Yoke (Jugum)

A quarter of a sulung, being the Kentish counterpart to the virgate, at roughly sixty acres.

The yoke stands to the sulung as the virgate stands to the hide: a quarter of the larger assessment, and about the size of a substantial peasant holding. It appears in Latin records as the jugum, from the word for a yoke of oxen, which places it in the same family of plough-derived units as the carucate and the oxgang. Kentish documents use yokes throughout the medieval period, and because gavelkind divided land equally among heirs rather than passing it whole, holdings in Kent fragmented into fractions of yokes across generations in a way that primogeniture elsewhere prevented. The result is a county whose land records look quite unlike those of its neighbours.