England Was Divided Into Hundreds. Hundreds of What Exactly?
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A unit of local administration sitting between the shire and the village ran justice, tax and policing across England for a thousand years, and nobody is quite sure what its name counted.
What the unit was
The division sat between the shire above and the individual settlement below, covering an area typically of a few dozen square miles containing several villages. It held its own court, meeting monthly at a fixed open air site, which dealt with disputes, minor crimes and the business of the area. It was the unit through which tax was assessed and collected, through which men were summoned for military service, and through which the community was made collectively responsible for producing suspects and for pursuing criminals.
What the name counted
Several explanations are offered and none is settled:
- •One hundred households
- •One hundred hides, a unit of land assessed for tax
- •Land sufficient to support one hundred families
- •An area producing one hundred fighting men
- •A group of one hundred men sworn to keep the peace
- •A round number applied loosely and never meant literally
How it actually worked
The most striking feature is collective responsibility, which is unfamiliar to modern thinking. Men were organised into groups of about ten, each group answerable for producing any member accused of an offence, and the wider division was answerable if a group failed. If a stranger was found murdered and the killer not produced, the whole division paid a fine, which gave everybody an interest in catching offenders. When a crime was discovered, a cry was raised and every man present was required to join the pursuit, on penalty of a fine for not doing so.
Where the courts actually met
Meeting places were open air and their locations are recoverable, which makes them a favourite subject for landscape historians. Sites were chosen to be central, accessible and recognisable, and the names record them, since a great many carry a word for a mound, a tree, a stone, a ford or a crossroads. Several were prehistoric burial mounds reused for the purpose, which put the assembly on a monument already ancient when it was chosen. Some sites remained in use for six hundred years. Mapping them against the divisions they served shows how deliberately the geography was arranged.
What happened to it
The division declined slowly rather than being abolished, which is why traces survive everywhere. Royal justices travelling on circuit took over the serious business from the fourteenth century. Justices of the peace absorbed most of the rest. The courts survived in form into the nineteenth century, by which time they did almost nothing, and were finally wound up by statute. The boundaries live on in the names of districts, in parish groupings and in the areas covered by some ancient charities, and they are still used by archaeologists and historians as a framework for studying early settlement.
The takeaway
A division between shire and village held its own monthly open air court and handled justice, tax assessment and military summons across England for around a thousand years. Its most distinctive feature was collective responsibility, with groups of ten answerable for producing their own members and the whole area fined if a killer went unfound. What the name originally counted has never been settled.