linen
manufacture, and cultivating the home fisheries, we find him throwing
out various valuable suggestions with reference to the means of
facilitating commercial transactions, some of winch have only been
carried out in our own day. One of his grandest ideas was the
establishment of a public bank, the credit of which, based upon the
security of freehold land,[17] should enable its paper "to go in trade
equal with ready money." A bank of this sort formed one of the
principal means by which the Dutch had been enabled to extend their
commercial transactions, and Yarranton accordingly urged its
introduction into England. Part of his scheme consisted of a voluntary
register of real property, for the purpose of effecting simplicity of
title, and obtaining relief from the excessive charges for law,[18] as
well as enabling money to be readily raised for commercial purposes on
security of the land registered.

He pointed out very graphically the straits to which a man is put who
is possessed of real property enough, but in a time of pressure is
unable to turn himself round for want of ready cash. "Then," says he,
"all his creditors crowd to him as pigs do through a hole to a bean and
pease rick." "Is it not a sad thing," he asks, "that a goldsmith's boy
in Lombard Street, who gives notes for the monies handed him by the
merchants, should take up more monies upon his notes in one day than
two lords, four knights, and eight esquires in twelve months upon all
their personal securities? We are, as it were, cutting off our legs and
arms to see who will feed the trunk. But we cannot expect this from
any of our neighbours abroad, whose interest depends upon our loss."

He therefore proposed his registry of property as a ready means of
raising a credit for purposes of trade. Thus, he says, "I can both in
England and Wales register my wedding, my burial, and my christening,
and a poor parish clerk is entrusted with the keeping of the book; and
that which is registered there is held good by our law. But I cannot
register my lands, to be honest, to pay every man his own, to prevent
those sad things that attend families for want thereof, and to have the
great benefit and advantage that would come thereby. A register will
quicken trade, and the land registered will be equal as cash in a man's
hands, and the credit thereof will go and do in trade what ready money
now doth." His idea was to raise money, when necessary, on the lan