Hence the yard-land became a bundle of scattered strips.
It also suggests a ready explanation of how when the common tillage died out, and the strips included in a hide, yard-land, or virgate, instead of varying with each year's arrangements of the plough teams, became occupied by the villein tenant year after year in permanent possession, there would naturally be left, as a survival of the ancient system, that now meaningless and inconvenient scattering of the strips forming a holding all over the open fields which in modern times so incensed Arthur Young, and made the Enclosure Acts necessary.
The strip the day's ploughing.
There is, lastly, another point in which the Welsh laws of co-aration suggest a clue to the reason and origin of a widely spread trait of the open field system. Why were the strips in the open field system uniformly so small? The acre or erw was obviously a furrow-long for the convenience of the ploughing. But what fixed its breadth and its area? This, too, is explained. According to the Welsh laws it was the measure of a day's co-ploughing. This is clear from two passages in the laws where it is called a 'cyvar,' or a 'co-ploughing.' [150] And it would seem that a day's ploughing ended at midday, because in the legal description of a complete ox it is required to plough only to midday.[151] The Gallic word for the acre or strip, 'journel,' in the Latin of the monks 'jurnalis,' and [p125] sometimes diurnalis,[152] also points to a day's ploughing; while the German word 'morgen' for the same strips in the German open fields still more clearly points to a day's work which ended, like the Welsh 'cyvar,' at noon.
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CHAPTER IV. FOOTNOTES.
[130.] The boundaries of the charters contained in first two volumes of the Codex Div. are collected in the Appendix to vol. iii. After this they are given with the charters.
[131.] Hist. Monasterii de Abingdon, vol. i. p. 57.
[132.] Codex Dip. cclxxii. 'grenan hlinc,' cccliii. 'hlinces,' ccclxxvii. 'ealde gare quod indigenæ nane monnes land vocant.' (See also dlxx. 'nane mannes land'), cccxcix. 'furlang,' ccccvii. 'forlang,' 'heued lande,' ccccxiii. 'furlang,' 'hlinces,' ccccxiv. 'mær hlinces,' ccccxvii. 'forerth akere,' ccccxviii. 'furlanges,' ccccxix. and xx. 'foryrthe,' 'greatan hlinces,' and so on. Instances are equally numerous in the Abingdon charters and those of the Liber de Hyda. For linces, see Hist. Abingdon, i. pp. 111, 147, 158, 188, 259, 284, 315, 341, 404. Liber de Hyda, pp. 86, 103, 107, 176, 235, 239.
[133.] Laws of King Ine. Ancient Laws, &c., of England, Thorpe, p. 55.