nook

In northern England and Scotland, 13th – 19th centuries, a unit of land area, = ¼ of a yardland.

Noy, writing in 1634, says “two Nookes make halfe a yard of land.” Hazlitt² quotes Noy as saying “four nooks make a yard-land,” perhaps referring to a later edition.

Halliwell-Phillipps³, writing in the mid-19th century, agrees that a nook is ¼ of a yardland, and adds that it varies from 15 – 40 acres.

1. R. Noy.
Complete Lawyer.
London, 1634.

Page 57.

R. Noy.
The Compleat Lawyer, or a Treatise Concerning Tenures and Estates.
1651.

2. W. Carew Hazlitt.
Tenures of Land and Customs of Manors.
London, 1874.

Page 434.

3. James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps.
Dictionary of archaic and provincial words, obsolete phrases, proverbs, and ancient customs from the fourteenth century. 11th edition.
London, Reeves and Turner, 1889.

sources

Sutton-Colfield, County of Warwick

...

Item, illi qui tenuerunt dimidiam virgatam terræ, vel nocatam terræ, vel cotagium de bondagii tenura, solebant esse bedellum manerii et decennarium.

Also, those who held half a yard-land, or a nook* of land, or a cottage of bondage-tenure, were used to be beadle of the manor, and decenary.

*Nocatam terræ. A nook of land. A. Noy, in his Complete Lawyer, p. 57, says two fardels of land make a nook, and four nooks make a yard-land. Blount's Law Dict. tit. Fardel.

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 501-502.