These last rules seem at first sight difficult of explanation: one does not see in what way the bringing in of strange cattle could damage the peasantry of the village, as nobody could drive more than a certain number of beasts to the common, and as the overburdening of it depended entirely on the excess of this number, and not on the origin of the beasts. And so one has to look to something else besides the apprehension that the common would get overburdened, in order to find a suitable explanation of the rule. An explanation is readily supplied by the notion that the use of the common was closely connected with the holding. Strange cattle had nothing to do with the holding, and were to be kept off from the land of the community; it is as representatives of a community whose territory has been invaded that the individual commoners have cause to complain. In fact, the common pasture, as well as the meadows, were thought of merely as a portion of the holding. The arrangements did not admit of the same certainty or rather of the same kind of determination as the division of the arable, but the main idea which regulated the latter was by no means cut short in its operation, if one may say so: it was not bound up with the exact measurement of arable acres. The holding was the necessary agricultural outfit of a peasant family, and of this outfit the means of feeding the cattle were quite as important a part as the means of raising crops. It is only inaccurately that we have been speaking of a virgate of 30 acres, and of a ploughland of 180 or 160. The true expression would be to speak of a virgate of 30 acres of arable and the corresponding rights to pasture and other common uses. And the records, when they want to give something like a full description, do not omit to mention the 'pertinencia,' the necessary adjuncts of the arable. The term is rather a vague one, quite in keeping with the rights which, though tangible enough, cannot be cut to so certain a pattern as in the case of arable[541]. And for this reason the laxer right had to conform to the stricter one, and came to be considered as appendant to it. [Common in special cases.]