It does not seem very clear why the idea of _one_ measure of land should suggest itself to either many such chieftains or one such Bretwalda, while other arrangements of a much more striking and necessary character remained totally different. ----- Against all these arguments we have only one fact to adduce, but it is no light one. It is certain that, in all the cases where a calculation can be made at all, we do find a most striking coincidence with respect to the size of the Hide in various parts of England; that such calculation is applicable to very numerous instances, and apparently satisfies the condition of the problem in all; and lastly that there appears no reason to suppose that any such real change had taken place in the value of the Hide, down to the period of the Norman conquest and the compilation of Domesday, according to the admeasurement of at least the largest and the most influential of the English tribes[155]. The latest of these measurements are recorded in Domesday; the earliest by Beda: the same system of calculations, the same results, apply to every case in which trial has been made between these remote limits; and we are thus enabled to ascend to the seventh century, a period at which any equality of possessions is entirely out of the question, but at which the old unit of measurement may still have retained and handed down its original value: even as, with us, one farm may comprise a thousand, another only two or three hundred acres, and yet the extent of the acre remain unaltered. ----- Footnote 155: Beda almost invariably gives his numbers as “iuxta mensuram Anglorum.” But in his works _Angli_ denotes all the Teutonic inhabitants of Britain. H. E. i. cap. 1. Again, in Bk. i. cap. 15, he identifies them, “Anglorum sive Saxonum gens.” He draws no distinction between Angle and Saxon tribes, except where special reasons lead him to particularize them. He does note discrepancies between them, which would have appeared far less important to a scientific and mathematical thinker, as he was, than differences in land-divisions. I conclude then that no limitation can be admitted in his assertion, and that the words “iuxta mensuram Anglorum” denote, “according to the admeasurement common to all the Germanic inhabitants of Britain.” ----- How then are we to account for this surprising fact, in the face of the arguments thus arrayed against it? I cannot positively assert, but still think it highly probable, that there was some such general measure common to the Germanic tribes upon the continent, and especially in the north. Whether originally sacerdotal, or how settled, it is useless to guess; but there does seem reason to believe that a measure not widely different from the result of my own calculations as to the Hide, prevailed in Germany; and hence to conclude that it was the usual basis of measurement among all the tribes that issued from the storehouse of nations[156]. -----