AN ACRE IS THE SIZE of field a medieval ploughman, with a team of eight oxen, was able to plough in a day. His field was 220 yards long – a ‘furrowlong’, which became abbreviated to a ‘furlong’. This was the distance a team of oxen could till before they needed a rest.
The ploughman would use a rod to goad his team, and in order to reach the front oxen the rod had to be sixteen and a half feet long. The ‘rod, pole or perch’ used to be taught in schools as a standard pre-decimal unit of measurement.
The standard width of a field was four rods – a day’s worth of ploughing – a measurement unit known as a ‘chain’. If you do the maths you’ll see that four times sixteen and a half is sixty-six feet, which is twenty-two yards.
Medieval England was a surprisingly egalitarian place, at least as far as farming went. To make sure everyone had an equal crack at getting a good piece of land, no farmer was allowed to have several acres next to each other. So each plot of one acre (a furlong long, a chain wide) was divided from its neighbour by a strip of unploughed land. Over time, the action of the oxen meant that these strips of land got pushed up slightly higher than the surrounding fields.
Crop rotation meant that every four years, each acre was left fallow and usually grassed over. The game of cricket was played across the width of these fallow fields, with wickets placed at each end – exactly one chain, or twenty-two yards, apart.
