Intack

Manx land taken into cultivation from the common, sitting outside the treen system entirely.

Intack is what happens when a fixed system of land division meets a growing population. The treens and quarterlands were already settled when the term first appears, around 1520, and intack is the land taken in beyond them — enclosed from the common and brought into cultivation.

Its position on the map tells the story. Intack generally sits above the six hundred foot contour and runs up to seven hundred and fifty or a thousand feet: the ground nobody had wanted while better land was available. In the Curragh in the north it is mostly damp meadow instead. Rent ran from fourpence to sixpence an acre depending on fertility, well below the rates on established holdings.

Some parcels were attached to an existing quarterland and known as Intacks of Ease, which is a precise piece of terminology — land that eased a holding which had become too small for the household working it.