Such serious contradictions and incongruities lead us forcibly to the conclusion that we have a state of transition before us, an institution that is in some degree distorted and warped from its original shape. In this respect the manorial element comes strongly to the fore. The rough scale of holdings would be grossly against justice for purely communal purposes, but it is not only the occupation of land, but also the incidence of services that is regulated by it. People would not so much complain of holding five acres instead of thirty, if they had to work and to pay six times less in the first case. Again, a division of tenements fixed once and for all in spite of changes in the numbers and wants of the population, looks anything but convenient. At the same time the fixed scheme of the division offers a ready basis for computing rents and assessing labour services. And for the sake of the lord it was advisable to preserve outward unity even when the system was actually breaking up: for dealings with the manorial administration virgates remained undivided, even when they were no longer occupied as integral units. Although the holdings are undoubtedly made subservient to the wants of the manor, it would be going a great deal too far to suppose that they were formed with the primary object of meeting those wants. If we look closer into the structure we find that it is based on the relation between the plough-team and the arable, a relation which is more or less constant and explains the gradations and the mode of apportionment. The division of the land is no indefinite or capricious one, because the land has to be used in certain quantities, and smaller quantities or fractions would disarrange the natural connexion between the soil and the forces that make it productive. The society of those days appears as an agricultural mass consisting not of individual persons or natural families, but of groups possessed of the implements for tilling the land. Its unit of reckoning is not the man, but the plough-beast. As the model plough-team happens to be a very large one, the large unit of the hide is adopted. Lesser quantities may be formed also, but still they correspond to aliquot parts of the full team of eight oxen. Thus the possible gradations are not so many or so gentle as in our own time, but are in the main the half plough-land, the virgate, and the oxgang. What else there is can be only regarded as subsidiary to the main arrangement: the cotters and crofters are not tenants in the fields, but gardeners, labourers, craftsmen, herdsmen, and the like. If the country had not been mainly cultivated as ploughland, but had borne vines or olives or crops that required no cumbersome implements, but intense and individualistic labour, one may readily believe that the holdings would have been more compact, and also more irregular.