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

But to return to the holding of the Roman veteran. It is not impossible to ascertain roughly its normal acreage from the amount of seed allotted in the outfit, as well as from the number of oxen.

Of about 30 jugera.

A single pair of oxen was, as we have seen, allotted under Saxon rules as outfit to the yard-land of thirty acres, of which, under the three-field or three-course system, ten acres would be in wheat, ten in oats or pulse, and ten in fallow. With the single pair of oxen was allotted to the veteran fifty modii of wheat seed, and fifty of oats or pulse. Five modii of wheat seed, according to the Roman writers on agriculture, commonly went to the jugerum;[392] so that the veteran with a single yoke of oxen had seed for ten jugera of wheat, and thus was apparently assumed to be able to cultivate, if farming on the three-course system, about thirty jugera in all, like the holder of the Saxon yard-land. The veteran to whom was assigned the double yoke of four oxen and 200 modii of seed—100 modii of each kind—would have about 60 jugera in his double holding.

Of course, too much stress should not be placed upon any close correspondence in the number of jugera; but it is, on the other hand, perfectly natural [p276] that, in the theory of these outfits, seed should be given for a definite area, and that this should be some actual division of the centuria of the Agrimensores.

Normal centuria, 200 and 240 jugera.

Siculus Flaccus, who wrote about A.D. 100, and chiefly of Italy, describes how, in the regular allotments by the Agrimensores, one settler, according to his military rank, would receive a single modus, another one and a half, and another two modii, whilst sometimes a single allotment was given to several people jointly. He mentions also that the centuriæ varied in size, being sometimes 200 jugera and sometimes 240; the smaller lots also sometimes varying in size, even in the same centuria, according to the fertility or otherwise of the land.[393]

All we can say is that the centuria of 240 jugera would be divisible into single and double holdings of thirty and sixty jugera respectively, just as the English double hide of 240 acres, or single hide of 120 acres, was divisible into yard-lands of thirty acres. The centuria of 200 jugera would be divisible into holdings of fifty and twenty-five jugera respectively.[394]

Passing from the outfit and the holdings, it may [p277] be asked, what was the system of cultivation? was it an open field husbandry?

Traces of an open-field husbandry in some cases.

Supercilia or linches.