The River Running
"Immigrants: we get the job done" -- Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton
Land Measurements in the Palatinate in the Early 19th Century
Legal notices for land auctions in the 1820s and 1830s show two groups of units in use for measuring land: traditional units and metric ones.
The basic traditional unit for measuring larger pieces of land was the Morgen. The word Morgen also means "morning." Was a Morgen originally meant to be the amount of land that could be ploughed (sown? harvested?) in one morning?
A Viertel is a quarter of a Morgen. The word Viertel also means "quarter" in the general sense.
Square Ruthen were used to measure smaller pieces of land. What's confusing is that the specification "square" is left out, so it looks as if land area is being measured in Ruthen, when actually the Ruthe was a unit of length. Only the context tells the reader that what's actually meant are square Ruthen.
There were 160 square Ruthen to a Morgen, 40 square Ruthen to a Viertel. (This can be compared to traditional English land measurement units, in which 160 square rods make an acre.)
The same issue of the implicit "square" applies to metric measurements. The basic metric unit for measuring larger piece of land was the Are (German plural: Aren), 1/100th of a hectare. The unit for measuring smaller pieces ought to be the Centiare, 1/100th of an Are, but I've only seen this used occasionally. More commonly the unit used is the Meter, meaning in fact the square meter, where one square meter equals one centiare.
The standard conversion between traditional and metric units is that one Morgen equals 32 Aren and thus five square Ruthen equal one Are. However, this can not be relied on. Conversion factors were often non-uniform, even within the same document.
For example, volume 11 of the Intelligenzblatt des Rheinkreises includes a legal notice posted 29 Mar 1828 involving Einöderweisenhof, a farm near Humerich Berg and Bottenbach, 76 km southwest of Freinsheim on the French border. The farm includes the following pieces of land:
For the arable land, one Morgan equals 33.12 Aren. For the meadow land, one Morgen equals 25.71 Aren. For the wooded land, one Morgen equals 27.27 Aren. Are the conversions different because a Morgen meant different things when applied to different types of land? Or was the person who did the conversions just really bad at arithmethic?
This notice is followed by another one, also dated 29 Mar 1828, concerning land held by Jacob Engel and Christine Schwind in Dackenheim:
Assuming that the 2 3/4 refers to 2.75 Ruthen, for the arable land one Morgen equals 29.33 Aren and one Aren equals 5.45 Ruthen. But for the vineyard, one Morgen equals 28 Aren. Different conversions for different types of land? Or arithmetic error?