Let us take a Kentish survey, the Black Book of St. Augustine's, Canterbury, for instance: it describes the peasant holdings in a way which differs entirely from other surveys. It begins by stating what duties lie on each _sulung_, that is, on the Kentish ploughland corresponding to the hide of feudal England. No regular sub-divisions corresponding to the virgates and bovates are mentioned, and the reckoning starts not from separate tenements, but from their combination into sulungs[499]. Then follow descriptions of the single sulungs, and it turns out that every one of them consists of a very great number of component parts, because the progeny of the original holders has clustered on them, and parcelled them up in very complicated combinations[500]. The portions are sometimes so small, that an independent cultivation of them would have been quite impossible. In order to understand the description it must be borne in mind that the fact of the tenement being owned by several different persons in definite but undivided shares did not preclude farming in common; while on the other hand, in judging of the usual feudal arrangement of holdings we must remember that the artificial unity and indivisibility of the tenement may be a mere screen behind which there exists a complex mass of rights sanctioned by morality and custom though not by law. The surveys of the Kentish possessions of Battle Abbey are drawn up on the same principle as those of St. Augustine's; the only difference is, that the individual portions are collected not in sulungs, but in yokes (_juga_)[501]. And so we have in England two systems of dividing the land of the peasant, of regulating its descent and its duties. In one case the tenant-right is connected with rigid holdings descending to a single heir; in another the tenements get broken up, and the heirs club together in order to meet the demands of the manorial administration. The contrast is sharp and curious enough. How is one to explain, that in conditions which were more or less identical, the land was sometimes partitioned and sometimes kept together, the people were dispersed in some instances and kept together in others? [Connecting links between the two systems.]