ON LAND TENURE IN ANCIENT TIMES. 159 
ox-goad, about eight feet long.* On the plains, they use for 
this purpose a rope about twice the length of the ox-goad, 
made of goat’s hair, about half an inch thick, called hhabaleh, 
evidently the Hebrew hhevel, “rope,” or “measuring line.”t 
Kach of these strips is called a maress, from the Arabic meerass, 
“inheritance” or “allotted portion.” The fields are taken 
separately, and the ten mawaress, or strips, are apportioned 
amongst the ten ploughs by lot. The owner of two ploughs, 
for instance, would get one-fifth of each field in his sixth 
division of the land, and the owner of one plough one-tenth. 
A man with two weak oxen who can only plough half a 
day is set down at half a plough, and gets one-twentieth of 
each field; and another who can only plough for a quarter of 
a day receives one-fortieth. Each farmer then pays the pro- 
portion of the land tax due on the strips of land allotted to him. 
A deep furrow divides these strips (mawaress), or a stone is 
placed at each end as a land-mark. It is held to bea heinous 
* Speaking of the origin in England in Saxon times of hams and hamlets 
that is, as the words signify manors, and small or subject manors, Mr. 
Frederic Seebohm says, “The typical importance in so many ways of the 
gyrd, or rod, or virga in the origin and growth of the Saxon ‘tun’ or 
‘ham’ is worth at least a moment’s notice. The typical site for a new 
settlement was a clearing in a wood or forest, because of the ‘fair rods’ 
which there abound. The clearing was measured out by rods. An 
allusion to this occurs in Notker’s paraphrase of Psa. lxxviii. 55—‘ He 
cast out the heathen before them, and divided them an inheritance by 
line.” The Vuigate, which Notker had before him, was ‘ £¢ sorte divisit eis 
terram in funiculo distributionis ;’? and he translated the last clause thus, 
‘teilta er das lant mit mazseile, to which he added, ‘also man nu tuot mit 
RUOTO,’ as they now do it with rods, 7.e., at St. Gall in the tenth or eleventh 
century. (Schilter’ Thesaur. Antig. Teut., i, p. 158 ; Ulm 1728). So in 
England the typical holding in the cleared land of the open fields was 
called a yard-land, or in earlier Saxon a gyrd landes, or in Latin a virgata 
terra; yard, gyrd, and virga all meaning rod, and all meaning also ina 
secondary sense a yard measure. The holdings in the open fields were of 
yarded or rooded land—land measured out with a rod into acres four rods 
wic., each vod in width being therefore a rood, as we have seen.” (The 
English Village Community, pp. 171, 172; Longmans, 1883.) 
+ There is an evident allusion to this division of the separate fields of the 
sadeh into equal parallel strips, measured off by ropes, in Ezekiel’s vision of 
the redistribution of the land of Palestine amongst the twelve tribes. Each 
of these is said to receive a straight strip of equal size, fifty miles in width, 
running parallel to the other strips, across the whole breadth of the land from 
east to west, Of these it is said most elliptically, “Joseph ropes (O° 20, hhava- 
leem),” thatis, “Joseph [shall have two] ropes,” or “strip-like portions 
measured out by ropes” (Ezekiel xlvii. 13), one strip for Manasseh and 
another for Ephraim side by side (xlviii. 4, 5). The same use of the word in 
English appears to have survived amongst the South Saxons, and hence 
the “rapes,” that is, ‘‘ropes,” into which the county of Sussex is divided, 
