§ 1. Measures and Fields.

Permanence and change in agrarian history.

At the present moment there is no need for arguments which insist upon the immutable character of ancient agrarian arrangements. If we take up a map of a common field drawn in the eighteenth century, the lines that we see upon it are in the main very old. The scheme seems fashioned for the purpose of resisting change and compelling the men of one age to till the land as their fathers tilled it. Nothing but an unanimous agreement among those who are not likely to agree can break up that prison-house of cells in which agriculture has been cramped and confined. Rather, it may be, the student who is perusing the ‘estate map’ and who is fascinated by the possession of a new tool for picking historical locks, should warn himself that, though there has been permanence, there has also been change, and that in a far-off time changes of a certain sort came quickly. True that in the current of agricultural progress there is a rapid acceleration as it flows towards our own day. We may easily go back to an age when the introduction of a new process or new implement was rare. On the other hand, if we fix our attention on the map of any one village and contemplate its strips and balks and virgates, the hazard involved in an assumption of their antiquity will increase swiftly when we have left behind us the advent of Duke William and are urging our inferential career towards Hengest or, it may be, towards Cæsar.

Rapidity of change in old times.

Let us look, for example, at the changes that take place in some Essex villages during the twenty years that precede the Domesday Inquest. The following table shows them:

VillaniBordariiServiLord’s teamsMen’s teams

Teidana[1217], T.R.E. 53424

T.R.W. 117033

Waldena[1218], T.R.E. 66171685

T.R.W. 4640201022

Hame[1219], T.R.E. 3216358

T.R.W. 48793412

Benefelda[1220], T.R.E. 102737

T.R.W. 911434

Wimbeis[1221], T.R.E. 26186321

T.R.W. 26550315

These are but specimens of the obscure little revolutions that are being accomplished in the Essex villages. In general there has been a marked increase in the number of bordarii, at the expense of the villeins on the one part and the serfs on the other[1222], and this, whatever else it may represent, must tell us of a redistribution of tenements, perhaps of a process that substitutes the half-virgate for the virgate as the average holding of an Essex peasant. The jar of conquest has made such revolutions easy[1223].

Devastation of villages.

But, it will be said, though the ‘bundles’ of strips be cut in half, the main features of the field remain constant. Let us, however, look at Yorkshire, where for fifteen years an immense tract of land has been lying ‘waste.’ Have we any reason to believe that when agriculture slowly steals back into this desert there will be a mere restoration of the defaced map? Surely not. If for a few years an ‘open field’ lies waste, there will be no mere restoration. For one thing, many of the old outlines will have utterly vanished. Even if the acres were already divided by the so-called ‘balks’ (and we can not be sure that they always were[1224]), the balk was but a narrow strip of unploughed sward and would hardly be perceptible when the whole field was once more a sheet of grass and weeds. For another thing, new settlers would probably begin by ploughing only a small portion of the old field. It is likely enough that their measuring rod would not be even approximately equal to the rod employed in a previous century, and they would have ample opportunity for the introduction of novelties, for the substitution of three fields for two and for all that such a change implies. Now William’s deliberate devastation of the north is but one final and grandiose exploit of an ancient kind of warfare. After his day agrarian history becomes more stable because invasions cease and the character of civil warfare changes. The strife between York and Lancaster, between King and Parliament, passes like a thunderstorm over the fields; it damages the crops; but that is all, and Bosworth ‘Field’ and Naseby ‘Field’ will next year be tilled in the same old way. A raid of the Danes, a feud between Angle and Saxon, was a different affair. The peasants fought. Men, women and children were sold as slaves. Also there was deliberate devastation. ‘They make a wilderness and call it peace.’ What else should they call it, when a foodless wilderness is the most scientific of all frontiers? Readers of the English Chronicle will doubt whether there is any village in England that has not been once, or more than once, a deserted village. And if we must reckon with war, there is famine also to be reckoned with. When in a few brief words the English Chronicler tells us that in 1043 there was mickle hunger in the land so that the sestar of corn sold for sixty pence and even more[1225], he is, like enough, telling us of a disaster which depopulated many a village and forced many a villager to bow his head for meat in those evil days[1226]. Agrarian history becomes more catastrophic as we trace it backwards.

Village colonies.

And, putting on one side the ravages of war and famine, we must call to mind the numerous hints that our map gives us of village colonization[1227]. Men did not make two contiguous villages at one time and call them both Hamton. Names are given to places in order that they may be distinguished from neighbouring places. So when we see two different villages, called Hamton and Other Hamton, lying next each other, we may be fairly certain that they are not of equal antiquity, and it is not unlikely that the one is the offshoot and daughter of the other[1228]. There are about one hundred and fifty Newtons and Newtowns in England. Every instance of colonization, every new settlement in the woods, gave scope for the introduction of novelties, such scope as was not to be found in after days when men stood thicker on the soil and all the best land was already tilled[1229].

Antiquity of the three-field system.

Therefore we must not trust a method of husbandry or a scheme of land-measures much further than we can see it. Nothing, for example, could be rasher than the assumption that the ‘three-course system’ of tillage was common in the England of the seventh century[1230]. We have a little evidence that it was practised in the eleventh[1231], perhaps some evidence, that it was not unknown in the ninth[1232]. But ‘the two-course system’ can be traced as far[1233], and seems to have been as common, if not commoner, in the thirteenth century[1234]. If on a modern map we see a village with ‘trinity fields,’ we must not at once decide that those who laid them out sowed two in every year, for it is well within the bounds of possibility that two were left idle[1235]. An agriculture of this kind was not unknown in the Yorkshire of the fourteenth century[1236], and indeed we read that in the eighteenth ‘one crop and two fallows’ was the traditional course in the open field of a Suffolk village[1237].

Differences between the different shires.

We have time enough on our hands. Between Domesday Book and the withdrawal of the legions lies as long an interval as that which separates the Conqueror from Mr Arthur Young. Also we have space enough on our hands. Any theory that would paint all England as plotted out for proprietary and agricultural purposes in accordance with a single pattern would be of all theories the least probable. We need not contrast Kent with Westmoreland, or Cornwall with Norfolk, for our maps seem to tell us that Somerset differed from Wiltshire and Dorset. The settlement of a heathen folk loosely banded together under a war-lord was one thing; the conquest of a new province by a Christian king who was advised by foreign bishops and had already been taught that he had land to ‘book,’ would be another thing. If, as seems possible, we read in Ine’s laws of a ‘plantation’ of some parts of Somerset effected by means of large allotments made to the king’s gesiths, who undertake to put tillers on the soil[1238], we must not at once infer that this is an old procedure, for it may be very new, and may have for its outcome an agrarian arrangement strikingly unlike that which existed in the heart of the older Wessex.

New and old villages.

Moreover there are upon the face of our map many cases which seem to tell us that in the oldest days the smallest district that bore a name was often large, and therefore that the territory which subserved a single group of homesteads was often spacious. One example we will take from Norfolk. We find a block of land that now-a-days consists of eleven parishes, namely, Wiggenhall S^t. Mary the Virgin, Wiggenhall S^t. German, Wiggenhall S^t. Peter, Wiggenhall S^t. Mary Magdalen, Tilney cum Islington, Tilney All Saints, Tilney S^t. Lawrence, Terrington S^t. Clement, Terrington S^t. John, Walpole S^t. Peter, Walpole S^t. Andrew[1239]. In such a case we can hardly suppose that all these villages belong to the same age, even if we are not entitled to infer that the later villages were not founded until the day for parish churches had arrived. This being so, it is highly probable that some villages were formed at all stages of the feudalizing process, and therefore that a historical account of ‘the’ English township, or even of ‘the’ English nucleated village, would of necessity be untrue. And, while this East Anglian specimen is still before us, we may notice another interesting trait. In the Marshland Fen there is a considerable tract of ground which consists of ‘detached portions’ of these and other villages. Each has been given a block there, a fairly rectangular block. At one point the partition is minute. A space of less than 36 acres has been cut up so that no less than six villages shall have a piece, a rectangular piece of it[1240]. It seems very possible that this fen has at some time been common ground for all these villages, and, as already said, it is in this quarter that we may perhaps find traces of something that resembled the ‘marks’ of Germany[1241]. The science of village morphology is still very young, and we must not be led away into any discussion of its elements; but there is the more reason why we should take to heart those warnings that it already gives us, because what we can read of hides is to be found for the more part in documents proceeding from a central power, which, for governmental and fiscal purposes, endeavours to preserve fictitious continuity and uniformity in the midst of change and variety. However, we must draw nearer to our task.

History of measures.

As regards land measurement, we may be fairly certain that in the days before the Norman Conquest there was little real, though much nominal uniformity. The only measures for the size of things with which nature has equipped the natural man are his limbs. For the things that he handles he uses his thumb, span, cubit, ell; for the ground upon which he walks, his foot and his pace. For large spaces and long distances he must have recourse to ‘time-labour-units,’ to the day’s journey and the morning’s ploughing. Then gradually, under the fostering care of government, steady equations are established between these units:—twelve thumbs, for instance, are to make a foot. Thus the measures for land are brought into connexion with the more delicate measures used for cloth and similar stuff. Then an attempt to obtain some standard less variable than the limb may forge a link between thumbs and grains of corn. Another device is the measuring rod. One rod will represent the arm of an average man; a longer rod may serve to mediate between the foot which is short and the acre or day’s ploughing which is large. In laying out a field in such wise that it shall consist of equal pieces, each of which can be ploughed in a forenoon, we naturally use a rod. We say, for example, that to plough a strip that is 4 rods wide and 40 long is a fair day’s work. For some while there is no reason why the rods employed in two neighbouring villages should be strictly or even approximately equal[1242]. Taxation is the great force that makes for standard land measures. Then a king declares how many thumbs there ought to be in the cloth-ell or cloth-yard. At a later time he actually makes cloth-ells or cloth-yards and distributes them, keeping an ultimate standard in his own palace. Thenceforward all other units tend to become mere fractions or multiples of this royal stick. The foot is a third, the thumb or inch a thirty-sixth part thereof. Five and a half cloth-measuring yards make a royal land-measuring rod. Plot out a space which is four rods by forty, you will have an acre.

Slow growth of uniformity.

The whole story, if ever it be told at length, will be intricate; but we believe that a general persuasion that land-measurements ought to be fixed by law and by reference to some one carefully preserved standard is much more modern than most people think. Real accuracy and the establishment of a measure that is to be common to the whole realm first emerge in connexion with the measurement of cloth and such like. There is a delightful passage in the old Scotch laws which tells us that the ell ought to contain 37 inches meted by the thumbs of three men, ‘þat is to say, a mekill man and a man of messurabill statur and of a lytill man[1243].’ We have somewhere read that in Germany, if a perch of fifteen feet was to be manufactured, the first fifteen people who chanced to come out of church contributed each a foot towards the construction of the standard. At an early time, however, men were trying to find some class of small things which were of a fairly invariable length and hit upon barley-corns. This seems to have happened in England before the Norman Conquest[1244]. Instead of taking the ‘thoume’ of ‘a man of messurabill statur’ for your inch, you are to take three barley-corns, ‘iii bear cornys gud and chosyn but tayllis (i.e. without the tails)’[1245]. But the twelfth century was drawing to an end before any decisive step was taken to secure uniformity even in the measurement of cloth. In Richard I.’s day guardians of weights and measures are to be appointed in every county, city and borough; they are to keep iron ulnae[1246]. At this time or a little later these ulnae, ells or cloth-yards were being delivered out by a royal officer to all who might require them, and that officer had the custody of the ultimate standards[1247]. We may doubt whether the laws which require in general terms that there shall be one measure throughout the realm had measures of land in view[1248]. A common standard is not nearly as necessary in this case as it is in the case of cloth. Even in our own day men do not buy land by the acre or the perch in the same sense as that in which they buy cloth or cotton by the yard. Very rarely will anyone name a price for a rood and leave it to the other bargainer to decide which out of many roods shall be included in the sale. Nevertheless, the distribution of iron ulnae was important. An equation was established between the cloth measure and the land measure: five-and-a-half ulnae or cloth-yards make one royal perch. After this we soon find that land is occasionally measured by the iron ulna of the king[1249].

Superficial measure.

The scheme of computation that we know as ‘superficial measure’ was long in making itself part of the mental furniture of the ordinary man. Such terms as ‘square rod’ and ‘square mile’ were not current, nor such equations as that which tells us how 144 square inches make a square foot. Whatever may have been the attainments of some cloistered mathematicians, the man of business did not suppose that he could talk of size without talking of shape, and indeed a set of terms which speak of shapeless size is not very useful until men have enough of geometry and trigonometry to measure spaces that are not rectangular parallelograms. The enlightened people of the thirteenth century can say that if an acre is x perches long it is y perches wide[1250]. They can compare the size of spaces if all the lines be straight and all the angles right; and for them an acre is no longer of necessity ten times as long as it is broad. But they will not tell us (and they do not think) that an acre contains z ‘square perches.’ This is of some importance to students of Domesday Book. Very often the size of a tract of land is indicated by the length of two lines:—The wood or the pasture is x leagues (furlongs, perches, feet) in length and y in breadth. Now, to say the least, we are hasty if we treat this as a statement which gives us size without shape. It is not all one to say that a wood is a league long and a league wide and to say that it is two leagues long and half a league wide. The jurors are not speaking of superficial content, they are speaking of length and breadth, and they are either giving us the extreme diameters of the irregularly shaped woods and pastures, or (and this seems more probable) they are making rough estimates of mean diameters. If we go back to an earlier time, the less we think of ‘superficial measure’ the better[1251].

The modern system.

Let us recall the main features of our modern system, giving them the names that they bore in medieval Latin.

Linear Measure.

12 inches (pollices)=1 foot (pes); 3 feet=1 yard (ulna); 5·5 yards=1 rod, pole, perch (virga, pertica, perca); 40 perches=1 furlong (quarentina); 8 furlongs=1 mile (mille); 12 furlongs=1 leuua, leuca, leuga (league)[1252].

Superficial Measure.

144 square inches=1 square foot; 9 square feet=1 square yard; 30·25 square yards=1 square perch; 40 square perches=1 rood; 4 roods=1 acre[1253].

In the thirteenth century these outlines are already drawn; but, as we have seen, if we are to breathe the spirit of the time, we ought to say (while admitting that acres may be variously shaped) that the normal acre is 4 perches in width and 40 perches (=1 furlong) in length. The only other space that we need consider is the quarter of an acre, our rood. That ought to be 1 perch in width and 1 furlong (=40 perches) in length. The breadth of the acre is still known to all Englishmen, for it is the distance between the wickets.

The ancient elements of land measure.

This system has been generated by the corelation of cloth-measures and land-measures. If we are going back to remote times, we must expel the cloth-measures as intruders. What then is left is very simple; it is this:—the human foot, a day’s ploughing and a measuring stick which mediates between feet and acres. That stick has had many names. Our arithmetic books preserve three, ‘rod, pole or perch’; it has also been known as a gād or goad and a lug: but probably its oldest name is yard (gyrd). It is of some importance that we should perceive that our modern yard of three feet is not one of the very ancient land-measures. It is a ‘cloth-yard’ not a land-yard. In medieval documents the Latin name for it is ulna[1254], and probably the oldest English name for it is eln, elle, ell. There seems to have been a shifting of names. The measuring rod that was used for land had so many names, such as perch, rod, pole, goad, lug, that it could afford, if we may so speak, to dispense with the additional name of yard, which therefore might stand for the much shorter rod that was used by the clothiers. However, even in our own century men have been speaking of ‘yards of land’ in a manner which implies that at one time a yard, when mentioned in this context, was the same thing as the perch. When they have spoken of a ‘yard of land’ they have meant sometimes a quarter of an acre (our rood) and sometimes a much larger space. In 1820 a ‘yard of land’ means, we are told, a quarter of an acre in Wiltshire, while in Buckinghamshire it stands for a tract which varies from 28 to 40 acres[1255]. This last application of the term we shall consider by and by. A yard of land or rood of land (rood and rod are all one) is a quarter of an acre, because an acre is four rods or ‘yards’ or perches in width, and, when an acre is to be divided, it is always, and for a very good reason, divided by lines parallel to its long sides. So though the rood or yard of land may in course of time take other shapes and even become a shapeless size, it ought to be a rod or ‘yard’ in width and forty rods or one furlong in length.

The German acre.

So we start with the human foot, the day’s ploughing and a rod. How much borrowing there has been in this matter by race from race is an obscure question. For example, the mediation of a rod between the foot and the day’s work is common to the Roman and the Germanic systems. Here the similarity ends, and the vast differences which begin seem to have exceedingly deep roots. We can not be content with saying that the Roman puts two oxen in the plough and therefore draws short furrows, whereas the German puts eight oxen and draws long furrows. There seems to be a radical disagreement between them as to what a plough should be and what a plough should do[1256]. To these matters we can make but the slightest reference, nor dare we touch the problems of Celtic history. Somehow or another the Germans come to the rule that generally an acre or day’s work should be four rods wide and, if possible, about forty rods long[1257].

English acres.

It is very probable that in England this rule prevailed at a remote time. Throughout the middle ages and on to our own day there have been many ‘acres’ in England which swerved markedly from what had become the statutory type, and in some cases a pattern divergent from the statutory pattern became ‘customary’ in a district. But apparently these customary acres commonly agree with the royal standard in involving the equation: 1 acre = 4 perches x 40 perches[1258]. In Domesday Book and thence onwards the common Latin for furlong is quarentina, and this tells us of furrows that are forty perches long. It is when we ask for the number of feet in a perch that we begin to get various answers, and very various they are. The statutory number, the ugly 16·5, looks like a compromise[1259] between 15 and 18, both of which numbers seem to have been common in England and elsewhere. This is the royal equation in the thirteenth century; it has been found near the middle of the twelfth[1260]; more at present we cannot say. Small acres.Short perches and small acres have been very common in the south of England. In 1820 some information about the customary acre was collected[1261]:—In Bedfordshire it was ‘sometimes 2 roods.’ In Dorsetshire ‘generally 134 [instead of 160] perches.’ In Hampshire, ‘from 107 to 120 perches, but sometimes 180,’ In Herefordshire, ‘two-thirds of a statute acre,’ but ‘of wood, an acre and three-fifths or 256 perches.’ In Worcestershire, ‘sometimes 132 or 141 perches.’ In Sussex, ‘107, 110, 120, 130 or 212 perches’; ‘short acre, 100 or 120 perches’; ‘forest acre, 180 perches,’ Then as to rods, the ‘lug or goad’ of Dorsetshire had 15 ft. 1 in.; in Hertfordshire, 20 feet; in Wiltshire, 15 or 16¹⁄₂ or 18. The wide prevalence of rods of 15 feet can not be doubted, and it seems possible that rods with as few as 12 feet have been in use[1262]. An acre raised from a 12 foot rod would, if feet were invariable, be little more than half our modern statute acre. Nowhere do we see any sure trace of a rod so short as the Roman pertica of ten pedes, though the scribes of the land-books will give the name pertica to the English gyrd[1263].

Large acres.

In northern districts the ‘customary’ acre grows larger. In Lincolnshire it is said to be ‘5 roods, particularly for copyhold land’; but small acres were known there also[1264]. In Staffordshire, ‘nearly 2¹⁄₄ acres.’ In Cheshire, ‘formerly and still in some places 10,240 square yards’ (pointing to a rod of 24 feet). In Westmoreland, ‘6760 square yards’ (pointing to a rod of 19¹⁄₂ feet), also the so-called ‘Irish acre’ of 7840 square yards (pointing to a rod of 21 feet). There is much evidence that rods of 20 and 21 feet were often used in Yorkshire and Derbyshire. Rods of 18, 19¹⁄₂, 21, 22¹⁄₂ and 24 feet were known in Lancashire. A writer of the thirteenth century speaks as if rods of 16, 18, 20, 22 and 24 feet were in common use, and mentions none shorter[1265]. As just said, the Irish plantation acre was founded on a rod of 21 feet. The Scotch acre also is larger than the English; it would contain about 6150·4 instead of 4840 of our square yards; it is formed from a rod of 6 Scotch ells. On the other hand, the acres which have prevailed in Wales seem to be small; one type had 4320 of our square yards, another 3240

Anglo-Saxon rods and acres.

There has been variety enough. Even if the limits of variation are given by rods of 12 and 24 feet, this will enable one acre to be four times as large as another. Whether before the twelfth century there was anything that we ought to call a standard rod, a royal rod for all England, must be very doubtful. In royal and other land-books references are made to furlongs, to acre-breadths, to yards or rods or perches, and to feet as to known measures of length[1266], but whether a kingly gift is always measured by a kingly rod we do not know. The Carolingian emperors endeavoured to impose a rod upon their dominions; it seems to have been considerably shorter than our statute perch[1267]. In this province we need not expect many Norman novelties. We see from Domesday Book that the Frenchmen introduced the ancient Gallic arpentum[1268] as a measure for vineyards[1269]; but most of the vines were of their own planting, and the mere fact that they used this measure only for the vineyards seems to tell us that they were content with English rods and English acres[1270]. In Normandy the perches seem to have ranged upwards from 16 to 25 feet[1271]; so that 16·5 would not have hit the average. On the whole, our perch seems to speak of a king whose interests and estates lay in southern England and who struck a mean between 15 and 18. Whoever he was, we owe him no thanks for the ‘undecimal’ element that taints our system[1272].

Customary acres and forest acres.

But we must be cautious in drawing inferences from loose reports about ‘customary’ measures. Village maps and village fields have yet to be seriously studied. We may in the meanwhile doubt whether in some districts to which the largest acres are ascribed, such acres are normal or are drawn in the oldest villages. We may suspect them of being ‘forest acres.’ If once a good many of these abnormal units are distributed in a district, they will by their very peculiarity attract more than their fair share of attention and will be spoken of as characteristic of that district. In Germany, as well as in England, we find forest acres which are much larger than common acres and are meted by a rod which is longer than the common rod[1273]. Possibly men have found a long rod convenient when they have large spaces to measure, but we fancy that the true explanation would illustrate the influence exercised by taxation on systems of measurement. Some scheme of allotment or colonization is being framed; an equal tribute is to be reserved from the allotted acres. If, however, there is uncleared woodland to be distributed, rude equity, instead of changing the tribute on the acre, changes the acre’s size and uses a long rod for land that can not at once be tilled[1274]. Also fields that were plotted out by Normans were likely to have large acres, and as the perches of Normandy seem to have been longer than most of the perches that were used in France, we may perhaps infer that the Scandinavian rods were long and find in them an explanation of the big acres of northern England. But at present such inferences would be precarious.

The acre and the day’s work.

Whether in its origin the land-measuring rod is a mere representative of a certain number of feet or is some instrument useful for other purposes seems to be dubious. One of the names that it has borne in English is goad; but most of our rods would be extravagantly long goads[1275]. Possibly the width of four oxen yoked abreast has exercised some influence upon its length[1276]. When a rod had once found acceptance, it must speedily have begun to convert that ‘time-labour-unit,’ the acre, into a measured space. Already in the land-books we read of acres of meadow[1277]; this is no longer a contradiction in terms. Still there can be no doubt that our acre, like the jurnale, Tagwerk, Morgen of the Continent, has at its root the tract that can be ploughed in a day, or in a forenoon:—in the afternoon the oxen must go to the pasture[1278]. Now, when compared with their foreign cousins, our statute perch is a long rod and our statute acre is a decidedly large ‘day-work-unit[1279].’ It seems to tell of plentiful land, sparse population and poor husbandry. This is of some importance. There is a good deal of evidence pointing to the conclusion that, whereas in the oldest days men really ploughed an acre in a forenoon, the current of agricultural progress made for a while towards the diminution of the space that was covered by a day’s labour. In Ælfric’s dialogue the ploughman complains that each day he must till ‘a full acre or more[1280].’ His successor, the poetic Piers, had only a half-acre to plough[1281]. In monastic cartularies which come from southern counties, where we have no reason to suspect exceptionally large acres, the villein seems often to plough less than an acre[1282]. Then that enlightened agriculturist, Walter of Henley, enters upon a long argument to prove to his readers that you really can plough seven-eighths of an acre in a forenoon, and even a whole acre if you are but engaged in that light kind of ploughing which does for a second fallowing[1283]. Five centuries later another enlightened agriculturist, Arthur Young, discovered that ‘from North Leach, through Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire, and Glamorganshire, light and middling turnip-land etc.’ was being ploughed at the rate of half an acre to one acre a day by teams of ‘eight oxen; never less than six; or four and two horses.’ This, he says, was being done ‘merely in compliance with the obstinacy of the low people,’ for ‘the labourers will not touch a plough without the usual number of beasts in it[1284]’. Mr Young could not tell us of ‘these vile remnants of barbarity without a great degree of disgust[1285]’. But we are grateful. We see that an acre of light land was the maximum that these ‘low people’ with their eight oxen would plough in a day, and we take it that at one time the voice of reforming science had urged men to diminish the area ploughed in a given time, to plough deeper and to draw their furrows closer. The old tradition was probably well content with a furrow for every foot. Walter of Henley proposed to put six additional furrows into the acre[1286]. Hereafter we shall see that some of the statistics given by Domesday Book fall in with the suggestion that we are here making. Also we may see on our maps that the strip which a man has in one place is very often not an acre but a half-acre. Now, in days when men really ploughed an acre at a stretch, such an arrangement would have involved a waste of time, since, when the morning’s work was half done, the plough would be removed from one ‘shot’ to another[1287].

The real acres in the fields.

At length we reach the fields, and at once we learn that there is something unreal in all our talk of acre and half-acre strips. In passing we may observe that some of our English meadows which show by their ‘beds’ that they were not always meadows, seem to show also that the boundaries of the strips were not drawn by straight rods, but were drawn by the plough. The beds are not straight, but slightly sinuous, and such, it is said, is the natural course of the old plough; it swerves to the left, and this tendency is then corrected by those who guide it[1288]. But, apart from this, land refuses to be cut into parallelograms each of which is 40 rods long and 4 wide. In other words, the ‘real acres’ in an open field diverge widely from the ideal acre that was in the minds of those who made them.

The ‘shots.’

Let us recall a few features of the common field, though they will be familiar to all who have read Mr Seebohm’s book[1289]. A natural limit to the length of the furrow is set by the endurance of oxen. From this it follows that even if the surface that lies open is perfectly level and practically limitless, it will none the less be broken up into what our Latin documents call culturae[1290]. The cultura is a set of contiguous and parallel acre-strips; it tends to be a rude parallelogram; two of its sides will be each a furlong (‘furrowlong’) in length, while the length of the other sides will vary from case to case. We commonly find that every great field (campus) is divided into divers culturae, each of which has its own name. The commonest English equivalent for the word cultura seems to have been furlong, and this use of furlong was very natural; but, as we require that term for another purpose, we will call the cultura a shot. So large were the fields, that the annual value of an acre in one shot would sometimes be eight times greater than that of an acre in another shot[1291]. To such differences our ancestors were keenly alive. Hence the dispersion of the strips which constitute a single tenement.

Delimitation of shots.

But to make ‘shots’ which should be rectangular and just 40 feet long was often impossible. Even if the surface of the field were flat, its boundaries were the irregular curves drawn by streams and mounds. In order to economize space, shots running at right angles to other shots were introduced, and of necessity some furlongs were longer than others. If, however, as was often the case, men were laying out their fields among the folds of the hills, their acres would be yet more irregular both in size and in shape. They would be compelled to make very small shots, and the various furrows if ‘produced’ (in the geometer’s sense of that word) would cut each other at all imaginable angles. On the maps we may still see them struggling with these difficulties, drawing as many rectilinear shots as may be and then compelled to parcel out as best they can the irregularly shaped patches that remain. And then we see that even these patches have been allotted either as acres or as half-acres.

The real and the ideal acre.

Therefore, when we are dealing with medieval documents, we have always to remember that besides ideal acres there were real acres which were mapped out on the surface of the earth, and that a plot will be, and rightly may be, called an acre though its size is not that of any ideal acre. To tell a man that one of these acre-strips was not an acre because it was too small would at one time have been like telling him that his foot was no foot because it fell short of twelve inches. This point is made very plain by some of the beautiful estate maps edited by Mr Mowat[1292]. We have a map of ‘the village of Whitehill in the parishe of Tackley in the countye Oxon., the moitye or one halfe whereof belongeth to the presidente and schollers of Corpus christi colledge in the universitye of Oxon., the other moitye unto Edwarde Standerd yeoman the particulars whereof soe far as knowne doe plainelye appeare in the platte and those which are unknowne, as wastes comons and lotte meadowes are equallye divided betweene them, drawne in November anno domini 1605, regni regis Iacobi iij^o.’ We see four great fields divided first into shots and then into strips. Each strip on the map bears an inscription assigning it either to the college or to Mr Standerd, and with great regularity the strips are assigned to the college and to Standerd alternately. Then on each strip is set its ‘estimated’ content, and on each strip of the college land is also set its true content. Thus looking at one particular shot in the South Field we read:

This means that, going along this shot, we first come to a two-acre-strip of college land containing by admeasurement 1 A. 1 R. 36 P.; next to a two-acre strip of Standerd’s land, which the surveyor, who was making the map for the college, was not at pains to measure; then to a two-acre strip of college land containing 1 A. 2 R. 2 P.:—and so forth. Then in the margin of the map has been set ‘A note of the contentes of the landes in Whitehille belonginge to the colledge.’ It tells us how ‘theire groundes in the West Fielde by estimation 80 acres doe conteine by statute measure 48 A. 2 R. 24 P.’ The other fields we may deal with in a table

A. A.B.P.

East Fieldestimation75measure51125

Middle Field 58 39336

South Field 103 59213

It will be seen at once that the discrepancy between the two sets of figures is not to be fully explained by the supposition that at Whitehill men had measured land by measures differing from our statutory standards[1293]. The size of a ‘two-acres’ (and the land in this instance had been divided chiefly into ‘two-acres’) varied not only from field to field and shot to shot, but within one and the same shot. Each two-acre strip has an equal breadth, but the curving boundaries of the fields make some strips longer than others[1294].

Varying size of the acres.

We turn to the admirable maps of Heyford in Oxfordshire designed in 1606. Here the land is divided among many occupiers and cut up into a vast number of strips, to each of which is assigned its ‘estimated’ and its measured content. Thus we read:—

In this part of this shot a ‘half-acre’ contains 1 R. 18 P. Some of the shots in this village have fairly straight and rectangular boundaries, so that we may, for example, find that many successive ‘half-acres’ contain 1 R. 18 P. But then if we pass to the next shot we shall find 1 R. 28 P. in the ‘half-acre,’ while in a third shot we shall find but 1 R. 8 P. Yet every strip of land is a ‘half-acre’ or an ‘acre’ or a ‘acre and a half’ or a ‘two acres’ or a ‘three acres.’ We see further that when ‘acres’ occur among ‘half-acres’ the strips vary in breadth but not in length.

On a map of Roxton made in 1768 we have the same thing written out in English words. Thus:—

Eliz. Gardner a half0. 1. 32

Carpenter a half0. 1. 32

Harris an acre0. 3. 24

Carpenter a half0. 1. 32

Jam. Gardner an acre0. 3. 24

Makepace a half0. 1. 34

The result of all this is that anyone who lives in a village knows how many ‘acres’ its fields contain. He has not to measure anything; he has only to count strips, for he is not likely to confuse ‘acres’ with ‘half-acres’ and that is the only mistake that he could make.

Irregular length of acres.

If a shot had a curved boundary, little or no pains seem to have been taken to equalize the strips that lay within it by making additional width serve as a compensation for deficient length. The width of the so-called acre remained approximately constant while its length varied. Thus, to take an example from the map of Heyford, we see a shot which is bounded on the one side by a straight line and on the other by a curving road. At one end of it the acre contains 2 R. 8 P.; this increases to 2 R. 30 P.; then slowly decreases until it has fallen as low as 1 R. 36 P., and then again rises to 2 R. 2 P. When they were dividing the field, men attempted to map out shots in which approximately equal areas could be constructed; but, when a shot was once delimited, then all the acres in it were made equally broad, while their length could not but vary, except in the rare case in which the shot was a true rectangle[1295].

The selions or beds.

It is probable that the whole system was made yet more visible by the practice of ploughing the land into ‘beds’ or ridges, which has but recently fallen out of use. In our Latin documents these ridges appear as selions (seliones). In English they were called ‘lands,’ for the French sillon struck no root in our language. Anyone who has walked through English grass fields will know what they looked like, for they triumph over time and change[1296]. Now it would seem that a fairly common usage made four selions in each acre[1297]; in other words, each acre-strip was divided longitudinally into four waves, so that the distance from crest to crest or trough to trough was a perch in length. Where this usage obtained, you could tell how many acres a shot or field contained by merely observing the undulations of the surface. Even if, as was often the case, the number of selions in the acre was not four, still the number that went to an acre of a given shot would be known, and a man might argue that a strip was an acre because in crossing it he traversed three or six terrestrial waves[1298].

Acres divided lengthwise.

If we look at old maps, we soon see that when an acre was divided, it was always divided by a line that was parallel, not to its short ends, but to its long sides. No one would think of dividing it in any other fashion. Suppose that you bisected it by bisecting its long sides, you would force each owner of a half-acre to turn his plough as often as if he had a whole acre. Besides, you would have uneconomical furrows; the oxen would be stopped before they had traversed what was regarded as the natural distance for beasts to go. Divide your acre into two long strips, then your folk and beasts can plough in the good old way. Hence it follows that when men think of dividing an acre they speak only of its breadth. Hence it follows that the quarter of an acre is a ‘rood’ or ‘yard[1299]’ or virga or virgata of land. Its width is a rod or land-yard, and its length—but there is no need to speak of its length[1300].

The virgate.

How then does it happen that these terms ‘virgate’ and ‘yard of land,’ though given to a quarter of an acre, are yet more commonly given to a much larger quantity containing 30 acres or thereabouts? The explanation is simple. The typical tenement is a hide. If you give a man a quarter of a hide (an equitable quarter, equal in value as well as extent to every remaining quarter) you do this by giving him a quarter of every acre in the hide. You give him a rood, a yard, a virga[1301], a virgata in every acre, and therefore a rood, a yard, a virga, a virgata of a typical tenement[1302].

The double meaning of a yard.

No doubt it is clumsy to have only one term for two quantities, one of which is perhaps a hundred-and-twenty times as great as the other; but the context will tell us which is meant, and the difference between the two is so large that blunders will be impossible. In course of time there will be a differentiation and specification of terms. To our ears, for example, rōd (rood) will mean one thing, rŏd another, yard a third; but even in the nineteenth century royal commissioners will report that a ‘yard of land’ may mean a quarter of an acre or ‘from 28 to 40 acres[1303].’ When men have not apprehended ‘superficial measure’ (the measurement of shapeless size), when their only units are the human foot, a rod, an average day’s work and the tenement of a typical householder, their language will be poor, because their thought is poor.

The yard-land a fraction of a hide.

We have now arrived at a not insignificant truth. The virgate or yard-land of 30 acres or thereabouts is not a primary unit like the hide, the rod, the acre. It is derivative; it is compound. In its origin it is a rod’s breadth in every acre of a hide. In course of time in this case, as in other cases, size will triumph over shape. The acre need not be ten times as long as it is broad; the virgate need not be composed, perhaps is rarely composed, of scattered quarter-acres; quartering acres is an uneconomical process; it leads to waste of time. But still the term will carry on its face the traces of an ancient history and a protest against some modern theories. The virgate in its inception can not be a typical tenement; it is a fraction of a typical tenement.

The yard-land in laws and charters.

What we have here been saying seems to be borne out by the Anglo-Saxon laws and charters. They barely recognize the existence of such entities as yard-lands or virgates. The charters, it must be confessed, deal with large tracts and seldom have need to notice less than a hide. When, however, they descend below the hide, they at once come down to the acre, and this although the quantity that they have to specify is 90, or 60 or 30 acres[1304]. On the other hand, any reference to such an unit as the virgate or yard-land is exceedingly rare. To judge by the charters, this is a unit which was but beginning to force itself upon men’s notice in the last century before the Conquest[1305]. From a remote time there may have been many tenements that were like the virgates or yard-lands of later days; but the old strain of language that is preserved in the charters ignores them, has no name for them, and, when they receive a name, it signifies that they are fractions of a householder’s tenement.

The hide not at first a measure.

As an unit larger than the acre men have known nothing but the hide, the manse, the land of one family, the land of one householder. This is what we find in England: also it is found in Germany and Scandinavia[1306]. The state bases its structure, its taxation, its military system, upon the theory that such units exist and can be fairly treated as equal or equivalent. This theory must have facts behind it, though in course of time the state may thrust it upon lands that it will not fit, for example, upon a land of ring-fenced property where there is no approximate equality between the various tenements. In its origin a hide will not be a measure of land. A measure is an idea; a hide is a tenement. The ‘foot’ does not begin by being twelve inches; it begins by being a part of the human body. The ‘acre’ does not begin by being 4840 square yards; it begins by being a strip in the fields that is ploughed in a forenoon. But unless there were much equality between human feet, the foot would not become a measure; nor would the acre become a measure unless the method of ploughing land were fairly uniform. A great deal of similarity between the ‘real’ hides or ‘householder’s lands’ we must needs suppose if the hide becomes a measure; not only must those in any one village be much alike, there must be similarity between the villages.

The hide as a measure.

After a certain sort the hide does become a measure. Bede does not believe that if the families in the Isle of Wight were counted, the sum would be just 1200. The Anglo-Saxon kings are giving away half-hides or half-manses as well as manses or hides. They can speak of three hides and thirty acres[1307] or of two hides less sixty acres[1308]. Men are beginning to work sums in hides and acres as they work sums in pounds and pence. Indubitably such sums are worked in Domesday Book. In the thirteenth century the hide can even be treated as a pure superficial measure. An instance is given by an ‘extent’ of the village of Sawston in Cambridgeshire. The content of about two hundred small parcels of land is given in terms of acres and roods. Then an addition sum is worked and a total is stated in hides, virgates and acres, the equation that is employed being 1 H. = 4 V. = 120 A. It is a remarkable case, because the area, not only of arable land, but of meadows, pasture, crofts, gardens and messuages is added up into hides. The hide is here a pure measure, a mere multiple of acres[1309]. The men who made this ‘extent’ could have spoken of a hide of cloth. But this seems a rare and it is a late instance. At an earlier time the hide is conceived as consisting only of arable acres with appurtenances.

The hide as a measure of arable.

A word to explain this conception. In very old times when men thought of land as the subject-matter of grants and taxes they spoke only of arable land[1310]. If we are to understand their sayings and doings, we must think ourselves into an economic arrangement very different from that in which we are now immersed. We must well-nigh abolish buying and selling. Every village, perhaps every hide, must be very nearly self-sufficient. Now when once population has grown so thick that nomadic practices are forsaken, the strain of supporting mankind falls almost wholly on the ploughed land. That strain is severe. Many acres feed few people. Thus the arable becomes prominent. But further, arable implies pasture. This is not a legal theory; it is a physical fact. A householder can not have arable land unless he has pasture rights. Arable land is land that is ploughed; ploughing implies oxen; oxen, pasture. Our householder can not use a steam-plough; what is more, he can not buy hay. If he keeps beasts, they must eat. If he does not keep beasts, he has no arable land. Lastly, as a general rule men do not possess pasture land in severalty; they turn out their beasts on ‘the common of the vill.’ Therefore, in very old schemes of taxation and the like, pasture land is neglected: not because it is unimportant, but because it is indispensably necessary. It may be taken for granted. If a man has 120 acres of arable land, he must have adequate pasture rights; there must be in Domesday’s language pastura sufficens carucis. And in the common case there will be not much more than sufficient pasture. If there were, it would soon be broken up to provide more corn. Every village must be self-supporting, and therefore an equilibrium of arable and pasture will be established in every village. Thus if, for fiscal and governmental purposes, there is to be a typical tenement, it may be a tenement of x arable acres, and nothing need be said of any other kind of ground.

The hide of 120 acres.

We are going to argue that the Anglo-Saxons give 120 acres, arable acres, to the hide. Our main argument will be that the equation 1 H. = 120 A. is implied in the fiscal system revealed by Domesday Book. But, by way of making this equation probable, we may notice that, if we had no evidence later than the Conquest, all that we should find on the face of the Anglo-Saxon land-books would be favourable to this equation. In the first place, on the only occasion on which we hear of the content of a hide, it is put at 120 acres[1311]. In the second place, when a number of acres is mentioned, it is commonly one of those numbers, such as 150, 90, 80, 60, 30, which will often occur if hides of 120 acres are being partitioned[1312]. The force of this last remark may seem to be diminished if we remember how excellent a dividend is 120. It is neatly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12. But then we must reflect that this very quality recommended it to organizers, more especially as there were 240 pence in the pound.

Real and fiscal hides.

Supposing for a moment that we bring home this equation to the Anglo-Saxon financiers, there would still remain the question how far it truthfully represented agrarian facts. To that question no precise answer can be given: the truth lies somewhere between two extremes. We must not for one instant believe that England was so neat a chess-board as a rude fiscal theory paints, where every pawn stands on its square, every ‘family’ in the centre of 120 acre-strips of 4 by 40 perches. The barbarian, for all his materialism, is an idealist. He is, like the child, a master in the art of make-believe. He sees things not as they are, but as they might conveniently be. Every householder has a hide; every hide has 120 acres of arable; every hide is worth one pound a year; every householder has a team; every team is of eight oxen; every team is worth one pound. If all this be not so, then it ought to be so and must be deemed to be so. Then by a Procrustean process he packs the complex and irregular facts into his scheme. What is worse, he will not count. He will assume that a large district has a round 1200 hides, and will then ordain that those hides must be found. We see this on a small scale if we study manorial ‘extents’ or village maps. The virgates are not equal; the acres are far from equal; but they are deemed to be equal[1313]. Nevertheless, we must stop short of the other extreme or we shall be over-estimating the power of such government and the originality of such statesmanship as existed. Theories like those of which we are speaking are born of facts and in their turn generate new facts. Our forefathers really lived in a simpler and a more chess-board-like England than that which we know. There must have been much equality among the hides and among the villages. When we see that a ‘hundred’ in Cambridgeshire has exactly 100 hides which are distributed between six vills of 10 hides apiece and eight vills of 5 hides apiece, this simple symmetry is in part the unreal outcome of a capricious method of taxation, but in part it is a real economic fact. There was an English conquest of England, and, to all seeming, the conquest of eastern England was singularly thorough. In all probability a great many villages were formed approximately at one time and on one plan. Conveniently simple figures could be drawn, for the slate was clean[1314].

Causes of divergence of fiscal from real hides.

However, at an early time the hide becomes an unit in a system of assessment. The language of the land-books tells us that this is so[1315]. Already in Ine’s day we hear of the amount of victual that ten hides must find for the king’s support[1316]. About the end of the tenth century the duty of maintaining burgs is bound up with the possession of hides[1317]. Before the end of that century heavy sums are being raised as a tribute for the Danes. For this purpose, as we shall try to show hereafter, ‘hides’ are cast upon shires and hundreds by those who, instead of counting, make pleasantly convenient assumptions about the capacity of provinces and districts, and in all probability the assumptions made in the oldest times were the furthest from the truth. Now and again the assessments of shires and hundreds were corrected in a manner which, so far as we are concerned, only made matters worse. It becomes apparent that hides are not of one value or nearly of one value. This becomes painfully apparent when Cornwall and other far western lands are brought under contribution. So large sums of hides are struck off the poorer counties. The fiscal ‘hide’ becomes a lame compromise between an unit of area and an unit of value. Then privilege confounds confusion; the estates of favoured churches and nobles are ‘beneficially hidated.’ But this is not all. Probably the real hides, the real old settlers’ tenements, which you could count if you looked at a village and its fields, are rapidly going to pieces, and the fragments thereof are entering into new combinations. In the lordless villages economic forces of an easily imaginable kind will make for this end. Not only may we suppose some increase of population, especially where Danes swarm in, and some progress in the art of agriculture, but also the bond of blood becomes weaker and the familia that lives in one house grows smaller. So the hides go to pieces. The birth of trade and the establishment of markets help this process. It is no longer necessary that every tenement should be self-sufficient; men can buy what they do not grow. The formation of manors may have tended in some sort to arrest this movement. A system of equal (theoretically equal) tenements was convenient to lords who were collecting ‘provender rents’ and extending their powers; but under seignorial pressure virgates, rather than hides, were likely to become the prominent units. We may well believe that if to make two ears of corn grow where one grew is to benefit mankind, the lords were public benefactors, and that the husbandry of the manors was more efficient than was that of the lordless townships. The clergy were in touch with their fellows on the Continent; also the church’s reeve was a professional agriculturist and might even write a tract on the management of manors[1318]. There was more cooperation, more communalism, less waste. A family could live and thrive upon a virgate[1319].

Effects of the divergence of fiscal from real hides.

But, what concerns us at the present moment is the, for us disastrous, effect of this divergence of the fiscal from the real hide. Even if finance had not complicated the problem, we should, as we have already seen, have found many difficulties if we tried to construe medieval statements of acreage. Already we should have had three different ‘acres’ to think of. We will imagine that a village has 590 ‘acre strips’ in its field. In one sense, therefore, it has 590 acres. But the ideal to which these strips tend and were meant to conform is that of acres measured by a rod of 15 feet. Measured by that rod there would, we will suppose, be 550 acres. Then, however, we may use the royal rod and say that there are 454 acres or thereabouts. But the field was divided into five tenements that were known as hides, and the general theory is that a hide (householder’s land) contains, or must be supposed to contain, 120 acres. Therefore there are here 600 acres. And now a partitionary method of taxation stamps this as a vill of four hides. Consequently the ‘hide’ of this village may have as many as 150 or as few as 90 ‘acres.’ It ought not to be so. It would not be so if men were always distinguishing between ‘acre strips’ and measured acres, between ‘real’ hides (which, to tell truth, are no longer real, since they are falling to pieces) and ‘fiscal’ or ‘geld’ hides. But it will be so. Here and there we may see an effort to keep up distinctions between the ‘carucate for gelding’ and the ‘carucate for ploughing,’ between the real acre and the acre ‘for defence (acra warae)[1320]’; but men tire of these long phrases and argue backwards and forwards between the rateable and the real. Hence some of the worst puzzles of Domesday Book[1321].

Acreage of the hide in later days.

Such being the causes of perplexity, it is perhaps surprising that in the thirteenth century when we begin to obtain a large stock of manorial extents, ‘the hide’ should still exhibit some uniformity. But, unless we have been misled by a partial induction, a tendency to reckon 120 rather than any other number of acres to the hide is plainly perceptible. The following are the equations that prevailed on the manors of Ramsey Abbey, which were scattered in the eastern midlands[1322].

Huntingdonshire

Upwood with Raveley1 H.= 4 V.= 80 A.

Wistow1 H.= 4 V.= 120 A.

Broughton1 H.= 6½ V.= 208 A.

Warboys1 H.= 4 V.= 120 A.

Holywell1 H.= 5 V.= 90 A.

Slepe (St Ives)1 H.= 5 V.= 80 A.

Houghton with Wyton1 H.= 6 V.= 108 A.

Hemingford1 H.= 6 V.= 96 A.

Dillington1 H.= 6 V.= 201 A.

Weston1 H.= 4 V.= 112 A.

Brington1 H.= 4 V.= 136 A.

Bythorn1 H.= 4 V.= 176 A.

Gidding1 H.= 4 V.= 112 A.

Elton1 H.= 6 V.= 144 A.

Stukeley1 H.= 4 V.= 96 A.

Ripton with Remington1 H.= 4 V.= 62 A.

Northamptonshire

Barnwell1 H.= 7 V.= 252 A.

Hemington1 H.= 7 V.= 252 A.

Bedfordshire

Cranfield1 H.= 4 V. = 192 A.

Barton1 H.= 4 V.= 96 A.

Shitlingdon1 H.= 4 V.= 48 A.

Hertfordshire

Therfield1 H.= 4 V.= 256 A.

Suffolk

Lawshall1 H.= 3 V.= 156 A.

Norfolk

Brancaster1 H.=4 V.= 160 A.

Ringstead1 H.=4 V.= 120 A.

Cambridgeshire

Elsworth1 H.= 4 V.= 120 A.

Knapwell1 H.= 4 V.= 160 A.

Graveley Freehold1 H.= 7 V.= unknown

Villeinage1 H.= 6¾ V.= 135 A.

Over1 H.= 4 V.= 120 A.

Girton1 H.= 4 V.= 120 A.

Burwell1 H.= 4 V.= 120 A.

Here in thirty-one instances what we take to be the normal equation appears but seven times, but no other equation occurs more than twice. Moreover, so far as we have observed, the variations in the acreage that will be ascribed to a hide are not provincial, they are villar variations: that is to say, though we may see that the average hide of one county would have more acres than those that are contained in the average hide of another, we can not affirm that the hide of a certain county or hundred contains a acres, while that of another has b acres, and, on the other hand, we often see a startling difference between two contiguous villages. Lastly, where the computation of 120 acres to a hide is forsaken, we see little agreement in favour of any other equation. In particular, though now and again the hide of a village will perchance have 240 acres, we can find no trace of any ‘double hide’ in which ingenuity might see a link between the Roman and English systems of measurement and taxation[1323]. The only other general proposition which our evidence suggests is that a land which habitually displays unusually large virgates will often be a land in which a given area of arable soil has borne an unusually light weight of taxation, and this, as we shall hereafter see, will often, though not always, be a land where a given area of arable soil has been deemed to bear an unusually small value. But this connexion between many-acred hides and light taxation is not very strongly marked in our cartularies[1324].

The carucate and bovate.

In the land-books which deal with Kent the aratrum or sulung[1325] is commoner than the hide or manse, and Domesday Book shows us that in Kent the solin (sulung) is the fiscal unit that plays the part that is elsewhere played by the hide. That same part is played in Suffolk, Norfolk, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and the counties of Derby, Nottingham and Leicester by the carucata, which has for its eighth part the bovata. These terms seem to be French: that is to say, they apparently formed no part of the official Latin that had been current in England[1326]. We may infer, however, that they translated some English, or rather perhaps some Scandinavian terms, for only in Danish counties do we find them used to describe the geldable units. It is exceedingly doubtful whether we ought to treat this method of reckoning as older than the Danish invasions. Bede, himself a Northumbrian, uses the ‘family-land’ as his unit, no matter what be the part of England of which he is speaking, and his translator uses the híd or hiwisc in the same indiscriminate fashion. Unfortunately the ‘carucated’ shires are those which yield us hardly any land-books, and we do not know what the English jurors said when the Norman clerks wrote carucata and bovata: perhaps plough-gate and ox-gate, or plough-gang and ox-gang, or, again, a plough of land, for these were the vernacular words of a later age. On the whole, the little evidence that we have seems to point to the greater antiquity in England of a reckoning which takes the ‘house-land’ rather than the ‘plough-land’ as its unit[1327].

The ox-gang.

As to the bovate or ox-gang, it seems to be an unit only in the same sense as that in which the virgate or yard-land is an unit; the one is the eighth, the other is the fourth of an unit. That, in days when eight oxen are yoked to a plough, the eighth of a plough-gang should be called an ox-gang will not surprise us, though, as a matter of fact, an ox never ‘goes’ or ploughs in solitude[1328]. In our Latin documents a third part of a knight’s fee will be, not tertia pars feodi unius militis, but far more commonly, feodum tertiae partis unius militis. We do not infer from this that fractions of knights, or fractions of knight’s fees are older than integral knights and integral fees. The bovate seems to have been much less widely known than the carucate, for apparently it had no place in the computation that was generally used in East Anglia, where men reckoned by carucates, half-carucates and acres and where the virgate was not absolutely unknown[1329].

The fiscal carucate.

In the financial system, as we have said, the carucate plays for some counties the part that is played for others by the hide. Fiscally they seem to be equivalent: that is to say, when every hide of Wessex is to pay two shillings, every carucate of Lincolnshire will pay that sum. We think also and shall try to show that the Exchequer reckons 120 acres to the carucate, or, in other words, that if a tenement taxed as a carucate were divided into six equal shares, each share would at the Exchequer be called 20 acres. The same forces, however, which have made the fiscal hide diverge widely from the ‘real’ hide have played upon the plough-gangs of the Danelaw. In the Boldon Book we read of many bovates with 15 acres apiece, though the figures 20, 13¹⁄₂, 12¹⁄₂, 12 and 8 are also represented, and, when we come to the extents of the thirteenth century, we seem to see in the north but a feeble tendency to any uniformity among the equations that connect carucates with acres. The numbers of the acres in a bovate given by a series of Yorkshire inquests is 7, 7, 8, 15, 12, 6, 12, 15, 15, 6, 5, 9, 10, 10, 12, 24, 4, 16, 12, 18, 8, 6, 10, 24, 32[1330]. With a bovate of 4 acres, our carucate would have no more than 32. But then, in the north we may find very long rods and very large acres[1331], and, where Danes have settled, we have the best reason to expect those complications which would arise from the superimposition of a new set of measures upon a territory that had been arranged to suit another set[1332].

Acreage tilled by a plough.

Having been led into speaking of plough-gangs, we may end these discursive remarks by a gentle protest against the use that is sometimes made of the statements that are found in the book called Fleta. It is a second-rate legal treatise of Edward I.’s day. It seems to have fallen dead from its author’s pen and it hardly deserved a better fate. For the more part it is a poor abstract of Bracton’s work. When it ceases to pillage Bracton, it pillages other authors, and what it says of ploughing appears to be derived at second hand from Walter of Henley[1333]. Now Walter of Henley’s successful and popular treatise on Husbandry is a good and important book; but we must be careful before we treat it as an exponent of the traditional mode of agriculture, for evidently Walter was an enlightened reformer. We might even call him the Arthur Young of his time. Now, it is sometimes said that according to Fleta ‘the carucate’ would have 160 acres in ‘a two course manor’ and 180 in ‘a three course manor.’ A reference to Walter of Henley will show him endeavouring to convince the men of his time that such amounts as these really can be ploughed, if they work hard. ‘Some men will tell you that a plough can not till eight score or nine score acres by the year, but I will show you that it can.’ His calculation is worth repeating. It is as follows:

The year has 52 weeks. Deduct 8 for holy-days and other hindrances. There remain 44 weeks or 264 days, Sundays excluded.

Two course. Plough 40 acres for winter seed, 40 for spring seed and 80 for fallow (total 160) at ⁷⁄₈ths of an acre per day = 182⁶⁄₇ days

Also plough by way of second fallowing 80 acres at an acre per day = 80 days

Total 262⁶⁄₇ days[1334].

Walter of Henley’s scheme.

It is a strenuous and sanguine, if not an impossible, programme. When harvest time and the holy weeks are omitted, the plough is to ‘go’ every week-day throughout the year, despite frost and tempest. Obviously it is a programme that can only enter the head of an enthusiastic lord who has supernumerary oxen, and will know how to fill the place of a ploughman who is ill. We have little warrant for believing that what Walter hopes to do is being commonly done in his day, less for importing his projects into an earlier age. In order that he may keep his beasts up to their arduous toil, he proposes to feed them with oats during half the year[1335]. If we inferred that the Saxon invaders of England treated their oxen thus, we might be guilty of an anachronism differing only in degree from that which would furnish them with steam-ploughs. But, to come to much later days, the Domesday of S^t. Paul’s enables us to say with some certainty that the ordinary team of eight beasts accomplished no such feats as those of which Walter speaks. For example, at Thorpe in Essex the canons have about 180 acres of arable land in demesne. These, it is estimated, can be tilled by one team of ten heads together with the ploughing service that is due from the tenants, and these tenants have to plough at least 80 acres, to wit, 40 in winter and 40 in Lent[1336]. We must observe that to till even 120 acres according to Walter’s two-course plan would mean that a plough must ‘go’ 180 acres in every year, and that, even if it does its acre every day, more than half the week-days in the year must be devoted to ploughing. We may, however, seriously doubt whether a scheme which would plough the land thrice between every two crops had been generally prevalent[1337]. Nay, we may even doubt whether the practice of fallowing had been universal[1338]. Not unfrequently in our cartularies the villein is required to plough between Michaelmas and Christmas and again between Christmas and Lady Day, while nothing is said of his ploughing in the summer[1339]. We are only beginning to learn a little about medieval agriculture.

However, we have now said all that we had to say by way of preface to what we fear will be a dreary and inconclusive discussion of some of those abundant figures that Domesday Book supplies. A few we have endeavoured to collect in the tables which will meet the reader’s eye when he turns this page, and which will be explained on later pages.