In that part of Britain called the Danelaw, a unit of land area, the amount of land that could be kept in cultivation by a single plow, = 8 bovates. Also called a carucata. Usually translated as plough-land, but often used as a synonym for the hide.
Like the hide, the carucate was not a unit of land area, but a unit of obligation for military service and taxes. Hollister hypothesizes on good evidence that, "the select-fyrd duty was assessed in the Danelaw at the standard rate of one man from a particular number of carucates, a number which was generally known at the time but is unknown to us.1" Round2 proposes that the number is 6.
In 1194, set at 100 acres.
1. C. Warren Hollister.
Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
Page 50.
2.
John Horace Round.
Feudal England.
London, 1895.
Page 69.
1
Rex Comiti W. salutem. Praecipio tibi quod sine dilatione teneas plenum rectum N. de decem carucatis terrae in Middleton...
The King to Earl W. greeting. I command thee that without delay thou shouldest do full right to N. concerning ten plough-lands in Middleton..."
Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Anglie
Ranulf de Glanville (1130-1190), Book 12, chapter 3.
as quoted and translated in
Kenelm Edward Digby and William Montagu Harrison.
An Introduction to the History of the Law of Real Property. (5th edition)
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897.
Pages 74 and 75.
2
Nicholas le Archer tenet dias carucatas terr� in villa de Stoke, in com. Glouc. per serjantiam inveniendi domino Rego in exercitu Walli�, unum himinem, cum arcu et sagittis, sumptibus suis propriis, per xl dies.
Pla. Cor. 15 Edw. I. Gloc. Blount, 57.
Nicholas le Archer holds two carucates of land in the town of Stoke, in the county of Gloucester, by the serjeanty of finding for our lord the King in his army in Wales, a man with a bow and arrows, at his own costs, for forty days.
Thomas Blount. Rev and corrected by Josiah Beckwith. Additions by Hercules Malebysse Beckwith.
Fragmenta Antiquitatis: or, Ancient Tenures of Land …
London: Printed by S. Brooke, Paternoster-Row, for Messrs Butterworth and Son, etc.,
1815.
Page 129.
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