13/08/2026
Did you know some buildings in Britain are still rented for a crab, a rose, or a single daffodil?
A coastwatch station on the Dorset coast holds its lease from the Encombe Estate for one crab per annum, if demanded. On the Isles of Scilly, the Wildlife Trust leases land from the Duchy of Cornwall for one daffodil a year. And every year the City of London pays its rent on Billingsgate fish market to Tower Hamlets with a single salmon, which is then given to a local charity.
These are peppercorn rents.
In English law, a contract needs consideration, something of value passing between the parties. A lease also has to reserve a rent. So when a landlord wants to charge almost nothing, they still need to charge something. A peppercorn, a crab, a salmon. It has almost no value, but it is not nothing, and that is the whole point.
Go back further and the payments get stranger.
A deed from 1291 set the rent as a pair of white gloves, a rose and a barbed arrow. One Yorkshire farm owed a snowball in summer and a red rose in winter, two things almost impossible to hand over on the day, which may well have been the joke. Two neighbouring farms each paid a single glove, one a right hand, one a left.
The oddest survivor is the Quit Rents ceremony, the oldest legal ceremony in England after the coronation. For a patch of Shropshire moorland the City of London pays the Crown two knives, one blunt and one sharp. For a forge near the Strand, six horseshoes and 61 nails. No one now knows exactly where either piece of land is. The same horseshoes are kept in a drawer, handed over each year, then quietly taken back.
The law has now caught up.
The Leasehold Reform Act of 2022 finally defined a peppercorn rent in statute, as one peppercorn. Centuries of whimsy, written into an Act of Parliament.
What is the oddest rent or covenant you have come across on a title?
