But it may be asked, how can it be proved that the other virgates were like the one virgate of John [p027] Moldeson thus by chance described and exposed to view on the manor rolls? Is it right to assume that this virgate may be taken as a pattern of the rest? The answer is, that in the description of its 72 half-acre strips the 144 neighbouring strips are incidentally involved. And as 66 of its strips had on one side of them 66 other strips of another tenant, viz. John Watekyns, and on the other side 43 of the next strips belonged to Henry Warde, and 23 to John Mayn, and 8 of the strips only had other neighbours, it is evident that the virgate of John Moldeson was one of a system of similar virgates formed of scattered half-acre strips, arranged in a certain regular order of rotation, in which John Moldeson came 66 times next to John Watekyns, and two other neighbours followed him, one 43 and the o ther 23 times, in similar succession. «A virgate or yard-land is a bundle of 30 or 40 acres in scattered acre or half-acre strips.» Thus the Winslow virgates were intermixed, and each was _a holding of a messuage in the village, and between 30 and 40 modern acres of land, not contiguous, but scattered in half-acre pieces all over the common fields_. The half-virgate consisted in the same way of a messuage in the village with half as many strips scattered over the same fields. The intermixed ownership complained of in the Inclosure Acts, and surviving in the Hitchin maps, need no longer surprise us. «The normal virgate was of 30 acres.» We know now what a virgate or yard-land was. We shall find that its normal area was 30 scattered acres--10 acres in each of the three fields. Using again the map of the Hitchin fields, we may mark upon it the contents of a normal virgate by way of impressing upon the eye the nature of this peculiar holding. It must always be remembered that when [p028] the fields were divided into half-acres instead of acres the number of its scattered strips would be doubled. «Two-thirds of the land held in virgates and half-virgates.»