arable land, meadow, pasture, and woods. Where the lands
were extensive there might perhaps be a small group of houses forming
a separate hamlet at some distance from the village, and occasionally
a detached mill, grange, or other building. Its characteristic
appearance, however, must have been that of a close group of buildings
surrounded by an extensive tract of open land.

[Illustration: Thirteenth Century Manor House, Boothby Pagnell,
Lincolnshire. (Turner, _Domestic Architecture in England_.)]

*9. The Vill as an Agricultural System.*--The support of the vill was in
its agriculture. The plan by which the lands of the whole group of
cultivators lay together in a large tract surrounding the village is
spoken of as the "open field" system. The arable portions of this were
ploughed in pieces equalling approximately acres, half-acres, or
quarter-acres.

[Illustration: Village with Open Fields, Noertershausen, near Coblentz.
Germany. (From a photograph taken in 1894.)]

The mediaeval English acre was a long narrow strip forty rods in length
and four rods in width, a half-acre or quarter-acre being of the same
length, but of two rods or one rod in width. The rod was of different
lengths in different parts of the country, depending on local custom,
but the most common length was that prescribed by statute, that is to
say, sixteen and a half feet. The length of the acre, forty rods, has
given rise to one of the familiar units of length, the furlong, that
is, a "furrow-long," or the length of a furrow. A rood is a piece of
land one rod wide and forty rods long, that is, the fourth of an acre.
A series of such strips were ploughed up successively, being separated
from each other either by leaving the width of a furrow or two
unploughed, or by marking the division with stones, or perhaps by
simply throwing the first furrow of the next strip in the opposite
direction when it was ploughed. When an unploughed border was left
covered with grass or stones, it was called a "balk." A number of such
acres or fractions of acres with their slight dividing ridges thus lay
alongside of one another in a group, the number being defined by the
configuration of the ground, by a traditional division among a given
number of tenants, or by some other cause. Other groups of strips lay
at right angles or inclined to these, so that the whole arable land of
the village when ploughed or under cultivation had, like many French,
German, or Swiss