IV. 

 WILD HYACINTHS. 



THE path through the Fore Acre leads right across 

 Venlake by tortuous windings to the tangled covert 

 and bosky marshland of Sedgewood Copse. There is 

 something to my mind very sweet and melodious about 

 these dear old-world English names. Most of them go 

 back even beyond the Norman conquest. The Fore 

 Acre, for example, is so called, not because it once 

 contained four acres, as the labourers will tell you, 

 but because it is the acre or field lying just in front of 

 the old immemorial homestead. In early English acre 

 simply means field ; its later use as a definite measure 

 of area, instead of the hide, is a mere modern innovation. 

 As a matter of fact, the size of any particular Fore Acre 

 depends usually upon the purest chance our own here 

 is a very small croft indeed and the Six Acres or Ten 

 Acres of latter-day farms are simply the results of false 

 analogy on the part of countrymen who have misin- 

 terpreted the good old English phraseology of their 

 forefathers. For ten centuries, in all probability, the 

 farmhouse and barton of Shapwick Farm, for the time 

 being, have stood on the selfsame site that the modern 



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