🏰 Medieval Land Converter
Convert acres into the units of medieval English land — hides, virgates, and roods — to read Domesday-era estates and charters the way contemporaries measured them.
📜 Measure the Manor
Medieval land measurement
Medieval England measured land not in neat surveyed acres but in units of assessment and support. The hide — nominally 120 acres — stood for the land that could sustain one household; the virgate, a quarter of it, for a peasant family’s holding; and the rood, a quarter-acre, for a strip in the open field. This converter restates a modern acreage in those three units.
Because these were tax and productivity measures rather than fixed areas, the real acreage varied from shire to shire. The nominal equivalences here — 120 acres to the hide, 30 to the virgate, 4 roods to the acre — give a useful feel for the scale of a manor described in Domesday Book or a medieval charter.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
What is a hide?
The hide was the basic unit of land assessment in Anglo-Saxon and Norman England — nominally the amount of land needed to support one free household and its dependants. It was conventionally reckoned at 120 acres, though the real acreage varied by region and soil quality, since it measured productive capacity as much as area.
What are virgates and roods?
A virgate (or yardland) was a quarter of a hide, about 30 acres — a typical holding for a peasant family. A rood was a quarter of an acre, so there are four roods to the acre. Together, hide, virgate, and rood span the scale from a great estate down to a single strip of a field.
Were these units exact?
No. Medieval land units were assessment and tax measures, not surveyor's constants, so their acreage shifted with region, custom, and land quality. The figures this converter uses — 120 acres to the hide, 30 to the virgate, 4 roods to the acre — are the common nominal equivalences, useful for understanding documents like Domesday Book.
Why convert acres to medieval units?
It helps make sense of historical records. When a charter or the Domesday survey describes an estate in hides and virgates, converting a modern acreage into those units gives you an intuitive feel for how contemporaries measured and taxed the land — and how big a 'ten-hide manor' really was.