Gif mon geþingað gyrde landes oþþe mære to ræde-gafole ⁊ geereð, gif se hlaford him wile þ land aræran to weorce ⁊ to gafole, ne þearf he him onfon gif he him nan botl ne selð. ⁊ þolie þara æcra. (67) If a man agrees for a yardland or more to gafol and ploughs it, if the lord wants to raise the land _to work and to gafol_, he need not take it upon him if he [the lord] does not give him a _botl_, and let him give up (?) the acres. Gif mon gesiðcundne monnan adrife, fordrife þy _botle, næs þære setene_. (68) If a man drive off a gesithcundman, let him be driven from the _botl_, not the _setene_. [Sidenote: The yardland was the usual holding of the _gebur_, with a pair of oxen.] Working from the known to the unknown, in a former volume we found that under the open-field system of husbandry the hide at the time of the Domesday survey and earlier was generally held to contain four virgates or yardlands, and that so far as arable land was concerned each yardland was a bundle, so to speak, of about thirty scattered strips or acres. Tracing the yardland further back, the interesting point was gained from the tenth-century document known as the ‘Rectitudines &c.,’ that ‘in some regions’ the custom in allotting a yardland to a tenant called a ‘_gebur_’ was to give him with his yardland to _land-setene_ seven acres already sown and a _pair of oxen_, and certain other things theoretically by way of loan, so that on the gebur’s death everything returned to the lord, though in practice the holding and land-setene were no doubt continued to his successor on payment of a ‘relief.’ And this system of settling gafol-geldas and geburs, or whatever such tenants might be locally called, on yardlands seems to be that alluded to in the Dooms of Ine. The clauses incidentally referring to gafol-geldas, geburs, and yardlands thus become intelligible and important in the light of the later evidence. This I endeavoured to show in a former volume.[268] [Sidenote: The hide of four yardlands agricultural.] Now, this system of settling tenants on yardlands by allotting to each a pair of oxen, so that four of them should be able to combine in forming the common plough-team of the hide, obviously belongs to a time when agriculture had become sufficiently important for the unit of occupation and so of gafol-paying and services to be generally agricultural rather than pastoral. But while the _hide_ thus seems to have been connected in the Dooms of Ine mainly with arable farming, it does not follow that it always had been so everywhere. The word ‘hide’ may have originally been applied to a holding devoted more to the grazing of cattle than the growing of corn.