Feudal England: Historical Studies on the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

by John Horace Round

Another objection that may be raised to my hypothesis is that the Hundred, as an area for police and rating, was a comparatively late institution, and that if the artificial system of assessment were as ancient as I suggest, it could not have operated, as we saw, in Cambridgeshire, it did operate, through the 'Hundred'. It is, however, admitted that the thing represented by the 'Hundred' was, whatever its original name, of immemorial antiquity, as the intermediate division between the Vill and the Shire or kingdom. Approaching the subject from the legal standpoint, Professor Maitland has pointed out that the Hundred having a proper court, which the Vill had not, was the older institution of the two, and has skilfully seized on the differentiation of villages originally possessing one name in common as a hint that some such subdivision may have been going on more widely than is known. It seems to me to be at least possible that the district originally representing a Hundred, and named, as we are learning, in most cases from the primitive meeting-place of its settlers, was reckoned as so many multiples of five or ten hides, and that this aggregate was subsequently distributed by its community among themselves.[¹⁷⁷]

If it be not presumption to touch on the controversies as to the Hundred,[¹⁷⁸] I would suggest that while agreeing with Dr Stubbs, that the name of 'Hundred' may be traced to the ordinance of Edgar[¹⁷⁹] —which did not, however, create the district itself—I cannot reconcile it with the view to which he leans in his Constitutional History, that 'under the name of geographical hundreds we have the variously sized pagi or districts in which the hundred warriors settled'; and that we should 'recognize in the name the vestige of the primitive settlement, and in the district itself an earlier or a later subdivision of the kingdom to which it belonged'.[¹⁸⁰] For my part, I have never been able to understand the anxiety to identify the district known, in later days, as a 'Hundred' with an original hundred warriors, families, or hides. The significant remark on the 'centeni' by Tacitus, that 'quod primo numerus fuit, jam nomen et honor est', would surely lead us to expect that by the time of the migration the 'Hundred' had become, like the 'hide' of Domesday, a term even more at variance with fact. Indeed, in his masterly 'Introductory sketch', Dr Stubbs observed that the 'superior divisions' made by the 'new-comers' would 'have that indefiniteness which even in the days of Tacitus belonged to the Hundreds, the centeni of the Germans', and that their 'system' would be 'transported whole, at the point of development which it has reached at home'.[¹⁸¹]

The suggestion I have made as to the origin of the five-hide system is tentative only, and must remain so until we have at our disposal for the whole hidated region that complete and trustworthy analysis of assessment, on the need of which I again insist, at the risk of wearisome iteration.

XII. THE EAST ANGLIAN 'LEET'

In Norfolk and Suffolk we find Domesday recording assessed values not, as everywhere else, at the outset of an entry, but at its close; not in terms of hides and carucates, but in terms of shillings and pence. Instead of saying that a Manor paid on so many 'hidæ' or 'carucatæ terræ', Domesday, in the case of these counties, normally employs the phrase: 'x denarii de gelto'. Its meaning is that to every pound paid by the Hundred as geld the Manor contributed x pence.[¹⁸²] Thus, in the case of a Hundred assessed at a hundred hides, the formula for a five-hide Manor would be here 'xii. denarii de gelto', instead of the usual 'defendit se pro v. hidis', or some such phrase as that. There is an exact parallel to this method of recording assessed values in the case of fractions of knights' fees where portions of land are entered as paying so much 'when the scutage is forty shillings', instead of being assessed in terms of the knight's fee.[¹⁸³] This system would seem, however, to have been understood imperfectly if at all. I may, therefore, point out that its nature is clear from the case of the Suffolk Hundred of Thingoe.

The case of this Hundred is singularly instructive. We find its twenty 'Vills' grouped in blocks, precisely as in the Cambridgeshire Hundreds, and these blocks are all equal units of assessment, like the ten-hide groups of the hidated districts. But in this case we can go further still, for we are not dependent on Domesday alone. The portion of a special Survey executed about a century later (circ. 1185) for Abbot Sampson of St Edmund's, which relates to its Hundred, is fortunately preserved, and gives us the name of the twelve 'leets' into which this Hundred was divided.[¹⁸⁴]

Here are the divisions recorded in it, with the Domesday assessment (in pence) of each Vill placed against its name.

				£	s	d
I.		Barrow	7
		Flemington	6
		Lackford	6
			—
			19	0	1	7
II.		Risby	20	0	1	8
III.		Saxham (A)	7
		Saxham (B)	7
		Westley	6½
			—
			20½	0	1	8½
IV.		Hengrave	10
		Fornham	10
			—
			20	0	1	8
V.		Ickworth	7½
		Chevington	6½
		Hargrave	7
			—
			21	0	1	9
VI.		Brockley	7
		Rede	7
		Manston	6
			—
			20	0	1	8
VII.		Whepstead	20	0	1	8
VIII.		Hawstead	13½
		Newton	6½
			—
			20	0	1	8
IX.		Horningsheath	20	0	1	8
X., XI., XII.		Sudbury	60	0	5	0
				————
				£1	0	0½