Quarterland
Modern equivalent
Commonly approx. 90 acres; range 50–180 acres
The working landholding of the Isle of Man, four of which typically made up a treen.
If the treen was the unit the Lord taxed, the quarterland was the unit a family farmed. By the early sixteenth century it was the standard landholding on the island, four of them making up a treen, and Woods counted 752 of them in 1864.
The spread is wide. Most run between fifty and a hundred and eighty acres, with something around ninety being typical, and the variation is the same variation that affects the treen: what mattered was the share of the whole, not the number of acres in it.
The name is not confined to the island. The quarterland appears across the western and northern Highlands and Islands of Scotland, where it is reckoned as eight fourpennylands, and it survives in place names there. That shared vocabulary is a reminder that the Irish Sea was a road rather than a boundary, and that Manx and Hebridean land organisation descend from the same Norse-Gaelic arrangement.