Virgates to Square Meters (virgate to m²)
1 virgate equals 121,405.6927 square meters (rounded).
How to convert virgates to square meters
To convert virgates to square meters, multiply the number of virgates by 121,405.6927. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply square meters by 0.000008236846049 (rounded).
square meters = virgates × 121,405.6927
Example: 10 virgates = 1,214,056.927 square meters.
Approximate value. Standards for the virgate varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.
About these units
Virgate (virgate)
About 30 acres, a quarter of a hide. The typical peasant holding in medieval England; notionally 30 acres but seldom exactly.
Medieval peasants in much of England held land by the yardland, from the Old English gyrd landes. After yard came to mean three feet, scholars coined the Latin-style term virgate to keep the two senses apart. It was the plot that a team of two oxen could plough in a year.
As a fraction of the hide it was usually a quarter, notionally but seldom exactly 30 acres, so it was chiefly a tax assessment and not a surveyed area. In the Danelaw it equalled two oxgangs, and four virgates made a carucate. Some regions split it further into four nooks, with a nook sometimes divided again into a farundel.
The figure used here is 30 acres, about 121,400 square meters, a convenient benchmark. Real holdings ranged widely, and a virgate-holder was a typical villager, farming a share of the open fields in strips.
1 virgate = 121,405.6927 square meters (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Virgate; Wikipedia: Hide (unit); Domesday Book Online: Glossary
Square Meter (m²)
The SI unit of area: a square one meter on each side. Used for floor areas and property sizes in most of the world.
Squaring the meter was built into the metric system from the start. The French law of 18 Germinal, Year III (7 April 1795) defined the are, the land unit that gave the hectare its name, as exactly 100 square meters, so the square meter was already the foundation of metric land measure. Nobody is credited with inventing it as a separate unit. It is simply the area of a square one meter on each side, and any SI prefix that works for the meter works for it, with the prefix squared along with the unit.
That squaring catches people out: a square kilometer is one million square meters, not one thousand. Since 1983 the meter has been defined through the speed of light, so the square meter is tied to a constant of nature as well as to the second. A hectare, about the area of Trafalgar Square in London, is 10,000 square meters. In everyday terms one square meter is about 10.76 square feet. Unicode has a compatibility character for it, but the recommended way to write it is the plain superscript two: m².
The square meter is the reference unit for area on this site.
Sources: Wikipedia: Square metre; Wikipedia: Are (unit); NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition
Related conversions
- Square meters to virgates (reverse)
- Virgates to square kilometers
- Virgates to hectares
- Virgates to square inches
- Virgates to square feet
- Virgates to square yards
- Virgates to acres
- Virgates to square miles
- Square kilometers to square meters
- Hectares to square meters
- Square inches to square meters
- Square feet to square meters
- Square yards to square meters
- Acres to square meters
- Square miles to square meters
- Square centimeters to square meters
- Square millimeters to square meters
- Tsubo to square meters
- Pyeong to square meters
- Rai (Thai) to square meters
See all area units.