Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England

by Frederic William Maitland

the second rated at 2 h. 3 v. has land for 6 teams,

the third rated at 2 h. 3 v. has land for 4 teams,

the fourth rated at 1¹⁄₂ v. has land for 1 team,

the fifth rated at 1 v. has land for 4 oxen,

the sixth rated at ¹⁄₂ v. has land for 3 oxen.

The teamland does not break up easily. As a general rule, we only hear of fractional parts of it when the jurors are compelled to deal with a tenement so small that it can not be said to possess even one teamland[1389].

Land for oxen and wood for swine.

In passing we observe that this phrase, ‘There is land for x teams’ finds exact parallels in two other phrases that are not very uncommon, namely, ‘There is pasture for y sheep’ and ‘There is wood for z pigs’: also that the values given to y and z are often large and round. It may be that the jurors have in their minds equations which connect the area of a wood or pasture with its power of feeding swine or sheep, but an extremely lax use must be made of these equations when the number of sheep is fixed at a neat hundred or the number of pigs at a neat thousand, nor dare we say that the quality of the grass and trees has no influence upon the computation.

Teamland no areal unit.

Secondly, we observe that the teamland when it does break into fractional parts does not break into virgates, bovates, acres, roods, or any other units which we can regard as units in a scheme of areal measurement[1390]. The eighth of a teamland is the land of (or for) an ox. If we wish to speak of the sixteenth of a teamland, we must introduce the half-ox. Now had the jurors been told to state the quantity of the arable land comprised in a tenement, they had at their command plenty of words which would have served this purpose. No sooner will they have told us that there is land for two teams, than they will add that there are five acres of meadow and a wood which is three furlongs in length by two in breadth. We infer that they have not been asked to state the area of the arable. They have been asked to say something about it, but not to state its area.