Sulung

The Kentish unit of land assessment, reckoned at roughly two hides, and divided into four yokes.

Kent did things its own way, and the sulung is the proof. Where the rest of southern England was assessed in hides and the Danelaw in carucates, Kent used a unit of its own that was roughly twice the size of a hide, and Domesday records the county accordingly. The name derives from the Old English sulh, a plough, so like the carucate it is reckoned from what a plough team could work rather than from what a household needed. Kent retained a good deal of distinctive law after the Conquest, most famously gavelkind, under which land was divided equally among sons rather than passing whole to the eldest. The sulung belongs to that same pattern of local exception, and it gives these islands a fourth system of land assessment alongside the English hide, the Danelaw carucate and the Welsh erw.