The British aristocracy was crushed by the Great War, which bled it white. But the British landed gentry, always a bit more reactionary, was destroyed by free trade and death taxes, decimated before the war even began, just as intended by the Whigs and Liberals. As Nicolson writes in The Gentry: "Half of the families in the 1863 Burke's Landed Gentry did not appear in the 1914 edition. By the 1920s, so many of the old gentry families had lost their lands that the ownership of land was no longer a requirement for a family to appear in the book at all. Between 1880 and 1980, over half of those who had owned between 3,000 and 10,000 acres went out of land entirely. For those with less than 3,000 acres, the rate of attrition was more like 80 per cent.' Although the question of definition is as difficult as ever, at the end of the twentieth century less than 1 per cent of England belonged to the gentry, perhaps 500 families owning 1,000 acres each. "The triple shock of the agricultural depression, death duties and the ebbing of self-confidence had all dealt them a blow far worse than anything they had experienced before. Death duties were first raised on land in 1894 at a rate equivalent to two years' net income. This was about the same as the fines imposed on the Royalist estates by the Parliamentary committees in the 1640s, but the atrocious returns from agriculture and the much better income available from industrial investments or government bonds made the burden more difficult to bear. The Finance Act of 1919 raised that tax from 12 per cent to 20 per cent, a level which encouraged many families to leave land entirely. Between 1918 and 1927, six to eight million acres, including at least 25 per cent of Britain's farmland, changed hands. Land was no longer the ultimate valuable. In 1880, it was estimated that the estate of the Marquess of Camden, which yielded £1,700 after all expenses had been paid, would sell for £190,000. If that capital sum were invested in government bonds it would yield £5,700 a year."