1 62 History of the English Landed Interest. 



The wide variations of acreage broiiglit to light hy compar- 

 ing the areas understood by these terms in the many manu- 

 scripts of the age, would seem to imply that they originated 

 at a time of complete isolation between district and district. 

 Common to the whole nation was the association between 

 certain land areas and the time and materials required to culti- 

 vate them ; but peculiar to each district Avas the exact acreage 

 found to be ploughable under the varied circumstances. We 

 may imagine that a tradition might well have been handed down 

 from father to son, and from tribal community to manorial, in 

 which an area of land so many yards long and so many yards 

 wide came to be implied as the average day's work of a plough 

 and yoke of oxen in that district. Varying with the conforma- 

 tion of the ground and the texture of the soil, this unit of all 

 English land measurements came to have a different signifi- 

 cance in almost every locality. The legislators of the statute 

 which procured for it one uniform meaning throughout the 

 length and breadth of England had wisely gone to the root of 

 the whole difficulty, and thus evolved order out of chaos. The 

 acre, definitely determined by law to be so many yards of land, 

 at once removed any vagueness about the bovate, virgate, and 

 carucate, each of which henceforth assumed recognised and in- 

 disputable areas in the scale of national land measurements. 

 The association of these areas with time and plough beasts 

 would, however, have long outlived the introduction of the 

 statute acre, and this would seem to explain how on certain 

 manors the number of virgates contained by the carucate 

 varied from four to seven, and how, in its turn, the virgate 

 varied between fifteen and eighty acres. 



Though there are other difficult terms in the Survey they are 

 insignificant, and we may dismiss them with the briefest refer- 

 ence. The word " terra " refers rather to quality than quantity 

 of land, and signifies either arable, wood, pasture, or meadow 

 grounds. " Leu " is pasture land one mile in length and 

 breadth ; but then who is to decide (especially when it is 

 applied to districts remote from London) whether the mile cor- 

 responded with the modern distance of 1,760 yards, or contained 

 half as mucli again ? Again, the " Leuca " (or in English 



