Now if we follow the clue afforded by the Cambridgeshire evidence, and hold that the assessment was originally laid not on the Manor, nor even on the Vill, but on the Hundred as a whole,[170] it might be suggested that the Hundred itself subdivided the amount among its constituent elements. In practice, indeed, from the nature of the case, this principle must have prevailed in every town assessed at a Hundred or Half-Hundred, for where an urban community was assessed in 'hides' the burgesses must, as in later days, have settled among themselves the proportion to be borne by individuals or individual properties. If, then, they were able to do this, and if, as I hold, town and country were assessed on the same principle, as part of the same system, what was to prevent their neighbours, in the court of the rural Hundred, similarly distributing among its constituents their respective shares of the common burden?

We might even be tempted to go far further than this, and to carry our discoveries to a logical conclusion. If, as is asserted, direct taxation ('geld') began in England with the need for raising money to buy off the Danes, let us ask ourselves how the Witan would proceed when confronted with a demand, let us say, for £10,000. As there had been hitherto, ex hypothesi, no direct taxation, there would be no statistical information at their disposal, enabling them to raise by a direct levy the sum required. Their only possible resource, we might hold, would be to apportionate it in round sums among the contributory shires. Proceeding on precisely the same lines, the county court, in its turn, would distribute the quota of the shire among its constituent Hundreds, and the Hundred court would then assign to each Vill its share. As the Vills were represented in the Hundred court, and the Hundreds in the Shire court, the just apportionment of the Shire's quota would be thus practically secured. The arrangement would, moreover, be as satisfactory to the Witan as it was fair to the contributors inter se; for, by this gradation of responsibility, the payment of the whole was absolutely secured. This explanation is very tempting, and, indeed, such a system of apportioning liability is to be traced from time immemorial in the Indian village community.[171] Moreover, if the ratio of 'hides' to ploughlands were found to vary to any marked extent, according to county, the hypothesis that the quota, in the first instance, was laid upon each county would duly explain the ratio assessment being higher or lower in one county than in another.

But such an hypothesis would imply that this assessment dated only from the days of Æthelred, or circ. 1000. Now the five-hide unit, on the contrary, was undoubtedly an old institution. Church lordships, the easiest to trace, appear to have retained their hidation unchanged from early times, and the 'possessio decem familiarum' of Bede seems to carry the decimal system back to very early days. Mr Seebohm, indeed—though, like others, he had failed to discover the existence of the five-hide system—saw in this 'possessio' of Bede a connecting link with the Roman decuria, just as he saw in the Roman jugatio the possible origin of English hidation. And we must, of course, trace its artificial arrangement (1) either to the Romans, (2) or to the Britons—assuming them to have had the same system as existed in Wales for the food-rents, (3) or to the English invaders.

Arrested at this point by the difficulty of assigning to the system I have described its real origin, I dropped these studies for some years in the hope that there might come from some quarter fresh light upon the problem. As I cannot, however, for lack of evidence, propound a solution capable of proof, I will content myself with indicating the line of research that offers, I venture to think, the most likelihood of success.

The proportionate sums contributed by the several counties to the Danegeld present a fruitful field of inquiry, but one, it would seem, as yet unworked. Mr Eyton, it is true, observed that 'in Devon and Cornwall the scope of the gheld-hide was enormous',[172] that is, in other words, the assessment was strangely low, but it did not occur to him to seek the cause of the phenomenon he observed. If, as was the case, West Wales was assessed on quite a different scale to the counties adjoining it on the east, it may suggest a conclusion no less important than that, when the latter were originally assessed, West Wales was not yet a portion of the English realm. But, before concluding that the hide assessment is proved to be as ancient as this, we must see whether it is possible to detect any principle at work in the total assessments of the several counties, any relation between their area and the sums they contributed to the geld as entered in the Pipe Roll of 1130, our first evidence on the subject.

For such an enquiry it is especially needful to insist on breadth of treatment. In the first place, the modern area of the counties may vary more or less from the original extent;[173] in the second we have no proof that the assessment had always been the same, though the tendency in early days, no doubt, was to stereotype such figures. We must not, therefore attempt close or detailed investigation but if, on a review of the whole evidence, we detect certain broad features, uneffaced by the hand of time, we may fairly claim that we have in these the traces of a principle at work, the witness to a state of things prevailing in the distant past.

On comparing the contributions to a 'geld' at two shillings on the hide with the (modern) area of counties, we find that a rate of about a pound for every seven square miles prevailed widely enough to be almost described as normal.

The three eastern counties work out thus:

Square Miles(At 1⁄7)Actual Sum
££sd
Norfolk2,1193025⁄733032
Suffolk1,4752105⁄723508
Essex1,5422202⁄723680