Oxgang / Bovate
Modern equivalent
Approx. 15 acres = 60,703 square metres
The share of land attributed to a single ox within an eight-beast plough team, being one eighth of a carucate.
Medieval ploughing was a communal undertaking: few peasants owned a full team, so households pooled their beasts and divided the resulting land accordingly. A villager who contributed one ox to the team held one oxgang. The Latinised form, bovate, appears throughout Domesday and later manorial rolls, and the unit survives in northern English field names and property boundaries to this day.