[519] In December 1693 Chamberlayne laid his plan, in all its naked absurdity, before the Commons, and petitioned to be heard.

He confidently undertook to raise eight thousand pounds on every freehold estate of a hundred and fifty pounds a year which should be brought, as he expressed it, into his Land Bank, and this without dispossessing the freeholder.

[520] All the squires in the House must have known that the fee simple of such an estate would hardly fetch three thousand pounds in the market.

That less than the fee simple of such an estate could, by any device, be made to produce eight thousand pounds, would, it might have been thought, have seemed incredible to the most illiterate foxhunter that could be found on the benches.

Distress, however, and animosity had made the landed gentlemen credulous.