ELEVENTH-CENTURY FARMING 211 



would require the produce of another 5 acres. It will be 

 remembered that the gebur of the Rectitudines Singularum 

 Personarum had to till 3 acres of his yard land for the 

 benefit of his lord. So 3,900,000 acres would be required 

 to provide a living for the 260,000 recorded families below 

 the rank of tenants-in-chief and mesne tenants, south of 

 Cheshire and Yorkshire. 



But what would be required for the living of the richer 

 classes ? At first it would seem as if this were an unanswer- 

 able question : any attempt to estimate the number of re- 

 tainers kept by any one of the magnates must be mere 

 guess-work, and we must therefore approach the problem 

 from another standpoint. Let us remember that the 260,000 

 families who required for their support and dues the produce 

 of 3,900,000 acres annually, were the tenants, whose plough- 

 teams were enumerated as the " carucae hominum." If, then, 

 it were possible to ascertain the proportion that the teams in 

 demesne bore to the tenants' teams, it might be possible to 

 ascertain the area cultivated by those teams. I have counted 

 the teams belonging to the demesne and the teams of the 

 tenants in three counties, as follows : 



Demesne. Tenants. 



Oxford 809^ 1625! 



Middlesex ... ... ... 128 ... 



Sussex 752^ 



1,690 



If this proportion could be relied on, there would be 

 between two and a half and three teams belonging to the 

 tenants for every team in demesne. A count of single 

 hundreds in sixteen other counties gives 842 teams in 

 demesne to 2002^ teams belonging to the tenants. Roughly 

 speaking, then, we may estimate that for every five teams 

 of the tenants there were two teams in demesne ; and the 

 problem now resolves itself into a proportion sum ; thus : 



