Terms of exceptional occurrence.
Before I leave the question as to the holdings of the feudal peasantry, I must mention some terms which occur in different parts of England, although more rarely than the usual hides and virgates[513]. Of the sulung I have spoken already. It is a full ploughland, and 200 acres are commonly reckoned to belong to it. The name is sometimes found out of Kent, in Essex for instance. In Tillingham, a manor of St. Paul's of London, we come across six hides 'trium solandarum[514].' The most probable explanation seems to be that the hide or unit of assessment is contrasted with the solanda or sulland (sulung), that is with the actual ploughland, and two hides are reckoned as a single solanda.
The yokes (juga) of Battle Abbey[515] are not virgates, but carucates, full ploughlands. This follows from the fact that a certain virgate mentioned in the record is equivalent only to one fourth of the yoke. In the Norfolk manors of Ely Minster we find tenmanlands[516] of 120 acres in the possession of several copartitioners, participes. The survey does not go into a detailed description of tenements and rights, and the reckoning of services starts from the entire combination, as in the Kentish documents. A commonly recurrent term is wista[517]; it corresponds to the virgate: a great wista is as much as half-a-hide, or two virgates[518].
The terms discussed hitherto are applied to the tenements in the fields of the village; but besides those there are other names for the plots occupied by a numerous population which did not find a place in the regular holdings. There were craftsmen and rural labourers working for the lord and for the tenants; there were people living by gardening and the raising of vegetables. This class is always contrasted with the tenants in the fields. The usual name for their plots is cote, cotland, or cotsetland. The so-called ferdel, or fourth part of a virgate, is usually mentioned among them because there are no plough-beasts on it[519]. Another name for the ferdel is nook[520]. Next come the crofters, whose gardens sometimes extend to a very fair size—as much as ten acres in one enclosed patch[521]. The cotters proper have generally one, two, and sometimes as much as five acres with their dwellings; they cannot keep themselves on this, as a rule, and have to look out for more on other people's tenements. A very common name for their plots is 'lundinaria[522],' 'Mondaylands,' because the holders are bound to work for the lord only one day in the week, usually on Monday. Although the absence of plough-beasts, of a part in coaration, and of shares in the common fields draws a sharp line between these men and the regular holders, our surveys try sometimes to fit their duties and plots into the arrangement of holdings; the cotland is assumed to represent one sixteenth or even one thirty-second part of the hide[523]. The Glastonbury Survey of 1189 contains a curious hint that two cottages are more valuable than one half-virgate: two cotlands were ruined during the war, and they were thrown together into half a virgate, although it would have been more advantageous to keep two houses on them, that is two households[524]. The bordae mentioned by the documents are simply cottages or booths without any land belonging to them[525]. The manorial police keeps a look-out that such houses may not arise without licence and service[526].
A good many terms are not connected in any way with the general arrangement of the holdings, but depend upon the part played by the land in husbandry or the services imposed upon it. To mention a few among them. A plot which has to provide cheese is called Cheeseland[527]. Those tenements which are singled out for the special duty of carrying the proceeds of the manorial cultivation get the name of averlands[528]. The terms lodland[529], serland[530] or sharland, are also connected with compulsory labour. The first is taken from the duty to carry loads or possibly to load waggons; the second may be employed in reference to work performed with the sithe or reap-hook. A plot reserved for the leader of the plough-team, the akerman, was naturally called akermanland[531]. Sometimes, though rarely, the holding gets its name from the money rent it has to pay. We hear of denerates[532] and nummates[533] of land in this connexion.
Conclusions.
All these variations in detail do not avail to modify to any considerable extent the chief lines on which the medieval system of holdings is constructed. I presume that the foregoing exposition has been sufficient to establish the following points:—
1. The principle upon which the original distribution depended was that of equalizing the shares of the members of the community. This led to the scattering and to the intermixture of strips. The principle did not preclude inequality according to certain degrees, but it aimed at putting all the people of one degree into approximately similar conditions.
2. The growth of population, of capital, of cultivation, of social inequalities led to a considerable difference between the artificial uniformity in which the arrangement of the holdings was kept and the actual practice of farming and ownership.
3. The system was designed and kept working by the influence of communal right, but it got its artificial shape and its legal rigidity from the manorial administration which used it for the purpose of distributing and collecting labour and rent.