Matt Tomkins kindly provided the following information which he is happy for me to pass on to this list. I found it fascinating and I hope that you will too. Garth "Everything Ian Hancock says makes sense to me, though I've never come across wands before as a measure of meadow (this sort of thing is exactly my speciality - I gave a paper at the Agricultural History Society's annual conference last year on the 15th and 16th century agricultural organisation of the landscape in the Buckinghamshire village I'm studying - but I know less about northern England than the south). However I'm sure wand was just the local dialect term for the more internationally recognised 'rod, pole or perch' (they all mean the same thing, etymologically - a long thin piece of wood). It is believed that they were originally the poles used to drive oxen - long enough to tap an ox to get its attention without having to run up to it. Because medieval peasants measured land using these poles these terms have a double meaning - they are both a measure of length and of area. A rod/pole/perch is a quarter of an acre, but I believe when used as a measure of meadow it was being used as a measure of length, not area. It meant a strip of meadow one rod/pole/perch in width but as long as the meadow was deep, so the actual area was variable. Many meadows in open fields - and your one was in a Wilberfosse field - were ribbons of flood plain along the edge of a stream running between the arable furlongs, and each dole (ie share - called a dale up north, I gather) was a strip running down from the edge of the meadow to the stream, one rod/pole/perch in width but as long as the floodplain was wide. Rods/poles/perches varied in length according to where you were. The statutory r/p/p (used in all modern measurements) is sixteen and a half feet, but many manors and townships used r/p/ps of 16, 18, 20, 22 or even 24 feet. These could change the size of the local acre considerably - a 20 foot r/p/p produced an acre one and a half times the size of the statutory one; an acre measured with a 24 foot pole was 2.12 times as big. Woodland was often measured with a longer r/p/p than other land in same place. Rods/pole/perches were particularly likely to be odd lengths in Yorkshire; someone who researched it found that up there they varied from 17.5 to 24 feet, but 18 and 20 feet were the most common. It is surprising how many features of the modern landscape were determined by these measurements. If you walk down many village high streets, and even those in the older towns, you can often see that all the house plots or shops have the same frontage, or are multiples of the same basic frontage (where two or three plots have been combined). These basic frontages will usually be the local rod/pole/perch wide, laid out right back in the middle ages. It is also said that some churches were built in multiples of the local r/p/p - for example the chancel may be exactly one local r/p/p wide. I have also read of churches where the local r/p/p was carved in the side of the church, as a kind of master proof against which everyone's measurements could be checked."