Culloden, therefore, suggested the granting to the sub-tenants of nineteen years’ leases if they would ‘offer frankly for their farms such rent as fairly and honestly they could bear.’ Such leases he had power to offer, and did offer. ‘No takers!’ Culloden was surprised, but he need not have been. The weight of the tacksmen would be against him; also the conservatism of the people. A fixed rent was a new crude hard thing: a system of shuffling along, above all as the general policy was to find room for swordsmen—was an old endurable thing. Culloden, however, persuaded some sub-tenants to offer. On the tacksmen he put pressure. He had with him some tacksmen from the mainland, better acquainted with farming methods. _They_ offered for the insular tacksmen’s farms, whereon the insular tacksmen also offered. Fixed now were rents, and fixed the duration of tenancy. One Culloden lease to a kind of village community of six people in portions of land of different sizes is dated April 18, 1739, from Stoney Hill.[176] The lease of 1739 is for nineteen years, ‘and that in full satisfaction of all casualitys, and other prestations and services whatsomever,’ except for services in repairing harbours, mending highways, or repairing miln-leads, for the general benefite of the Island (Mull). The tenants were to pay cesses, ministers’ stipends, schoolmasters’ salaries, &c., ‘freeing and relieving the Duke’ from these burdens. Failure of rent meant removal, and made the lease null and void; the tenants having leave, however, to take over the share of a defaulter or choose a substitute for him. What the sub-tenants gain is freedom from a tacksman, secure possession while they pay, and freedom from all but the stated customary services and ‘casualties.’ One of these was military service in a Jacobite rising. A tenant in Mull could not now lose his holding if his tacksman ordered him to join the Prince and he refused. As to the other ‘services,’ the Duke of Argyll regards them as indefinite and oppressive. He selects examples from Sinclair’s paper for the Board of Agriculture in 1795. Rent was mainly paid in kind, chickens, cattle, grain, _plus_ ‘tilling, dunging, sowing, and harrowing a part of an extensive farm in the proprietor’s’ (or tacksman’s) ‘possession.’ Peats, thatching, weeding, cartage, harvesting, and so forth, were exacted, with implements, eggs, butter, cheese, a tithe of fish and oil, woollen yarn, and so forth. These services might easily be made oppressive, and did not conduce to improvement in agriculture.