Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 4.djvu/388

 432 NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. iv. NOV. 25, -99. I seldom took the breadth as well-as the length, my object having been to see whether the length of bay corresponded to the space required by a yoke of four oxen and to a perch. But it appears from an entry in Boldon Buke' that the houses which villeins were accustomed to build in the twelfth cen- tury were 15 ft. in breadth.* In the summer of the present year I measured the fork-built bays in the farm buildings adjoining Offerton Hall, near Hathersage, built in 1658, and found them 15 ft. in length and 16 ft. in breadth, giving the superficial area of each bay as 240ft. And as the houses mentioned in ' Boldon Buke' were 40 ft. in length, cor- responding to a bovate. we know that they consisted of two and a half bays, each entire bay being 16 ft. in length. Each of these bays, therefore, like those at Offerton, con- tained a superficial area of 240 ft. If we refer to the table which I have just given we shall see that the bay corresponds to the shilling. As there are 240 square feet in a bay, and as in the table a bay corre- sponds to a shilling, we get the following result:— 1. 20 square feet of a bay correspond to a penny. 2. 12 by 20, or 240 square feet, correspond to a shilling. 3. 20 by 240, or 4,800 square feet, corre- spond to a pound. Therefore,— 1. The twelfth part of a bay, or 20 square feet, corresponds to a penny. 2. The bay (=twelve pence) corresponds to a shilling. 3. Twenty bays correspond to a pound. As, therefore, the bay corresponds to six acres as well as to a shilling, it follows that the acre corresponds to two pence, and that the hide corresponds to a pound. Hence the expression liberate, terrae, The Anglo-Saxons had a monetary unit of thirty pence, called mancus. It will be seen on reference to my table that this corre- sponds to a bovate of fifteen acres, and also to a house of two and a half bays. After I had worked out these quantities, and had constructed the foregoing table, I came on a passage in Saxo Grammaticus in which bays and payments in money are associated in a very remarkable way. In relating, about the end of the twelfth cen- tury, how a king called Godricus imposed an unusual tax on the Frisians, the author says: " Primum itaque ducentorum quadragititapedum longitudinem haoentia sedificii structure disponitur, bis senis distincta spatiis, quorum quodlibet vice- norum pedum intercapedine tenderetur. predict® quantitatis summam totalis spatii dispendio red- A building 240 ft. long was erected in twelve bays of 20 ft. each in length. At one end sat the receiver or tax collector; at the other end stood a brazen vessel, into which every Frisian had to throw a penny with such force that the receiver could hear it ring when it fell into the vessel. I am not quite sure of the sense of the words following "tenderetur," but I take them to mean that the bays of this building were 20ft. square. If that is the meaning, then the bay contained 400 square feet, and the whole building contained 4,800 square feet, or exactly the same quantity as that con- tained in the 20 bays which, according to my table, were associated with the English hide and pound. _ But whether I am right in my interpreta- tion of the concluding words of the passage quoted or not, one cannot fail to notice the numbers 12, 20, 240, for they remind us at once of the number of pence in a shilling, of shillings in a pound, and of pence in a pound. If Saxo's house, as I understand it, had consisted, like the hypothetical English hidal house given in my table, of twenty bays con- taining 240 square feet each, the resemblance in form would have been exact. As it is, though the shapes are different, both houses contain precisely the same number of super- ficial square feet. It is possible that Saxo's account contains a legendary element, and he may have mixed up the figures. At all events, the old Frisian laws mention this tax, which they call klip- schild, and say that the penny must be so big that it will resound through nine bays, instead of twelve bays as in Saxo's account. In a little book by Otto Lasiust a plan, drawn to scale, of a Frisian farmhouse, built in 1551, is given. The large building which contains the threshing-floor and the cattle- stalls consists of thirteen bays, the whole length of the building being a little more than 203ft. This would give the length of each bay as about 15 ft. 7£ in. Substantially, therefore, the bays of this Frisian building correspond in length to the bays of English rural buildings. The breadth of the bay is twice as much, and, in addition, the building contains aisles. • TJ *db' iT1";.?- 167! <iuoted from Jacob Grimm's J*f ohtaalterthumer,' 1854, p. 77. See also Richt- hofen, Fnesisehe Rechtsquellen ' xv. 42 t 'Das friesische Bauernhaus,' Strassburg, 1885,
 * Surtees Society edition, p. 4. And see p. 33.