Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/248

 make a ploughland, while in a two-course system eight score acres make a ploughland. We have had great difficulty in squaring this with the indubitable fact that it was common to reckon but six score acres to the ploughland. Now, when we turn to Walter of Henley we find that though he estimates the ploughland at nine score or eight score acres awrding as the one or the other of the two well-known courses of tillage is adopted, he betrays a suspicion, or more than a suspicion, that this computation will generally be regarded as extravagant. ' Acune gent dirrunt ke la charue ne put pas sustenir par an viijxx acres ne ixxx acres. E io vos mustray ke si put.' He is not stating common doctrine; he is an advanced agriculturist with a theory. And then an interesting note or gloss explains how whether you plough 180 acres under a three-course system or 160 acres under a two-course system your plough will really 'go' 240 acres in the year. Dr. Cunningham works out the sum thus: 'If the land was laid out in two fields of 80 acres each, there would be 40 acres to plough before the wheat was sown, 40 more before the barley was sown, and 80 to be ploughed twice over in June, when the stubble of the second field was broken up and it was left fallow, i.e. 40 + 40 + (80 x 2) = 240. If the three-field system was used, there would be 60 res to plough before the wheat sowing, 60 acres to plough before the barley sowing, and 60 acres to plough twice over when the stubble was broken up in June, i.e. 60 + 60 + (60 x 2) = 240.' In either case the plough 'goes' 240 acres in the year.

One small mistake on the part of the editors seems just worth mention. I think that they have underrated the antiquity of two out of the twenty-one mauscripts in which they have unearthed Walter of Henley's 'ditee.' One of these two is our Cambridge MS., Dd. vii., 6 this is the Longueville MS., which should be famous among legal antiquarians since it was thence that Mr. F. M. Nichols gathered many of those glosses which give to his beautiful edition of Britton much of its value. He ascribed it to the first years of Edward II., and I have good reason for knowing that Mr. Henry Bro, dshaw, whose word on such a point is like to be final, was of the same opinion. (See Nichols's Britton, vol. i., pp. xlix., lxi.) The other MS. also is one not unknown in legal history, Dd. vii., 14, for it was thence that Mr. A. J. Hotwood recovered some of the buried Year Books of Edward I.; he has fully described it in Year Books 20-21 Edward I. (Rolls Series), p. xi. More about such points as these would be out of pize in an economic journal, and they have already been notcd by the author of an anonymous article on Walter of Henley contained in the Dictionary of National Biography. Whether Miss Lamond has chosen for her text quite the best of all the manuscripts I cannot pretend to say, but I know no reason for doubting that the Luffield codex deserved the honour that she has paid to it.