| Forest | 8,623,128 | hect. |
| Landes | 8,000,00 | ” |
| 16,623,128 | ” |
Where, probably, portions of the wood and lande are not reckoned to the land under profitable cultivation. Still this is a very different thing from being under the plough.
[178]. It is well known that great quantities of land were thrown out of cultivation to produce chases and forests. And the constant wars of the baronial ages must have had the same effect. However singular we may think it, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that, in some districts of England, the Saxons may have had more land in cultivation than we ourselves had at the beginning of George the Third’s reign; Mr. Porter calculates that from 1760 to 1814, no less than 7,076,610 acres have been brought into cultivation under Inclosure Bills. Pr. of the Nation, 154.
[179]. Cod. Dipl. No. 538.
[180]. “In the greater part (of Germany), especially in all the populous parts of Southern Germany, the land is tilled by its owners, scarcely any small holdings being farmed out. The possessions of the peasant owners and cultivators are usually very diminutive, and those of the richer lords of the soil, especially in the North, immensely extensive. Lastly, the peasant scarcely anywhere lives upon his land, but in the adjacent village, whatever may be its distance from his fields.” Banfield, Agric. on the Rhine, p. 10.
[181]. Leo, Sprachproben, p. 7. Thorpe, Analect. p. 8.
[182]. In Hungary, where land is abundant, houses, even those of considerable proprietors, are rarely of more than one story.
[183]. Cod. Dipl. No. 529.
[184]. It is to be remarked that the eight and twelve acres of meadow are distinguished here from the feld-land or arable: and in strictness they ought not to be calculated into the hide; but perhaps it was intended to plough them up: or Oswald may even have begun to follow a system in which arable and meadow should both be included in the hide, which is equivalent, in other words, to the attempt to replace the wasteful method of unenclosed pastures by a more civilized arrangement of the land. He speaks indeed, on more than one occasion, of granting gedál-land, and land tó gedále, which can hardly mean anything but new enclosures.
[185]. Cod. Dipl. No. 612.