Vergée

The traditional land measure of Jersey and Guernsey, descended from Norman French practice and still in current use.

Every other historical land unit in this archive is dead. The vergée is not: Jersey property is still advertised and registered in vergées, and an islander buying a field today will be quoted in them. The reason is constitutional. The Channel Islands were never part of the Kingdom of England but Crown dependencies descended from the Duchy of Normandy, so they kept Norman customary law and the measures that came with it while England reformed its own. The islands do not agree with each other either: a Jersey vergée is roughly a tenth larger than a Guernsey one, because each is built on its own local perch. Forty perches make a vergée in both, but the perches differ. Nothing in the archipelago has ever been quite uniform, which is rather the point of an archipelago.