<<Is anyone able to confirm or add to my understanding of the following item from a will written in 1570 please? 'I bequeath to my said sonnes as aforesaid two days mathe of meadow grounde' Am I right in thinking that this refers to a system of strip farming on a flood meadow where certain farmers own the right to take the first math ie the first cut of hay, measured not in acreage but in day's work. After the first cut then the land reverts to common grazing land until the first floods of winter. Was this sytem wide spread throughout Britain I wonder?>> Hello Barbara, The answer to all your questions is 'Yes'. Except that, unless this will comes from a parish with vast quantities of meadow, a day's mathe is unlikely to have been as much meadow as could be cut in a day, which would have been an unusually large share of most parish's resources. It may be some kind of areal measurement, perhaps specific to meadow (which was often had its own unique terminology) - in some areas a daywork or dayswork, notwithstanding its apparent etymology, was a mere fraction of an acre (a sixteenth? I can't remember). In questions of terminology it's always useful to mention the locality, as different regions used different terms. Where does this particular will come from? Matt Tompkins