The typical holding of ten hides may perhaps be usefully regarded, from a fiscal point of view, as a unit for purposes of revenue, at a time when that revenue under tribal custom consisted chiefly of food rents paid in kind for the King’s or the chieftain’s use.
Clause 70 of the Dooms of Ine fixes in detail the food rent of ‘ten hides’ ‘to fostre’ or ‘on feorm.’
If the unit of ten hides were not the customary unit for these food rents on the Royal domains why should the details of the food rent of ten hides have been made the subject of an isolated clause like this?
Land grants of 10 hides.
Again, if we turn to the grants made by King Ine to the monasteries, they become intelligible if the system of management of the Royal domains in units and multiples of ten hides may be understood to underlie them. When Ine grants to Aldhelm, then Abbot of Malmesbury, ‘45 cassati’ in the county of Wilts, the grant is found to consist of groups of ‘manentes’ in four different places. And the groups consist of 5, 20, 10, and 10.[262] When Ine makes a grant to Abbot Bernald of land in Somersetshire it consists of three groups of 20, 20, and 20 cassati or manentes from three different estates.[263] And when he makes a similar grant to Glastonbury it consists of 10, 10, 20, 20 hides and one hide in five different places in Somersetshire.[264]
So also when Bede mentions the donations by King Oswy to the Abbess Hilda of 12 possessiuncula terrarum he adds that six were in the province of Deira and six in Bernicia and that each of them consisted of 10 familiæ, so that in all there were 120.[265]
Now it would seem that as ealdormen were set over shires so gesithcund men may have been set over smaller units of 10 hides or multiples of 10 hides, holding them as lænland, not only for services rendered, but also with some kind of subordinate official or even judicial functions.
Official position of the gesithcundman.
Schmid long ago pointed out that the translator of Bede in six passages translated the Latin comes by ‘gesith’ or ‘gesithcundman.’[266] This seems to imply that his position was in some sense an official one, subordinate indeed to the ealdorman’s, as we may also learn from the translator of Bede. For while he translates the ‘villa comitis’ of Bede as the ‘gesith’s hus’ he translates the ‘villa regis’ as the residence of the king’s ealdor (‘botl cyninges ealdor’).[267]