D · On what terms

Rent and proviso clauses

69% → 4%Rent clause, 1617–49 → 1660–99

Key point

A rent is mentioned in 69% of entries in 1617–1649 and in 4% in 1660–1699.

Definition: Share of Woodcroft entries 1617–1759 whose summary mentions a rent to the Crown or a proviso or voidance clause.
Formula: entries mentioning the clause ÷ entries, by decade
How to read it: Up to the 1640s about seven entries in ten mention a rent; in the 1660s and 1670s about one in ten, and from the 1680s almost none.
Caveats: Counts only what Woodcroft's summary says; the summaries need not carry every clause of the letters patent.

Share of entries mentioning the clause, by decade.

Table

Decade	Total	Rent	Proviso	Rent share	Proviso share
1610	15	13	2	86.7%	13.3%
1620	33	22	10	66.7%	30.3%
1630	75	49	48	65.3%	64.0%
1640	4	4	3	100.0%	75.0%
1660	31	3	6	9.7%	19.4%
1670	51	6	13	11.8%	25.5%
1680	53	0	16	0.0%	30.2%
1690	102	0	27	0.0%	26.5%
1700	22	0	14	0.0%	63.6%
1710	38	0	34	0.0%	89.5%
1720	89	0	85	0.0%	95.5%
1730	56	0	23	0.0%	41.1%
1740	82	0	9	0.0%	11.0%
1750	92	1	0	1.1%	0.0%

OCR count: counted by rule from scanned OCR text; below, the error measured on a sample checked against page images

Bennet Woodcroft, Titles of Patents of Invention, Chronologically Arranged, from March 2, 1617 (14 James I.) to October 1, 1852 (16 Victoriae), London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1854, 2 parts (Nos. 1–14,359). Entries were split from the word coordinates of the Internet Archive OCR of the University of Illinois copy (chronologicalin1617grea_0, chronologicalind1617grea); 115 pages on which that OCR lost entry numbers were read again from the page images with tesseract 5. (public domain, 1854; https://archive.org/details/chronologicalin1617grea_0)