A description of some of the ancient measurements referred to in the Tithe Awards of 1840

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The acre is 4,840 square yards (or 4046.873 square metre ) and was the area that a medieval ploughman with a team of eight oxen was required to till in a day. There was some variation in this measurement across Britain. In England the acre was 4,840 square yards whilst in Scotland it was 6,150 square yards and in Ireland it rose to 7,840 square yards. The acre in medieval England was a furlong in length and a chain wide (a chain was twenty-two yards - cricketers will quickly recognise this figure ). The variations may have been due to the quality of the soil since some regions recognised the amount of land a man would need to feed his family for a year, which in some areas might be equivalent to 120 modern acres, but in others it might be only one quarter of this. A statute or Saxon acre is equal to a good-sized football pitch. For Village Intro

The ploughman handled the plough while his boy controlled the oxen using a stick or ‘rod’, which had to be long enough to reach all the oxen (medieval ploughing was done with oxen, up to 4 pairs at a time). To reach his leading pair, the rod had to be sixteen and a half feet long or five and a half yards. This length enabled the ploughman to quickly calculate how much land had been ploughed of the width of the acre, such as 4 poles or rods to the chain. The perch was used in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), the pole since the 16C, and the rod since 1450. In the 16th century the lawful rod was decreed to be the combined length of the left feet of 16 men as they left church on a Sunday morning. In our time, a perch is roughly equivalent to the area marked out in a supermarket car park for two cars.