34 THE DOMESDAY INQUEST 



restricted area of meadow, would place great difficulties in the 

 way of a man who thought of keeping more teams than were 

 absolutely necessary for his work. We may, therefore, pro- 

 visionally interpret the third term of the formula to mean that 

 the area under cultivation, whether in demesne or in the occu- 

 pation of tenants, was cultivated by C + D teams. 



At present we have no idea of the area represented by a 

 teamland. How much land could be cultivated by one team in 

 one year ? First, what was the number of beasts composing a 

 team ? This number is easily ascertainable for Cambridge- 

 shire. A comparison of parallel passages in the Exchequer 

 Domesday, the Cambridgeshire Inquest, and the Ely Inquest 

 shows many instances where the compiler of one record states, 

 " There is land for a half or a quarter of a team," and the com- 

 piler of another says, " There is land for four or two oxen," as 

 though it were a matter of indifference whether the area were 

 expressed in terms of teams or oxen, and showing that in that 

 county, at all events, the plough-team was composed of eight 

 oxen. 1 This equation is implied in other counties, and it is 

 only reasonable to suppose that the Commissioners considered 

 that a team was composed of the same number of oxen in all 

 parts of the country ; otherwise those who used Domesday 

 Book would have required a table, showing the number of 

 oxen in a team in the different counties. 



Documents of the thirteenth century, quoted by Mr. 

 Seebohm, show that at that time the average area allotted 

 to each manorial team of eight oxen was a hide an areal 

 hide of 1 20 so-called acres, scattered over the open fields 

 of the manor. Since the publication of his work on the 

 English Village Community^ every historical student knows 

 the main features of the open or common field system ; that 

 all the cultivated land of a manor was divided into two or 

 three fields, one of which lay fallow every year ; in a two- 

 field manor, the fields were cultivated in alternate years ; in 



1 F. JS. t 35- 



