[151]. Cod. Dipl. No. 240.
[152]. Cassatus or casatus, a married man, Span. casado. Othello speaks of his unhoused free condition, that is, his bachelor state. It is by marriage that a man founds a house or family.
[153]. Henry of Huntingdon thus defines its extent: “Hida autem Anglice vocatur terra unius aratri cultura sufficiens per annum.” lib. vi. an. 1008. But this is a variable amount on land of various qualities, as every ploughman well knows.
[154]. It does not seem very clear why the idea of one measure of land should suggest itself to either many such chieftains or one such Bretwalda, while other arrangements of a much more striking and necessary character remained totally different.
[155]. Beda almost invariably gives his numbers as “iuxta mensuram Anglorum.” But in his works Angli denotes all the Teutonic inhabitants of Britain. H. E. i. cap. 1. Again, in Bk. i. cap. 15, he identifies them, “Anglorum sive Saxonum gens.” He draws no distinction between Angle and Saxon tribes, except where special reasons lead him to particularize them. He does note discrepancies between them, which would have appeared far less important to a scientific and mathematical thinker, as he was, than differences in land-divisions. I conclude then that no limitation can be admitted in his assertion, and that the words “iuxta mensuram Anglorum” denote, “according to the admeasurement common to all the Germanic inhabitants of Britain.”
[156]. I do not know the present average amount of a Frisian or Westphalian Hof, but the peasant-farms a little below Cologne, on the left bank of the Rhine, average from 30 to 50 acres. See Banfield, Agricult. Rhine, p. 10. The Bavarian Hof of two Huben contains from 50 to 60 juckert (each juckert equal to 40,000 square Bavarian feet, or nearly a jugerum). This brings the Hof from about 36 to 40 acres. See Schmeller, Baierisch. Wörterbuch, ii. 142, voc. Hueb. Schmeller’s remarks on Hof are worth consulting, and especially his opinion that it may mean a necessary measure or portion. See also Grimm, Rechtsalt. p. 535.
[157]. That it was a fixed and not a variable quantity, both as to form and extent, seems to follow from the expressions, three acres wide (Cod. Dipl. No. 781), iii acera brǽde, i. e. three acres breadth (Leg. Æðelst. iv. 5), ix acræ latitudine (Leg. Hen. I. cap. xvi.).
[158]. These calculations rest not only upon the authority of several large, practical farmers, and the opinions of intelligent ploughmen who have been consulted, but also upon experiments made under the author’s own eye, on land of different qualities.
[159]. I think, for reasons to be assigned below, that there was a small as well as large acre: in which case the small acre was probably made up of 5 × 5 × 40 = 1000 sq. y.
[160]. The yard of land was a very different thing: this was the fourth part of the Hide, the Virgata of Domesday.