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]
V. THE HOLDINGS—THE YARD-LAND OR HUB.
We now pass from the strips to the holdings.
The typical English holding of a serf in the open fields was the yard-land of normally thirty acres (ten [p390] scattered acres in each of the three fields), to which an outfit of two oxen was assigned as 'setene' or 'stuht,' and which descended from one generation to another as a complete indivisible whole.
The hub or yard-land.
The German word for the yard-land is hof or hub; in its oldest form huoba, huba, hova.[605] And Aventinus, writing early in the sixteenth century of the holdings in Bavaria in the thirteenth century, distinguishes the hof as the holding belonging to a quadriga, or yoke of four oxen, taxed at sixty 'asses,' from the hub or holding of the biga or yoke of two oxen, and taxed [p391] at thirty 'asses.' [606] If the tax in this case were one 'as' per acre, then the hof contained sixty acres, and the hub thirty acres. So that, as in the yard-land, ten acres in each field would go under the three-field system to the pair of oxen.
Wide prevalence of the hub of thirty morgen in Middle and South Germany.
The hub of thirty morgen seems to have been the typical holding of the serf over a very wide area, according to the earliest records. Whilst as a rule absent from North Germany, Dr. Landau traces it in Lower Saxony, in Engern, in Thuringia, in Grapfeld, in Hesse, on the Middle Rhine and the Moselle, in the old Niederlahngau, Rheingau, Wormsgau, Lobdengau and Spiergau, in Elsass, in Swabia, and in Bavaria.[607]
The double huf of sixty morgen also occurs on the Weser and the Rhine in Lower Saxony and in Bavaria.[608] The word 'huf' first occurs in a document of A.D. 474.[609]