i6o History of the English Landed Interest. 



portions to several persons. The tenancy of John Moldeson is 

 found thus to consist of seventy-two half-acre strips, besides his 

 messuage in the village of Shipton. Comparing this single 

 instance with other neighbouring tenancies in the same manor, 

 Mr. Seebohm concludes that every virgate in the AVinslow 

 Lordship consisted of, besides the messuage, between thirty and 

 forty modern acres of land, scattered in three equal numbers of 

 half-acre strips over each of the three common fields. Using 

 these data for purposes of comparison with the Hundred Rolls 

 of Edward I., this writer extends his conclusions to an area of 

 country embracing five great Midland counties. Though the 

 bundle of scattered strips called a virgate did not always con- 

 tain the same number of acres, and though the hide did not 

 always contain the same number of virgates, the author gathers 

 that the normal area of this larger land measurement was 120 

 acres, or four virgates. For purposes of assessment, the land 

 measurements involved the area of demesne lands, and these 

 were not necessarily cut up by balks into acres. Now this fact 

 draws a distinction between the hide and virgate as actual 

 holdings and such areas as customary land measures. From 

 the same sources of information Mr. Seebohm notes an entry 

 showing the scutum or knight's fee to contain four hides of 

 land ; in other words, each virgate is one-sixteenth of a scu- 

 tum, and to corroborate this fact several entries show that 

 it was charged 2.s. 6fZ. as scutage, or one-sixteenth of 40.s-., 

 w'hich we know to have been the annual value of a knight's' 

 fee.^ Thus the normal acreage of both hide and virgate is 

 connected with the scutage of 40.s-. "Without analysing fur- 

 ther Mr. Seebohm's conclusion regarding the correspondence 

 between the national acreage and coinage, we shall now 

 proceed to examine his evidence connecting the hide with the 

 carucate. Again the Hundred Rolls afford him data by 

 which he can show that the carucate occasionally contained the 

 identical normal acreage of the hide, but often dropped below 

 or exceeded this area. It was, he decides, what it literally 



' We must be careful to distinj^uisli hero between the intrinsic value of 

 a knight's fee, which was from £15 to £20, and the annual scutage pay- 

 ment ('106'.) on a knight's fee. 



