The English Village Community / Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

IV. THE DIVISION OF THE FIELDS INTO FURLONGS AND ACRES.

Passing next to the divisions of the open fields, we take first the Furlongs or Shots (the Latin Quarentenæ).

'Shot.'

The word 'Shot' probably is simply the Anglo-Saxon 'sceot,' or division; but it is curious to find in a document of 1318 mention of 'unam peciam, quod vulgariter dicitur Schoet' at Passau, near the junction of the Inn with the Danube.[579]

'Gewann.'

The usual word in Middle and South Germany is 'Gewende,' in Lower Germany 'Wande' or 'Wanne,' or 'Gewann'—words which no less than the Furlong[580] refer to the length of the furrow and the turning of the plough at the end of it.

Headland.

The headland, on which the plough was turned, [p381] is also found in the German three-field system as in England.

'Voracker.'

In a Frankish document quoted by Dr. Landau, it is called the 'Voracker,' elsewhere it is known as the 'Anwänder' (versura), or 'Vorwart.' [581]

The Lince called 'Rain.'

In the English system the furlongs were divided into strips or acres by turf balks left in the ploughing, and, as we have seen, on hill-sides, the strips became terraces, and the balks steep banks called 'linces.' It will be remembered that these were produced by the practice of always turning the sod downhill in the ploughing. There are many linces as far north as in the district of the 'Teutoberger Wald,' [582] and they occur in great numbers as far south as the Inn Valley, all the way up to St. Mauritz and Pontresina. Although in many places the terraces in the Engadine are now grass-land, it is well known to the peasantry that they were made by ancient ploughing.

The German word for the turf slope of these terraces is 'Rain,' and, like the word balk, it means a strip of unploughed turf.[583] It is sometimes used for the terrace itself. Precisely the same word is used for the similar terraces in the Dales of Yorkshire, which are still called by the Dalesmen 'reeans' or 'reins.' [584] Terraces of the same kind are found in [p382] Scotland; and when Pennant in 1772 asked what they were called, he was told that they were 'baulks.' [585]

The Celtic Rhan.

Both words suggest a wider than merely German origin. 'Balk' is as thoroughly a Welsh word[586] as it is English and German. 'Rain' can hardly be other than the Welsh 'Rhan' (a division), or 'Rhyn' and 'grwn' (a ridge), with which the name of the open-field system in Ireland and Scotland—'run-rig'—is no doubt connected. The English word lince or linch, with the Anglo-Saxon 'hlinc' and 'hlince,' is perhaps allied to the Anglo-Saxon 'Hlynian,' or 'Hlinian,' to lean, making its participle 'hlynigende;' and this, and the old High German 'hlinen,' are surely connected with the Latin and Italian 'inclinare' and the French 'enclin.' As we have seen, the Roman 'Agrimensores' called these slopes or terraces 'supercilia.'

Next let us ask, whence came the English acre strip itself?

The acre strip a day's work.

It represented, as we have seen, a day's work at ploughing. Hence the German Morgen and Tagwerk, in the Alps Tagwan and Tagwen; and hence also, as early as the eighth century, the Latin 'jurnalis' and [p383] 'diurnalis.' [587] In early Roman times Varro describes the jugerum [or jugum]—the Roman acre—as 'quod juncti boves uno die exarare possint.' [588]

The division of arable open fields into day-works was therefore ancient. It was also widely spread, and by no means confined to the three-field system. It was common to the co-aration of both free tribesmen and 'taeogs' in Wales; and the Fellahin of Palestine to this moment divide their open fields into day-works for the purpose of easy division among them, according to their ploughs or shares in a plough.[589]

In the Irish open-field system, as we have seen, the land was very early divided into equal 'ridges,' for in the passage quoted, referring to the pressure of population in the seventh century, the complaint was, not that the people received smaller ridges than in former times, but fewer of them. These ridges, however, may or may not have been 'day-works.'

But perhaps, outside of the three-field system, a still more widely spread practice was that of dividing the furlongs or larger divisions into as many strips as there were sharers, without reference to the size of the strips. This practice seems to be the one adopted in many parts of Germany, in Russia, and in the East, and it is in common use in the western districts of Scotland to this day whenever a piece of land is held by a number of crofters as joint holders.[590] [p384]

It is doubtful whether the division into acre strips representing day-works, and divided from their neighbours by 'raine' or balks, was one of the features of the original German system of ploughing. It is chiefly, if not entirely, in the districts within or near to the Roman 'limes,' or colonised after the conquest of the Roman provinces, that it appears to have been prevalent.[591]

With regard to the word 'acre,' it is probably of very ancient origin.

The German 'acker' has the wider sense of ploughed land in general, but sometimes in East Friesland,[592] and also in South Germany and German Switzerland it has still the restricted meaning of the acre strip laid out for ploughing.[593]

We now pass to the form of the acre strip or day's work in ploughing.

Roman jugerum.

The Roman actus or furrow length was 120 feet, or twelve 10-feet rods. The actus quadratus was 120 feet square. The jugerum was composed of two of these actus quadrati. It was therefore in length still an actus or furrow of 120 feet, and it was twice as broad as it was long; whilst the length of the English acre is ten times its breadth.

Strips of the same form as the English acre in France and in Bavaria in the seventh century.

Thus the English acre varied much in its shape [p385] from the Roman jugerum. Its exact measurements are found in the mappa, or measure of the day-work of the tenants of the abbot of St. Remy at Rheims, which is described in the Polyptique of the ninth century as forty perches in length and four in width.[594] It occurs again in the 'napatica' of the Polyptique of the abbey of St. Maur, near Nantes, which was of precisely the same dimensions.[595] And we have seen that the 'andecena,' or measure of the day's work of ploughing for the coloni and servi of the Church, was described by the Bavarian laws in the seventh century as of precisely the same form as the English acre, forty rods in length and four rods in width, only that the rods were Roman rods of 10 feet.

We have to go, therefore, to Bavaria in the seventh century for the earliest instance of the form of the English acre. And in this earliest instance it had a distinctly servile connexion, as it had also in the French cases quoted. In all it fixed the day's task-work of semi-servile tenants.

Further, the Bavarian 'andecena,' if the spelling of the word may be trusted, may have another curious and interesting connexion with the Saxon acre, to which attention must be once more turned.

The form in which the 'agrarium' or tithe-rent was taken.

We have seen that the tithes were to be paid in Saxon times in the produce of 'every tenth acre as it [p386] is traversed by the plough.' The Roman land-tribute in Rhætia and the 'Agri Decumates' also consisted of tithes. If these latter tithes were paid as the Saxon ecclesiastical tithes were, by every tenth strip being set aside for them in the ploughing, the words of the Bavarian law have an important significance. The judex or villicus is required by the laws to see that the colonus or servus shall render by way of agrarium or land tribute according to what he has, from every thirty modii three modii (i.e. the tenth)—'lawful andecenæ (andecenas legitimas), that is (the rod having ten feet) four rods in width and forty in length, to plough, to sow, to hedge, to gather, to lead, and to store.' [596]

Now why is the peculiar phraseology used 'from 30 modii 3 modii'? Surely either because three modii, according to the 'Agrimensores,' went to the juger, or because the actual acre of the locality was sown with three modii of seed,[597] so that in either case it was a way of saying 'from every ten acres one acre.' Further, the form and measure of the acre is described, and it is called the 'lawful andecena.' The word itself in its peculiar etymology possibly contains a reference to the one strip set apart in ten for the tithe. Be this as it may, here again, in another point connected with the 'acre,' we find the nearest and earliest analogies in South Germany within the old Roman province. [p387]

Lastly, we have still to explain the reason of the difference between the form of the Roman 'actus' and 'jugerum' and that of the early Bavarian and English acre.

The Egyptian arura was 100 cubits square.[598]

The Greek πλέθρον was 10 rods or 100 feet square.[599]

The Roman actus was 12 rods or 120 feet square.

The Roman 'jugerum' was made up of two 'actus' placed side by side, and was the area to be ploughed in a day.

Form of the acre or day's-work connected with the number of oxen in the team.

In all these cases the yoke of two oxen is assumed, and the length of the acre, or 'day-work,' is the length of the furrow which two oxen could properly plough at a stretch.[600]

The reason of the increased length of the Bavarian and the English acre was, no doubt, connected with the fact of the larger team.[601]

If the Bavarian team was of eight oxen, like that of the English and Welsh and Scotch common plough, it would seem perfectly natural that with four times the strength of team the furrow might also be assumed to be four times the usual length. In this way the Greek and Roman furrow of 10 or 12 rods may naturally have been extended north of the Alps into the 'furlong' of forty rods. [p388] . Now, there is a remarkable proof that long furrows, and therefore probably large teams, were used in Bavaria, then within the Roman province of Rhætia, as early as the second century. The remains of the Bavarian 'Hochäcker' are described as running uninterruptedly for sometimes a kilomètre and more, i.e. five times the length of the English furlong. And a Roman road with milestones, dating as early as A.D. 201, in one place runs across these long furrows in a way which seems to prove that they were older than the road.[602]

The Bavarian 'Hochäcker' and their long furrows.

Professor Meitzen argues from this fact that these 'Hochäcker' with long furrows are pre-German in these districts, and in the absence of evidence of their Celtic origin he inclines to attribute them to the husbandry of officials or contractors on the imperial waste lands, who had at their command hundreds of slaves and heavy plough teams.

This may be the solution of the puzzling question of the origin of the Bavarian 'Hochäcker,' but the presence of the team of eight oxen in Wales and Scotland as well as in England, and the mention of teams of six and eight oxen in the Vedas[603] as used by Aryan husbandmen in the East, centuries earlier, makes it possible, if not probable, that the Romans, in this instance as in so many others, adopted and adapted to their purpose a practice which they found already at work, connected perhaps with a heavier soil and a clumsier plough than they were used to south of the Alps.[604] [p389]