In the management of the meadow land communal features were much more
clearly brought out; the arable was not reallotted,[5] but the meadow
was, annually; while the woods and pastures, the right of using which
belonged to the householders of the village, were owned by the village
'community'. There may have been at the time of the English conquest
Roman 'villas' with slaves and _coloni_ cultivating the owners'
demesnes, which passed bodily to the new masters; but the former
theory seems true of the greater part of the country.

At first 'extensive' cultivation was practised; that is, every year a
fresh arable field was broken up and the one cultivated last year
abandoned, for a time at all events; but gradually 'intensive' culture
superseded this, probably not till after the English had conquered the
land, and the same field was cultivated year after year.[6] After the
various families or households had finished cutting the grass in their
allotted portions of meadow, and the corn on their strips of tillage,
both grass and stubble became common land and were thrown open for the
whole community to turn their stock upon.

The size of the strips of land in the arable fields varied, but was
generally an acre, in most places a furlong (furrow long) or 220 yards
in length, and 22 yards broad; or in other words, 40 rods of 5-1/2
yards in length and 4 in breadth. There was, however, little
uniformity in measurement before the Norman Conquest, the rod by which
the furlongs and acres were measured varying in length from 12 to 24
feet, so that one acre might be four times as large as another.[7] The
acre was, roughly speaking, the amount that a team could plough in a
day, and seems to have been from early times the unit of measuring the
area of land.[8] Of necessity the real acre and the ideal acre were
also different, for the reason that the former had to contend with the
inequalities of the earth's surface and varied much when no scientific
measurement was possible. As late as 1820 the acre was of many
different sizes in England. In Bedfordshire it was 2 roods, in Dorset
134 perches instead of 160, in Lincolnshire 5 roods, in Staffordshire
2-1/4 acres. To-day the Cheshire acre is 10,240 square yards. As,
however, an acre was and is a day's ploughing for a team, we may
assume that the most usual acre was the same area then as now. There
were also half-acre strips, but whatever the size the strips were
divided one from another by