This calculation leaves no doubt a bare possibility of the hide’s containing 100 or 120 statute-acres: but those who are inclined to believe that, taking all England through, the proportion of cultivated to uncultivated land was as 29:3, or even as 24:7, it must be owned, appreciate our ancient husbandry beyond its merits[175]. Cultivation may very probably have increased with great rapidity up to the commencement of the ninth century; and in that case, waste land would have been brought under the plough to meet the demands of increasing population: but the savage inroads of the Northmen which filled the next succeeding century must have had a strong tendency in the opposite direction. I can hardly believe that a third of all England was under cultivation at the time of the conquest; yet this is the result which we obtain from a calculation of thirty-two or thirty-three acres to the hide, while a calculation of forty acres gives us a result of three-eighths, or very little less than one-half. The extraordinary character of this result will best appear from the following considerations. Footnote 175: I have taken the acreage as given in the Census of 1841, but there is another calculation which makes it amount to 32,342,400; in which case the several values must be corrected as follows. The general result is not in the least altered by this change in the factors. Acreage at 30 7,308,000 Excess Rat. 7:25 25,034,400 32 7,795,200 24,547,200 7:24 33 8,038,800 24,303,600 1:3 40 9,744,000 22,598,400 9:22 100 24,360,000 7,982,400 24:7 120 29,232,000 3,110,400 29:3 If we proceed to apply these calculations to the existing condition of England, we shall be still more clearly satisfied that from thirty to thirty-three acres is at any rate a near approximation to the truth. The _exact_ data for England are I believe not found, but in 1827 Mr. Couling, a civil engineer and surveyor, delivered a series of calculations to the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Emigration, which calculations have been reproduced by Mr. Porter in his work on the Progress of the Nation. From this I copy the following table: