It is well known that great quantities of land were thrown out of cultivation to produce chases and forests. And the constant wars of the baronial ages must have had the same effect. However singular we may think it, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that, in _some_ districts of England, the Saxons may have had more land in cultivation than we ourselves had at the beginning of George the Third’s reign; Mr. Porter calculates that from 1760 to 1814, no less than 7,076,610 acres have been brought into cultivation under Inclosure Bills. Pr. of the Nation, 154. ----- The number of forty acres has of course been taken solely for the purpose of getting a common measure with the present acre assumed in the parliamentary survey. Whether it corresponded exactly with thirty, thirty-two or thirty-three Saxon acres, it is impossible to say, but I have shown that the difference could not be very great. Something may be alleged in favour of each of these numbers; but on the whole the larger one of thirty-three acres seems to me the most probable. A valuable entry of the year 967 may help us to some clearer conclusion[179]. In this document Bishop Oswald states himself to have made a grant of seó þridde hind at Dydinccotan, ðæt is, se þridde æcer,—the third _hind_ at Didcot, that is, the third acre. It is certain that at some very early period the word _hund_ denoted _ten_, whence we explain its occurrence in such numerals as hundseofontig, hundeahtatig, etc. The word _hind_ then, I derive from this hund, and render by _tenth_, and the grant seems to have conveyed the third _tenth_, which can only be said of a quantity containing three times ten units of some description or other. But this third tenth is further described as being every third acre, that is, a third of the whole land; and ten units make up this third: it seems therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the acre was the unit in question, that ten such acres constituted the hind, and that the hind itself was the third part of the hide. When we consider that thirty acres are exactly three times an area of 40 × 40 square rods, there appears a probability that the measure was calculated upon a threefold course of cultivation, similar to that in use upon the continent of Europe; this consisted of a rotation of winter corn, summer corn, and fallow, and to each a block or _telga_ of ten large or forty small acres (roods) was allotted. Thirty acres were thus devoted to cultivation; but where was the homestall? Probably not upon the thirty acres themselves, which we cannot suppose to have been generally enclosed and sundered, but to have lain undivided, as far as external marks were concerned, _in the general arable of the community_. The village containing the homesteads of the markers, probably lay at a little distance from the fields[180], and I do not think we shall be giving too much when we allow three acres, over and above the thirty, for farm buildings,