Note 199 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES

Before leaving the subject of the sulung, one should mention perhaps that it was divided (as Mr Seebohm has explained) into four quarters known as juga, just as the hide was divided into four virgates. Mr Seebohm bases this statement on Anglo-Saxon evidence,199 but it is abundantly confirmed by Domesday, where we read of Eastwell (in Kent): 'pro uno solin se defendit. Tria juga sunt infra divisionem Hugonis, et quartum jugum est extra' (i. 13). So far all is clear; but Professor Vinogradoff, on the contrary, asserts that 'the yokes (juga) of Battle Abbey (in Kent) are not virgates, but carucates, full ploughlands' (p. 225). This assertion is based on a very natural misapprehension. In the Battle Manor of Wye (Kent) we find that the jugum itself was divided into four quarters, called 'virgates' which were each, consequently, the sixteenth, not, as in the hidated district, the fourth of a ploughland. Professor Vinogradoff, naturally assuming that the 'virgate' meant the same here as elsewhere, inferred that four 'virgates' (that is, a jugum) must constitute a full ploughland. But this change of denotation goes further still. The Battle Cartulary records yet another 'virgate', namely, the fourth (not of a ploughland, but) of an acre! This led me, on its publication, to wonder whether we have here the clue to the origin of the somewhat mysterious term 'virgate'. Starting from the acre, we should have in the virgata (rood) its quarter, with a name derived from the virga (rod) which formed its base in mensuration. The sense of 'quarter' once established, it might be transferred to the quarter of a jugum, or the quarter of a hide. This is a suggestion which, of course, I advance with all diffidence, but which would solve an otherwise insoluble problem. The relation of the bovate to the carucate, and of the jugum to the sulung, are both so obviously based upon the unit of the plough-team that they raise no difficulty. But the term 'virgate' does not, like them, speak for itself. If we might take it to denote merely a 'quarter' of the hide, it would become a term of relation only, leaving the 'hide' as the original unit. Should this suggestion meet with acceptance, it might obviously lead to rather important results.