The English Village Community / Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry; An Essay in Economic History (Reprinted from the Fourth Edition)

by Frederic Seebohm

VI. THE HIDE, THE HOF, AND THE CENTURIA.

The 'hide,' 'familla,' 'casatum,' and 'hiwisc.'

From the yard-land, or hub, the holding of a serf, we may pass to the typical holding of the full free landholder, connected in England with the full team of eight oxen.

The Saxon hide, or the familia of Bede, was Latinised in Saxon charters into 'casatum.' We have found in the St. Gall charters the word 'casa' used for the homestead. The present Romanish word for house is 'casa,' and for the verb 'to dwell,' 'casar.' And there is the Italian word 'casata,' still meaning a family. Thus the connexion between the 'familia' of Bede and the 'casatum' of the charters is natural. Bede wrote more classical Latin than the ecclesiastical scribes in the charters. The hide was the holding of a family.[614] Hence it was sometimes, like the yard-land or holding of a servile family, called a 'hiwisc,' which was Anglo-Saxon, and also High German for family.[615] But the Saxon hide, also, was translated into ploughland or carucate, corresponding with the full team of eight oxen.

The 'carucate,' 'sulung,' or plough-land.

Generally in Kent, and sometimes in Sussex, Berks, and Essex, we found in addition to or instead of the hide or carucate, or 'terra unius aratri,' solins, sullungs, or swullungs—the land pertaining to a 'suhl,' the Anglo-Saxon word for plough. This word is [p396] surely of Roman rather than of German origin. The Piedmontese 'sloira,' and the Lombardic 'sciloira,' and the Old French 'silleoire,' are surely allied to the Romanish 'suilg,' and the Latin 'sulcus.'

The 'gioc,' or 'jugum.'

Again, in Kent the quarter of a 'sulung' (answering to the yard-land or virgate of other parts) is called in the early charters a 'gioc,' 'ioclet,' or 'iochlet,' [616] i.e. a yoke or small-yoke of land. We have seen in the St. Gall charters, also, mention of 'juchs' or 'jochs,' which, however, were apparently jugera. This word gioc is surely allied to the Italian 'giogo,' and the Latin jugum.

The 'hide' and 'centuria' the typical free holding.

Here, then, we have the hide the typical holding of a free family, as the centuria was under Roman law. A free Saxon thane might hold many hides, and so might and did the lord of a Roman villa hold more than one 'centuria' within its bounds. Still Columella took as his type of a Roman farm the 'centuria' of 200 acres,[617] and calculated how much seed, how many oxen, how many opera, or day-works of slaves, or 'coloni' were required to till it. The hide, double or single, was also a land measure, and contained eight or four yard-lands, and so also was the 'centuria' a land measure divisible into eight normal holdings allotted with single yokes. Both also became, as we have seen, units of assessment. But in England the hide was the unit. Under the Roman system of taxation the jugum was the unit. [p397]

This variation, however, confirms the connexion. The Roman jugum, or yoke of two oxen, made a complete plough. Nothing less than the hide was the complete holding in England, because a team of eight oxen was required for English ploughing. The yard-land was only a fractional holding, incomplete for purposes of ploughing without co-operation. Hence it would seem that the complete plough was really the unit in both cases.

The Saxon 'hidation' and the Roman 'jugatio.'

How closely the English hidation followed the lines of the Roman 'jugatio' has already been seen. When to the many resemblances of the hide to the 'centuria,' and of the 'jugum' to the virgate, regarded as units of assessment, are now added the other connecting links found in this chapter, in things, in figures, and in words, between the Saxon open-field system, and that of the districts of Upper Germany, so long under Roman rule, the English hidation may well be suspected to go back to Roman times, and to be possibly a survival of the Roman jugation. When Henry of Huntingdon, in describing the Domesday Survey, instead of saying that inquiry was made how many hides and how many virgates there were, uses the words 'quot jugata et quot virgata terræ,' [618] he at any rate used the exact words which describe what in the Codex Theodosianus is spoken of as taxation 'per jugationem.' [619]

Not, as already said, that the Romans introduced into Britain the division of land according to plough teams, and the number of oxen contributed [p398] to the plough team. It would grow, as we have seen, naturally out of tribal arrangements whenever the tribes settled and became agricultural, instead of wandering about with their herds of cattle. It was found in Wales and Ireland and Scotland, in Bohemia, apparently in Slavonic districts also and further east.[620] It is much more likely that the Romans, according to their usual custom, adopted a barbarian usage and seized upon an existing and obvious unit as the basis of provincial taxation.

Roman tributum in Frisia paid in hides.

The Frisian tribute of hides was perhaps an example of this. The Frisians were a pastoral people, and a hide for every so many oxen was as ready a mode of assessing the tribute as counting the plough teams would be in an agricultural district. The word 'hide,' which still baffles all attempts to explain its origin, may possibly have had reference to a similar tribute. Even in England it does not follow that it was in its origin connected with the plough team. Its real equivalent was the familia, or casatum—the land of a family—and in pastoral districts of England and Wales the Roman tribute may possibly have been, if not a hide from each plough team, a hide from every family holding cattle; just as in A.D. 1175 Henry II. bound his Irish vassal, Roderic O'Connor, to pay annually 'de singulis animalibus decimum corium placabile mercatoribus'—perhaps a tenth of the hides he himself received as tribute from his own tribesmen.[621] The supposition of such an origin of the connexion of the word 'hide' with the 'land of a family' [p399] or of a plough team is mere conjecture; but the fact of the connexion is clear. All these three things, the hide, the hiwisce, and the sullung, and their subdivision the yard-land, were the units of British 'hidation,' just as the centuria and the jugum were the units of the Roman 'jugatio.'