IN NORTHUMBERLAND AND DURHAM.

251

15.71

ON BOTTOM OF EACH COVER,

Elizabethan Communion Cups, All Saints Church, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (see p. 254).

37

which are represented by two examples. Pre-Reformation patens are more numerous than chalices, some ninety altogether being known, of which almost a third are in Norfolk. The two north country examples are (see Plate XIV.) the rude paten at Heworth, county Durham, which is of 1514, and a similar example (see Plate XV.) formerly at Hamsterley in the same county, but now preserved in the Chapter Library at Durham, of the year 1519.

They are of the usual type found in the later Gothic period, showing a six-lobed depression, with a very rude representation of the Vernicle engraved in the centre of the plate. A large proportion of the patens remaining are of this fashion, and are of the thirty years between 1490 and 1520. With the accession of Edward VI. the whole fashion of church plate changed. The chalices were melted down or exchanged, under stringent visitation articles of the bishops, into plain communion cups of the strictest Protestant shape and character; but owing, no doubt, to the shortness of the reign there are fewer communion cups known of this period than chalices of the pre-Reformation type, few though there are even of these. Not a single example is to be seen in our present list. Come we then to the reign of queen Elizabeth for the first examples of vessels of the Protestant type to be found within the range of our present enquiry; and we are immediately struck by the extreme paucity of such pieces compared with what we might fairly have expected to find. The change from chalice to communion cup was made all over England with such rapidity that in the course of a few years, say, in the interval between 1558 and 1580, almost every church in every county and diocese from one end of England to the other was provided with vessels adapted for the new use, and everywhere examples of the cups so provided are commonly found at the present day-everywhere but in the extreme north it must now be said-for whereas they are broadcast over the south of England and Midland counties, strange to say only seven individual examples of undoubtedly Elizabethan cups and plates have been brought to light in the whole county of Northumberland, and hardly more, comparatively speaking, in Durham, which can, however, show some seventeen specimens as will be seen by the list appended to this article. If we add to these the very few pieces which appear to be of sixteenth century fashion, but which,

150

THE ANCIENT FARMS OF NORTHUMBERLAND.

mensuration of this American square mile, the influence of the common field-furrow, and the gad, or rod, or pole, by which the common field acres were marked out can be traced in every corner of the plot. According to Canon Taylor,90 a furlong is the length of the longest furrow that could be conveniently ploughed before the oxen had to stop and rest; whilst the breadth of the acre depended on the number of furrows which formed the daily task of the villan and his oxen. Mr. Pell, in his learned but difficult paper on the Domesday Assessment, disputes this,91 and states that the furlong means not a furrow long, but rather a line 40 rods long, that this line 4 rods broad makes the acre, and that both the acre and the rod are merely convenient fractions of some larger area. However this may be, 8 of these furlongs lie on each side of the square mile shown on this plan. Quarter the area and you get the normal farm of 160 acres, quarter the farm and you get the 40 acres which we have seen to be the usual extent of the part cultivated or enclosed for corn and meadow hay; quarter that cultivated portion and you get the square furlong, or ferdell, which contained 10 normal acre strips, each acre strip being 40 rods long and 4 rods broad, in other words, a furlong in length and 4 rods in breadth, the area which, according to the ordinance of Edward I., constituted a legal acre. In fact this American square mile, divided into four farms of 160 acres each, is exactly similar in extent, dimensions, and divisions to the four carucates of arable land, containing in length 8 furlongs, and in breadth 8 furlongs, the gift of Algar, the knight, to the abbey of Croyland, which was confirmed to that abbey by that description by the charter of Wiglaf, king of the Mercians, in the year 833.93

There are two great differences between this modern Kansas farm and the ancient Northumbrian farms which we have been considering. Its homestead is isolated from those of its neighbours and its lands are cultivated in severalty. If, instead of being connected by the power of steam with other parts of the earth, from which it can obtain the supplies of those necessaries which are produced by different industries, its proprietor had had to depend for these on mutual exchange with 91 Ibid. p. 371.

90 Domesday Studies, vol. i. p. 60. 92 Decem acræ terræ faciunt secundum antiquam consuetudinem unam ferdellam. Spelman's Gloss. Title Virgata terræ.

93 Kemble's Anglo-Saxon Charters, vol. I., page 306. See also Ingulph. Bohn's edition, page 15.