The so-called Domesday of St. Paul's reports,(27*) that in Runwell eighty acres used to be reckoned to the hide, but in course of time new land was acquired (for tillage) and measured, and so the hide was raised to 120 acres. Altogether the supposition of an uniform acre-measurement of bovates, virgates, hides, and knights' fees all over England would be entirely misleading. The oxen were an important element in the arrangement, but, of course, not the only one. The formation of the holding had to conform also to the quality of the soil, the density of the population, etc. We find in any case the most varying figures. The knight's fee contained mostly four or five full ploughs or carucates, and still in Lincolnshire sixteen carucates went to the knight's fee.(28*) The carucate was not identical with the hide, but carucate and hide alike had originally meant a unit corresponding to a plough-team. Four virgates were mostly reckoned to the hide, but sometimes six, eight, seven are taken.(29*) The yardlands (virgates) or full lands, as they are sometimes called, because they were considered as the typical peasant holdings, consist of fifteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-four, forty, forty-eight, fifty, sixty-two, eighty acres, although thirty is perhaps the figure which appears more often than any other.(30*) Bovates of ten, twelve, and sixteen acres are to be found in the same locality.(31*) We cannot even seize hold of the acre as the one constant unit among these many variables; the size of the acre itself varied from place to place. In this way any attempt to establish a normal reckoning of the holdings will not only seem hazardous, but will actually stand in contradiction with patent facts.
Another circumstance seems of yet greater import: even within the boundaries of one and the same community the equality was an agrarian one and did not amount to a strict correspondence in figures. It was obviously impossible to cut up the land among the holdings in such a way as to make every one contain quite the same number of acres as the rest. In the Cartulary of Ramsey it is stated, that in one of the manors the virgate contains sometimes forty-eight acres and sometimes less.(32*) The Huntingdon Hundred Rolls mentions a locality where some of the half-virgates have got houses on their plots and some have not.(33*) In the Dorsetshire manor of Newton, belonging to Glastonbury, we find a reduction of the duties of one of the virgates because it is a small one.(34*) A curious instance is supplied by the same Glastonbury survey as to the Wiltshire manor of Christian Malford: one of the virgates was formed out of two former virgates, which were found insufficient to support two separate households.(35*)This last case makes it especially clear that the object was to make the shares on the same pattern in point of quality, and not of mere quantity. It is only to be regretted that manorial surveys, hundred rolls, and other documents of the same kind take too little heed of such variations, and consider the whole arrangement merely in regard to the interests of the landlord.
For this purpose a rough quantitative statement was sufficient.
They give very sparing indications as to the facts underlying the system of holdings; their aim is to reduce all relations to artificial uniformity in order to make them a fitter basis for the distribution of rents and labour services. But very little attention is required to notice a very great difference between such figures and reality. In most of the cases, when the virgate is described in its component parts, we come across irregularities. Again, each component part is more or less irregular, because instead of the acres and half-acres the real ground presents strips of a very capricious shape. And so we must come to the conclusion, that the hide, the virgate, the bovate, in short every holding mentioned in the surveys, appears primarily as an artificial, administrative, and fiscal unit which corresponds only in a very rough way to the agrarian reality.
