If the Bavarian team was of eight oxen, like that of the English and Welsh and Scotch common plough, it would seem perfectly natural that with four times the strength of team the furrow might also be assumed to be four times the usual length. In this way the Greek and Roman furrow of 10 or 12 rods may naturally have been extended north of the Alps into the 'furlong' of forty rods. [p388] . Now, there is a remarkable proof that long furrows, and therefore probably large teams, were used in Bavaria, then within the Roman province of Rhætia, as early as the second century. The remains of the Bavarian 'Hochäcker' are described as running uninterruptedly for sometimes a kilomètre and more, _i.e._ five times the length of the English furlong. And a Roman road with milestones, dating as early as A.D. 201, in one place runs across these long furrows in a way which seems to prove that they were older than the road.[602] «The Bavarian 'Hochäcker' and their long furrows.» Professor Meitzen argues from this fact that these 'Hochäcker' with long furrows are pre-German in these districts, and in the absence of evidence of their Celtic origin he inclines to attribute them to the husbandry of officials or contractors on the imperial waste lands, who had at their command hundreds of slaves and heavy plough teams. This may be the solution of the puzzling question of the origin of the Bavarian 'Hochäcker,' but the presence of the team of eight oxen in Wales and Scotland as well as in England, and the mention of teams of six and eight oxen in the Vedas[603] as used by Aryan husbandmen in the East, centuries earlier, makes it possible, if not probable, that the Romans, in this instance as in so many others, adopted and adapted to their purpose a practice which they found already at work, connected perhaps with a heavier soil and a clumsier plough than they were used to south of the Alps.[604] [p389] V. THE HOLDINGS--THE YARD-LAND OR HUB. We now pass from the strips to the holdings. The typical English holding of a serf in the open fields was the yard-land of normally thirty acres (ten [p390] scattered acres in each of the three fields), to which an outfit of two oxen was assigned as '_setene_' or '_stuht_,' and which descended from one generation to another as a complete indivisible whole. «The hub or yard-land.» The German word for the yard-land is _hof_ or _hub_; in its oldest form _huoba, huba, hova_.[605] And Aventinus, writing early in the sixteenth century of the holdings in Bavaria in the thirteenth century, distinguishes the _hof_ as the holding belonging to a _quadriga_, or yoke of four oxen, taxed at sixty 'asses,' from the _hub_ or holding of the _biga_ or yoke of two oxen, and taxed [p391] at thirty 'asses.'[606] If the tax in this case were one '_as_' per acre, then the _hof_ contained sixty acres, and the _hub_ thirty acres. So that, as in the yard-land, ten acres in each field would go under the three-field system to the pair of oxen.