In the Roll of Battel Abbey (tenth and eleventh centuries) the perch is 16 feet; the acre is 40 perches long and 4 broad and pays a penny a year; 3 shillings for the virgate or wist, the price of which was about 20 shillings. In this case 8 virgates made a hide, but this ‘eighth’ is exceptional, for the term ‘virgate’ brought a fourth sense to the virga = yard series of words, giving rise to the term yard-land as a quarter of the plough-land or hide. As the vergée in France (sometimes ambiguously called verge, as it has been seen that Recorde spoke of ‘a rodde of lande which some call a roode’) and the rood in England were a quarter-acre, and as this quarter-acre was sometimes called a ‘yard of land,’ so virga-verge-yard acquired the general sense of ‘quarter’—either of an acre or of a ploughland or carucate. Thus in ‘Quant une homme est feffe dune verge de terre et dun autre de un carue du terre’ (Statute of Wards, 1300), the term ‘verge de terre’ means not a rod, a verge, but a yardland or virgate.
‘Farthing’ or ‘ferling’ as a quarter was used in the same double sense: a quarter-acre or a quarter-hide, indeed, as will presently be seen, a quarter-virgate.
ACREME.—This old law-term for 10 acres of land points to a tradition that our original unit of land-measurement was a rood or furlong square, that is 40 × 40 rods: it was called a Ferlingata or Ferdelh.
A document temp. Edw. II describes the virgate (of which 4 made a hide; 5 hides being a knight’s fee) as of 4 (square) furlongs, each of 10 acres.
Decem acræ faciunt ferlingatam; quatuor ferlingatæ faciunt virgatam, et quatuor virgatæ faciunt hidam; quinque hidæ faciunt feodum militis.
So it appears conclusive (1) that the hide was 16 square furlongs, a quarter of a square mile = the quarter section of America; (2) that the acre was originally a slice of land off the square furlong, a rood, or furlong in length, a tenth of this in breadth.
FURLONG AND FERLING.—The square furlong is the same as the Acreme = 10 acres. The square furlong or furrow-long tends to become confused with ferling, G. _vierling_, with fardel, G. _viertel_, with farthendale, Du. _vierendeel_, all meaning a fourth. This confusion arises from the square furlong, similar in sound to ferling, being approximately the fourth, or farthing, of the virgate or yardland, itself Ferlingus terræ, a fourth of the hide or ploughland. So a ferling may be a fourth of an acre, or of a virgate, or of a hide. Similarly it may be, as farthendale or farendel, a quarter-bushel.