Bovate

The Latin name for the oxgang, being an eighth of a carucate.

Bovata terrae, from bos, an ox. It is the word the clerks wrote when the ploughmen said oxgang, and it is the form that appears in Domesday Book and in the charters of the Danelaw counties.

The logic is the plough team. Eight oxen drew a heavy plough, and the land they could work in a year was a carucate of about a hundred and twenty acres. One ox’s share of that was a bovate: an eighth, or roughly fifteen acres.

Like every medieval land unit it measured capability rather than extent, so a bovate of heavy clay was a smaller piece of ground than a bovate of light soil. The acreages given here are the conventional reckoning, not a survey.