It is certainly difficult to discover any regular or consistent assessment in a system where the ploughland was represented by anything from 1/2 _carucata_ to 2-1/4 _carucatæ_. There is, however, in so many cases an approximation to an assessment of three _carucatæ_ for two ploughlands, that there seems to have been some underlying idea, if we could only trace it out. But for this there is needed a special investigation of all the carucated counties, a work of great labour and requiring local co-operation. If we could have tables for each county, arranged Hundred by Hundred and Vill by Vill, showing in parallel columns the ploughland and the _carucatæ ad geldum_, we could then, and only then, venture to speak positively. Till that is accomplished we are not in a position to explain how a system of assessment, based on actual area, could result in aggregate assessments uniformly expressed in terms of the six-carucate unit. XI. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS In seeking a clue to the origin of that artificial assessment, of which the traces, whether more or less apparent, linger on the pages of Domesday, I propose to exclude the carucated district, because we require, as I have said, more complete evidence as to the system pursued within it, and because, being associated with the settlement of the Danes it represents a later introduction, while the very name 'carucate', as I observed in _Domesday Studies_, has, unlike the mysterious 'hide', an obvious connection with the ploughland. Confining ourselves to the district assessed in terms of the 'hide', we seek to learn the origin of the system by which, as I contend, it was divided for the purpose of taxation into blocks, each of which was expressed in terms of the five-hide unit. Now if we follow the clue afforded by the Cambridgeshire evidence, and hold that the assessment was originally laid not on the Manor, nor even on the Vill, but on the Hundred as a whole,[170] it might be suggested that the Hundred itself subdivided the amount among its constituent elements. In practice, indeed, from the nature of the case, this principle must have prevailed in every _town_ assessed at a Hundred or Half-Hundred, for where an urban community was assessed in 'hides' the burgesses must, as in later days, have settled among themselves the proportion to be borne by individuals or individual properties. If, then, they were able to do this, and if, as I hold, town and country were assessed on the same principle, as part of the same system, what was to prevent their neighbours, in the court of the rural Hundred, similarly distributing among its constituents their respective shares of the common burden?