of an acre, in one place, another strip not adjacent to it, but
somewhere else in the fields, still another somewhere else, and so on
for his whole holding, while the neighbor whose house was next to his
in the village would have pieces of land similarly scattered through
the fields, and in many cases probably have them adjacent to his. The
result was that the various acres or other parts of any one man's
holding were mingled apparently inextricably with those of other men,
customary familiarity only distinguishing which pieces belonged to
each villager.

In some manors there was total irregularity as to the number of acres
in the occupation of any one man; in others there was a striking
regularity. The typical holding, the group of scattered acres
cultivated by one man or held by some two or three in common, was
known as a "virgate," or by some equivalent term, and although of no
universal equality, was more frequently of thirty acres than of any
other number. Usually one finds on a given manor that ten or fifteen
of the villagers have each a virgate of a given number of acres,
several more have each a half virgate or a quarter. Occasionally, on
the other hand, each of them has a different number of acres. In
almost all cases, however, the agricultural holdings of the villagers
were relatively small. For instance, on a certain manor in Norfolk
there were thirty-six holdings, twenty of them below ten acres, eight
between ten and twenty, six between twenty and thirty, and two between
thirty and forty. On another, in Essex, there were nine holdings of
five acres each, two of six, twelve of ten, three of twelve, one of
eighteen, four of twenty, one of forty, and one of fifty. Sometimes
larger holdings in the hands of individual tenants are to be found,
rising to one hundred acres or more. Still these were quite
exceptional and the mass of the villagers had very small groups of
acres in their possession.

It is to be noted next that a large proportion of the cultivated
strips were not held in virgates or otherwise by the villagers at all,
but were in the direct possession and cultivation of the lord of the
manor. This land held directly by the lord of the manor and cultivated
for him was called the "demesne," and frequently included one-half or
even a larger proportion of all the land of the vill. Much of the
meadow and pasture land, and frequently all of the woods, was included
in the demesne. Some of the demesne land w