Let us now connect the territorial with the institutional unit. Dealing in my 'Danegeld' essay with the evident assessment of towns in terms of the five-hide unit, I traced it to the fact that 'five hides were the unit of assessment for the purpose of military service'.[128] The evidence I have adduced in the present paper carries further its significance; but we must not allow its financial to obscure its military importance. I appealed, at that time, to the Exeter instance:
Quando expeditio ibat per terram aut per mare serviebat hæc civitas quantum v. hidæ terræ;
and to the service of Malmesbury:
Quando rex ibat in expeditione vel terra vel mari habebat de hoc burgo aut xx. solidos ad pascendos suos buzecarlos aut unum hominem ducebat secum pro honore v. hidarum.[129]
Of course this brings us to the notoriously difficult question of the thegn and his qualification. With this I am only concerned here so far as it illustrates the prevalence of a five-hide unit. Mr Little, who holds that Maurer, followed by Dr Stubbs, has gone too far, and that 'there is no proof of any general law or widely prevalent custom which conferred on the owner of five hides pure and simple the title, duties, and rights of a thegn',[130] sets forth his view thus:
What then is the meaning of the frequent recurrence in the laws of possession of five hides of land as the distinctive mark of a particular rank?
An explanation may be hazarded: at the end of the seventh century it was the normal and traditional holding of a royal thegn.... It is not too much to infer from the parallelism of the two wergelds, that five hides formed also the regular endowment of a Saxon king's thegn.[131]
Dr Stubbs' views will be found in his Constitutional History (1874), i. 155-6, 190-2, and those of Gneist in his Constitutional History (1886), i. 13, 90, 94. The latter writer follows Schmidt rather than Maurer, but sums up his position in the words: 'Since under Ælfred and his successors every estate of five hides is reckoned in the militia system as one heavy-armed man, the rank of a thane becomes the right (as such) of a possessor of five hides.'
Lastly, it is an interesting and curious fact that we owe to the five-hide unit such place-names as Fivehead, Somerset; Fifehead, Dorset; Fifield, Oxon; Fifield and Fyfield, Wilts; Fyfield, Hants; and Fyfield, Essex—all of them in Domesday 'Fifhide' or 'Fifehide'—as well as Fyfield, Berks, which occurs in Domesday as 'Fivehide'. Philologists will note the corruption and its bearing on the original pronunciation.
To the probable antiquity and origin of the five-hide system I must recur, after glancing at the evidence for the northern and eastern districts of England.