I may here give a fifteenth-century record of English linear measures.[17]
It is to mete that iij Early Cornys in the myddis of the Ere makyth one ynche, And xij enchis makyth a foote
And sixteyne foote and a halfe makyth a perche; And in sum cuntre a perche ys xviij foote.
Fourty perchys in lengyth makyth a Rode of Lande; put iiij therto in brede, and that makyth an Acre.
And v yerdis makyth an hyde of lande, which ys lxx Acrys.
And viij hydis makyth a knyghtis fee, which is vC.lx Acrys of lande.
I insert this note (sent to the _Academy_ in August 1896 by the late Mr. F. J. Furnivall, who found it in a Bodleian MS.) because it happened to direct my attention to our measures, and was thus the seed whence this book has sprung. The yardland and hide are here of less than half the usual extent.
ROD.—Pole, Perch, Goad, Lug, L. _pertica_, Fr. _perche_, _verge_, G. _ruthe_, Du. _roede_.
The equivalent words, L. _virga_, Fr. _verge_, A.S. _geard_, Eng. ‘yard,’ originally any long straight twig or rod, came to mean: (1) a yard or ell-measure, (2) a rod measure of land, lineal or superficial. The French verge is still thus used in Normandy and the Channel Islands. Our ‘yard’ acquired this extended sense, and others still more extended. In Cornwall 2 staves (of 9 feet) make a yard of land. In Somerset the lineal rod is the ‘land-yard,’ and the yard of land is a square rod. Thus the rood is ‘forty yard o’ ground’ and the acre is ‘eight score yard o’ ground.’
ROOD.—A differentiated form of ‘rod’ applied in a lineal sense to 40 rods, and also to the area of a quarter-acre 40 × 1 rods.
In Normandy and the Channel Islands our rod and rood are verge and vergée, and as the first sense of verge was ‘yard’ so vergée became in English a ‘yard of lande.’ So here we have a third sense of the triple-form word virga-verge-yard.
‘A rodde of land which some call a roode, some a yarde lande, and some a farthendale’ (Recorde, 1542).
The latter term, meaning a ‘fourth part,’ as in the farthing to the penny, may also have referred to the rood as being a farthing-land in rental. It appears as L. _furendellus_, _farundel_, _ferling_.
The rood was also divided into 4 day’s-work, each of 10 square rods.
ACRE.—As the rood was sometimes lineal, though usually superficial, so also the ‘acre’ was sometimes a rough lineal measure, generally an acre-breadth, or 4 rods (a cricket-pitch). But it might also be an acre-length = a rood length. The verse in 1 Samuel xiv.: ‘And that first slaughter which Jonathan and his armour bearer made was about twenty men within as it were an half-acre of land which a yoke of oxen might plow,’ is in Coverdale’s version (1535) ‘within the length of halve an aker of londe,’ that is, in a length of 20 rods. In French ‘arpent’ was likewise used for a French acre-length, reckoned, not of the official square arpent, but of the furrow-long arpent, nearly a furlong. Thus in the Chanson de Roland