The English Village Community: Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)Seebohm, Frederic
History
The English Village Community: Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)
Seebohm, Frederic
Village communities -- Great Britain
A single pair of oxen was, as we have seen, allotted under Saxon
rules as outfit to the yard-land of thirty acres, of which, under the
three-field or three-course system, ten acres would be in wheat, ten
in oats or pulse, and ten in fallow. With the single pair of oxen was
allotted to the veteran fifty modii of wheat seed, and fifty of oats
or pulse. Five modii of wheat seed, according to the Roman writers on
agriculture, commonly went to the jugerum;[392] so that the veteran
with a single yoke of oxen had seed for ten jugera of wheat, and thus
was apparently assumed to be able to cultivate, if farming on the
three-course system, about thirty jugera in all, like the holder of
the Saxon yard-land. The veteran to whom was assigned the double yoke
of four oxen and 200 modii of seed--100 modii of each kind--would
have about 60 jugera in his double holding.
Of course, too much stress should not be placed upon any close
correspondence in the number of jugera; but it is, on the other hand,
perfectly natural [p276] that, in the theory of these outfits, seed
should be given for a definite area, and that this should be some
actual division of the centuria of the _Agrimensores_.
«Normal _centuria_, 200 and 240 jugera.»
Siculus Flaccus, who wrote about A.D. 100, and chiefly of Italy,
describes how, in the regular allotments by the _Agrimensores_, one
settler, according to his military rank, would receive a single
modus, another one and a half, and another two modii, whilst
sometimes a single allotment was given _to several people jointly_.
He mentions also that the _centuriæ_ varied in size, being sometimes
200 jugera and sometimes 240; the smaller lots also sometimes varying
in size, even in the same centuria, according to the fertility or
otherwise of the land.[393]
All we can say is that the centuria of 240 jugera would be divisible
into single and double holdings of thirty and sixty jugera
respectively, just as the English double hide of 240 acres, or single
hide of 120 acres, was divisible into yard-lands of thirty acres. The
centuria of 200 jugera would be divisible into holdings of fifty and
twenty-five jugera respectively.[394]
Passing from the outfit and the holdings, it may [p277] be asked,
what was the system of cultivation? was it an open field husbandry?
«Traces of an open-field husbandry in some cases.»
«_Supercilia_ or linches.»
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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