ABSTRACT
Each country had complex legal provisions which aimed to regulate landlord/tenant relations. These laws could, in principle, be analysed without too much difficulty. But in so personal a matter as the relationship between a landlord and a tenant, the ability of the law to govern actual conduct was severely limited. Given the widespread realisation that the gap between officially sanctioned behaviour and actual practices was often a wide one, it might be thought that a substantial amount of research would have been carried out into this problem. Tenants had little security beyond this term. But with the imposition of rent controls some provision had to be made for security, in order to prevent eviction by landlords whose rents were suddenly controlled. The security provisions were often lifted or eased as rent controls diminished in the inter-war period, only to be reimposed during the second world war.
