The Winchester estates at Downton and Taunton.

The truth seems to be that some of the very earliest gifts of land that were made to the churches might, if we have regard to the size of the existing kingdoms, be fairly called the cession of provinces, the cession of large governmental and jurisdictional districts. The bishops want a revenue, and in the earliest days a large district must be ceded if even a modest revenue is to be produced, for all that the king has to give away is the chieftain’s right to live at the expense of the folk and to receive the proceeds of justice. Therefore not only whole villages but whole hundreds were given. Chilcombe was by no means the only vast estate that the bishop of the West Saxons acquired in very early days. Domesday Book shows us how at Downton in Wiltshire the church of Winchester has had a round 100 hides[1644]. For these 100 hides we have a series of charters which professes to begin in the days when the men of Wessex were accepting the new faith. They bear the names of Cenwealla[1645], Egbert[1646], Edward[1647], Æthelstan[1648], Edred[1649], Edgar[1650], and Æthelred[1651]. Kemble has accepted the last four of them. They tell a consistent story. There were 100 manses at Downton, or, to speak more accurately, 55 at Downton itself and 45 at Ebbesborne (the modern Bishopston) on the other side of the Avon[1652]. We might speak of other extensive tracts, of Farnham where there have been 60 hides[1653], of Alresford where there have been 51[1654], of Mitcheldever where there have been 106[1655], of Taunton where there have been 54 and more[1656]. Whenever the West Saxons conquer new lands they cede a wide province to their bishop. But perhaps we have already said more than enough of these cessions, though in our eyes they are very important; they are among the first manifestations of incipient feudalism and feudalism brings manorialism in its train. We have recurred to them here because the Winchester charters which describe them testify strongly to the continuity of the hide and also indicate the weak point in the arguments that are urged by the advocates of little hides[1657].

Kemble and the Taunton estate.

Kemble has argued that it is impossible for us to allow the hide of Domesday Book or the hide or manse of the charters as many as 120 acres. Take a village, discover how many hides are ascribed to it, discover how many acres it has at the present day, you will often find that the whole territory of the village will not suffice to supply the requisite number of hides if the hide is to have 120 or even 60 acres. Kemble illustrates this method by taking nine vills in Somerset and Devon. One of them is Taunton. Modern Taunton, he says, has 2730 acres, the Tantone of 1086 had 65 hides[1658]; multiply 65 even by so low a figure as 40 and you will nearly exhaust all Taunton’s soil[1658]. This argument involves the assumption that the limits of modern Taunton include the whole land that is ascribed to ‘Tantone’ in the Conqueror’s geld-book. Strangely different was the result to which Eyton came after a minute examination of the whole survey of Somersetshire. The ‘Tantone’ of Domesday covers some thirteen or fourteen villages and is now represented not by 2730 but by 24,000 acres[1659]. The editor of the Anglo-Saxon charters should have guessed that many hides ‘lay in’ Taunton which as a matter of physical geography were far off from the walls of the bishop’s burg[1660]. There are counties in which the list of the places that are mentioned in Domesday is so nearly identical with the list of our modern parishes, that no very great risk would be run if we circumspectly pursued Kemble’s method; but just in those counties to which he applied it the risk is immeasurably great, for it is the land where many villages are often collected into one great manerium and all their hides are spoken of as lying in one place. Not until we have compared the whole survey of the county with the whole of its modern map, are we entitled to make even a guess as to the amount of land that a place-name covers. Often enough in those shires where there are large and ancient ecclesiastical estates, those shires in which the feudal and manorial development began earliest and has gone furthest, hides ‘are’ in law where they are not in fact. They ‘lie into’ the hall at which they geld or the moot-stow to which they render soke, and this may be far distant from their natural bed[1661].

Difficulty of identifying parcels.

As we go backwards this danger is complicated by another, namely, by the growth of new villages. The village of Hamton has been a large village with 20 hides. Some of its arable land has lain two or three miles from the clustered steads. A partition of its fields is made and a new cluster of steads is formed; for housebuilding is not a lengthy or costly process. And so Little Hamton or ‘Other’ Hamton with 5 hides splits off from the old Hamton which has 15. We must not now try to force 20 hides into the territory of either village[1662]. And as this danger increases, the other hardly diminishes, for we come to the time when a king will sometimes give a large jurisdictional district and call it all by one name. If the once heathen Osric of the Hwiccas gave to a church ‘100 manentes adjoining the city that is called the Hot Baths,’ he in all probability gave away the ‘hundred’ of Bath; he gave Bath itself and a territory which in the eleventh century was the site of a dozen villages[1663]. We have the best reason for believing that when a king of the eighth century says that he is giving 20 manses in the place called Cridie he is giving his rights over a tract which comprises ten or twelve of our modern parishes and more than the whole of the modern hundred of Crediton[1664].

The numerous hides in ancient documents.

We have given above some figures which will enable our readers to compare the hides and the teamlands of a county with its modern acreage. Also we have confessed to thinking that we can hardly concede to every teamland that Domesday mentions 120 statute acres of arable land[1665]. On the other hand, we do not think that there would in general be much difficulty in finding 120 arable acres for every fiscal hide, though perhaps in the south the average size of the acre would be small[1666]. However, we have admitted, or rather contended, that before the middle of the eleventh century the hides of the fiscal system had strayed far away from the original type, and the sight of an over-hided vill would not disconcert us. But unfortunately we can not be content with such results as we have as yet attained. We have already seen that the hides attributed to a district show a tendency to increase their number as we trace them backwards[1667], and there are certain old documents which deal out hides so lavishly that we must seriously face the question whether, notwithstanding the continuity of the land-books, we must not suppose that some large change has taken place in the character of the typical tenement.

The Burghal Hidage.

We have said above that we have inherited three ancient documents which distribute hides among districts. We call them in order of date (1) The Tribal Hidage, (2) The Burghal Hidage, (3) The County Hidage. Of the youngest we have spoken. We must now attend to that which holds the middle place. It states that large round numbers of hides belong to certain places, which seem to be strongholds. The sense in which a large number of hides might belong to a burh will be clear to those who have read the foregoing pages[1668]. This document has only come down to us in a corrupt form, but it has come from a remote time and seems to represent a scheme of West-Saxon defence which was antiquated long years before the coming of the Normans. We will give its effect, preserving the most important variants and adding within brackets some guesses of our own.

The Burghal Hidage[1669]

These figures having been stated, we are told that they make a total of 27,070 hides[1682]. And then we read ‘et triginta[1683] to Astsexum [al. Westsexum], and to Wygraceastrum mcc, hydas. to Wæringewice [al. Parlingewice] feower and xxiiii. hund hyda.’

Meaning of The Burghal Hidage.

Apparently we start at some burg in the extreme east of Sussex, go through Hastings, Lewes, Burpham, Chichester, Porchester, and then pass through Hampshire, through the south of Wiltshire, through Dorset to Devon, keeping always well to the south. Then in Devon we turn to the north and retrace our steps by moving to the east along a more northerly route than that which we followed in the first instance. In short, we make a round of Wessex and end at Southwark. This done, we cast up the number of hides and find them to be somewhat more than 27,000. Then in what may be a postscript the remark is made that to Essex and Worcester belong 1200 hides (probably 1200 apiece) and to Warwick 2404. The writer seems to know Wessex pretty thoroughly; of the rest of England he (if he added the postscript) has little to tell us. We might perhaps imagine him drawing up this statement under Edward the Elder[1684]. He hears reports of what has been done to make Essex defensible and of two famous burgs built in Mercia; but the military system of Wessex he knows[1685]. Of a military system it is that he is telling us. He does not take the counties of Wessex one by one; he visits the burgs, and his tour through them takes him twice through Wiltshire: westwards along a southerly and eastwards along a northerly line. It is an artificial system that he discloses to us. The 324 hides allotted to ‘Heorepeburan’ (a place that eludes us) may seem insufficiently round until we add it to the 726 given to ‘Burhham.’ The Wiltshire burgs seem to be grouped thus:—

The Burghal Hidage and later documents.

To compare these figures with those given in Domesday Book and in The County Hidage is not a straightforward task, for the military districts of 900 may not have been coincident with the counties of 1086, and, for example, Bath may have been supported partly by Gloucestershire and partly by Somerset[1686]. The best comparison that we can make is the following:—

There is discord here, but also there is concord. According to our reckoning, the Oxfordshire and Berkshire of Domesday Book have just about 2400 hides apiece; then The County Hidage gives Oxfordshire 2400; and The Burghal Hidage gives 2400 to Oxford and 2400 to Wallingford. Both documents give 1200 to Worcester, and this is very close to the number that Domesday Book assigns. Next we see that, with hardly an exception[1695], all the aberrations of our Burghal Hidage from Domesday Book lie in one direction. They all point to great reductions of hidage, which seem to have been distributed with a fairly even hand. Further, in the case of Wiltshire we see a progressive abatement. The hidage is lowered from 5600 to 4800 and then to a little over 4000, and the first reduction seems to have relieved the shire of just one-seventh of its hides.

Criticism of The Burghal Hidage.

Now it seems to us that, on the one hand, we must reckon with this document as with one which, however much it may have been distorted by copyists, is or once was a truthful, and possibly an official record, and that, on the other hand, we can reckon with it and yet retain that notion of the hide which we have been elaborating. In a general way it both gives support to and receives support from the evidence that has already come before us. We have seen reductions of hidage or carucatage made in Yorkshire and Leicestershire after the Domesday survey; we have seen reductions in Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Cambridge, Northamptonshire. Here we come upon earlier reductions. They are large; but still they are not of such a kind as to make us think that any great change has taken place in men’s idea of a normal and typical hide. For one thing, we might be rash if we denied that during that miserable tenth century both the population and the wealth of Wessex were declining, for, despite its Æthelstan and Edgar, a miserable time it was. A real extinction of many a ‘real hide’ there may have been. But our main explanation will be that, by a process which is gradual and yet catastrophic, the ancient exaggerated estimates of population and wealth are being brought into correspondence with the humbler facts.

The Tribal Hidage.

We must now turn to a more famous and yet older document, namely that which we call The Tribal Hidage[1696]. It assigns large round quantities of hides to various districts, or rather to various peoples, whose very names would otherwise have been unknown to us. We are not about to add to the commentaries that have been written upon it; but its general scheme seems to be fairly plain. It begins by allotting to Myrcna land 30,000 hides. On this follow eighteen more or less obscure names to each of which a sum of hides is assigned; 36,100 hides are distributed between them. Then a grand total of 66,100 is stated. Ten other more or less obscure names follow, and 19,000 hides are thus disposed of. Then we have more intelligible entries:—‘East Engle 30,000. East Sexena 7,000. Cantwarena 15,000. South Sexena 7,000. West Sexena 100,000.’ Then we are told that the complete sum is 242,700, a statement which is not true as the figures stand, for they amount to 244,100. The broad features, therefore, of this system seem to be these:—It ascribes to Wessex 100,000 hides, to Sussex 7,000, to Kent 15,000, to Essex 7,000, to East Anglia 30,000, to Mercia 30,000, to the rest of England 55,100. Apparently we must look for this rest of England outside Wessex, Sussex, Kent, Essex and East Anglia and outside the Mercians’ land, though this last term is probably used in an old and therefore narrow sense. The least obscure of the obscure names that are put before us, those of the dwellers in the Peak, the dwellers in Elmet and the men of Lindsey, seem to point to the same conclusion[1697].

Criticism of The Tribal Hidage.

Now our first remark about this document will perhaps be either that it is wild nonsense, or that its ‘hide’ has for its type something very different from the model that has served for those hides of which we have hitherto been reading. Domesday will not allow the whole of England 70,000 hides (carucates, sulungs) and now we are asked to accommodate more than 240,000. Kent is to have 15,000 hides instead of 1200 sulungs. Even the gulf between The Burghal Hidage and this Tribal Hidage is enormous. The one would attribute less than 4500 hides to the Sussex burgs, the other would burden the South Saxons with 7000. In the older document Wessex has 100,000 hides, while in the younger the burgs of Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset and Devon have as their contributories less than a quarter of that number. The suspicion can not but cross our mind that the ‘hides’ of The Tribal Hidage are yard-lands, or, in other words have for their moulding idea rather a tenement of 30 than a tenement of 120 arable acres[1698].

Bede’s hidage.

Before we decide this important question we must give audience to Bede, whose testimony seems to point in the same direction. As already said, he uses one and the same unit, namely, the land of a family, whenever he speaks of a tract of soil, whether that tract be the territory of a large tribe or an estate that is granted to a monastery. He gives 7000 of these units to the South Saxons, 5000 to the South Mercians, 7000 to the North Mercians, 960 to Anglesey, 300 and more to Man, 600 to Thanet, 1200 to Wight, 600 to the Isle of Ely, 87 to the promontory of Selsey, 5 to Iona. Then he tells how Alchfrid bestowed on Wilfrid the land of 10 families at Stanford and a monastery of 30 families at Ripon, and in various other cases we hear of a prelate acquiring the land of 20, 12, 10, 8 families or of one family[1699].

Criticism of Bede’s hidage.

Now we must notice that in their estimates of one large province there is a certain agreement between the Ecclesiastical History and The Tribal Hidage. Both give the South Saxons 7000 hides or families[1700]. What are we then to say? If we suppose that Bede is speaking to us of tenements which tend to conform to the hide of 120 arable acres his statements must fly far beyond their mark. For example, the Isle of Wight is to have 1200 hides, and yet, according to Domesday Book, the whole of Hampshire including that island will not have 3000 hides, nor 3000 ‘teamlands,’ nor 3000 teams. Bede’s Wight contains as many hides as the Worcestershire or the Herefordshire of Domesday. He allots 600 of his units to the Isle of Ely, which in 1086 had about 80 hides and 126 teamlands. He allots another 600 of his units to the Isle of Thanet, which in 1086 had about 66 sulungs and 93 teamlands[1701].

Bede and the large hide.

We have now reached the critical point in our essay. Before us lie two paths and it is hardly too much to say that our whole conception of early English history depends on the choice that we make. Either as we pursue our retrogressive course through the centuries there comes a time when the hide of 120 acres gives place to some other and much smaller typical tenement, or the men of Bede’s day grossly exaggerated the number of the hides that there were in England and the various parts thereof.

Continuity of the hide in the land-books.

We make our choice. We refuse to abandon the large hide. In the first place, we call to mind the continuity of the charters. They have begun to flow in Bede’s day; they never cease to flow until they debouch in Domesday Book. They know but one tenemental unit. To describe it they use Bede’s phrase, and his translator’s phrases. It is the hiwisc, the terra unius familiae, the terra unius manentis, the manse, the hide[1702]. Between this and the acre they know nothing except the yard of land. Of it they speak but seldom, and it can only be explained as being a yard in every acre of a hide. No moment can we fix when an old mode of reckoning by reference to small tenements is superseded by references to a fourfold larger model.

Gradual reduction of hidage.

In the second place, we have been prepared for exaggeration. We have seen the hides steadily increasing in number as we passed from Domesday Book to The County Hidage and thence to The Burghal Hidage, and what may we not expect in the remote age that we have now reached? Even in the days of The Burghal Hidage there was a kingdom of England. There was a king of the English who was trying to coordinate his various dominions in one common scheme of national defence. But now we have penetrated to an age when there is no English nation. The gens Anglorum whose ecclesiastical history is being written is but a loose congeries of kindred folks. Rude indeed will be the guesses made at such a time about the strength of tribes and the wealth of countries. The South Mercians are a folk of 5000 families, ‘so they say’:—that is all that Bede can tell us about them. It is not likely that they have underestimated their numbers. When there is a kingdom of England, when there is a crushing tax called ‘danegeld,’ then the day will have come when a county will, if it can, ‘conceal’ its hides. At an earlier time the various folks will brag of their strength and there will be none to mitigate their boasts. Moreover we can not put our finger on the spot where the breach of continuity occurs. In 1086 Sussex has about 3100 teamlands; it has about 3500 hides. The Burghal Hidage would burden it with nearly 4500, and now we are required to give it 7000. There is no place where we can see its hides suddenly multiplied or divided by four.

Over-estimates of hidage.

Dare we set any limit to the power of exaggeration? In much later days when England had long been strongly governed and accurate fiscal rolls were being carefully stored in the treasury, men believed in 60,000 knight’s fees; royal ministers believed in 32,000; and yet we now see good reason for doubting whether there were more than 5000[1703]. In the reign of Edward III. the collective wisdom of the nation supposed, and acted upon the supposition, that there were more than 40,000 parishes in England, and then made the humiliating discovery that there were less than 9000[1704]. We hear that the same error was current in the days of Wolsey. Men still believed in those 40,000 parishes[1705]. Such numbers as these stood written in ancient manuscripts, some of which seem to have taken our Tribal Hidage as a base for calculations[1706]. These traditional numbers will not be lightly abandoned, though their falsehood might be proved by a few days’ labour spent among the official archives. Counting hides is repulsive work. If then these things happen in an age which is much closer to our own than to Bede’s, ought we not to be surprised at the moderation of those current estimates of tribal strength that he reports.

Size of Bede’s hide.

Thirdly, when Bede speaks not of a large province, but of an estate acquired by a prelate, then his story seems to require that ‘the land of one family’ should be that big tenemental unit, the manse or hide of the land-books. Let us take by way of example the largest act of liberality that he records. King Oswy, going to battle, promises that if he be victorious he will devote to God his daughter with twelve estates for the endowment of monasteries. He is victorious; he fulfils his vow. He gives twelve estates, six in Deira, six in Bernicia; each consists of ‘the possessions of ten families.’ His daughter enters Hild’s monastery at Hartlepool. Two years afterwards she acquires an estate of ten families at Streanaeshalch and founds a monastery there. According to our reading of the story, Oswy bestows twelve ‘ten-hide vills’; he gives, that is, his rights, his superiority, over twelve villages of about the average size, some of which are in Deira, some in Bernicia. It is a handsome gift made on a grand occasion and in return for a magnificent victory; but it is on the scale of those gifts whereof we read in the West Saxon and Mercian land-books, where the hides are given away by fives and tens, fifteens and twenties. We feel no temptation to make thirty-acre yard-lands of the units that Oswy distributed. Were we to do this, we should see him bestowing not entire villages (for a village of two-and-a-half hides would, at all events in later days, be abnormally small) but a few of the tenements that lie in one village and a few of those that lie in another, and such a gift would not be like those gifts that the oldest land-books record. And so we think that the unit which Bede employs is our large hide. When he speaks of the estates given to those churches with whose affairs he is conversant, he will state the hidage correctly; but when it comes to the hidage of Sussex or Kent, he will report current beliefs which are far from the truth. This is what we see in later days. The officers at the Exchequer know perfectly well that this man has fifty knight’s fees and that man five, but opine that there are 32,000, or, may be, 60,000 fees in England[1707].

Evidence from Iona.

Observe how moderate Bede’s estimate of hidage is when he speaks of a small parcel of land of which he had heard much, when he speaks of the holy island of Hii or Iona. A Pictish king gave it to Columba, who received it as a site for a monastery. ‘Neque enim magna est, sed quasi familiarum quinque, iuxta aestimationem Anglorum[1708]’ ‘It is not a large island; we might compare its size with that of one of our English five-hide túns.’ The comparison would be apt. Iona has 1300 Scotch acres or thereabouts[1709]. Plough 600 acres; there will be ample pasture left[1710]. If, however, we interpreted his statement about the 7000 hides of Sussex in a similar fashion, the result would be ridiculous. The South Saxons had not 840,000 acres of arable; our Sussex has not 940,000 acres of any kind; their Sussex was thickly wooded. The contrast, however, is not between two measures; it is between knowledge and ignorance. Bede’s name is and ought to be venerated, and to accuse him of talking nonsense may seem to some an act of sacrilege. But about these matters he could only tell what was told him, and we may be sure that his informants, were, to say the least, no better provided with statistics than were the statesmen of the fourteenth century[1711].

Evidence from Selsey.

Also there is one case in which we have what may be called a very ancient, though not a contemporary, exposition of Bede’s words. He tells us that Æthelwealh king of the South Saxons gave to Wilfrid the land of 87 families called Selsey[1712]. Then there comes to us from Chichester the copy of a land-book which professes to tell us more touching the whereabouts of these 87 hides[1713]. Ceadwealla with the approval of Archbishop Wilfrid gives to a Bishop Wilfrid a little land for the construction of a monastery in the place called Selsey: ‘that is to say 55 tributarii in the places that are called Seolesige, Medeminige, Wihttringes, Iccannore, Bridham and Egesauude and also Bessenheie, Brimfastun and Sidelesham with the other villae thereto belonging and their appurtenances; also the land named Aldingburne and Lydesige 6 cassati, and in Geinstedisgate 6, and in Mundham 8, and in Amberla and Hohtun 8, and in Uualdham 4: that is 32 tributarii.’ This instrument bears date 683. Another purporting to come from 957 describes the land in much the same fashion[1714]. Where, let us ask, did the makers of these charters propose to locate the 87 hides? Some, though not all, of the places that they mentioned can be easily found on the map. We see Selsey itself; hard by are Medmeny or Medmerry, Wittering, Itchenor, Birdham and Siddlesham. At these and some other places that are not now to be found were 55 hides. Then we go further afield and discover Aldingbourn, Lidsey, Mundham, Amberley, Houghton and perhaps Upper Waltham. But we have travelled far. At Amberley and Houghton we are fifteen miles as the crow flies from Selsey[1715]. Apparently then, the 87 hides consist of a solid block of villages at and around Selsey itself and of more distant villages that are dotted about in the neighbourhood. Be it granted that these land-books are forgeries; still in all probability they are a good deal older than Domesday Book[1716]. Be it granted that the number of 87 hides was suggested to the forgers by the words of Bede[1717]. Still we must ask what meaning they gave to those words. They distributed the 87 hides over a territory which is at least eighteen miles in diameter[1718]. Now it is by no means unlikely that Æthelwealh’s gift really included some villages that were remote from Selsey. We have seen before now that lands in one village may ‘lie into’ another and a distant village which is the moot-stow of a ‘hundred.’ But at any rate the forgers were not going to attempt the impossible task of cramming ‘the land of 87 families’ into the Selsey peninsula.

Conclusion in favour of the large hide.

Therefore, in spite of Bede and The Tribal Hidage, we still remain faithful to the big hide. We have seen reason for believing that in the oldest days the real number of the ‘real’ hides was largely over-estimated. It would be an interesting, though perhaps an unanswerable, question whether any governmental or fiscal arrangements were ever based upon these inflated figures. A negative answer would seem the more probable. In Bede’s day there was no one to tax all England or to force upon all England a scheme of national defence. So soon as anything that we could dare to call a government of England came into being, the truth, the unpleasant truth, would become apparent bit by bit. All along bits of the truth were well enough known. The number of hides in a village was known to the villagers; the kingling knew the number of hides that contributed to his maintenance. As the folks were fused together, these dispersed bits of truth would be slowly pieced into a whole, though for a long while the work of coordination would be hampered by old mythical estimates. Perhaps The Burghal Hidage may represent one of the first attempts to arrange for political purposes the hides of a large province. There is still exaggeration, and, unfortunately for us, new causes of perplexity are introduced as the older disappear. On the one hand, statesmen are beginning to know something about the facts; on the other hand, they are beginning to perceive that tenements of equal size are often of very unequal value, and to give the name hide to whatever is taxed as such. Also there is privilege to be reckoned with, and there is jobbery. It is a tangled skein. And yet they are holding fast the equation 1H. = 120A

Continental analogies.

There is, however, another point of view from which the evidence should be examined, though a point to which we can not climb. How will our big hide assort with the evidence that comes to us from abroad? Only a few words about this question can we hazard.

The German Hufe.

If we look to the villages of Germany, or at any rate of some parts of Germany, we see that the typical fully endowed peasant holds a mass of dispersed acre-strips, a Hufe, hoba mansus which, while it falls far short of our hide, closely resembles our virgate. The resemblance is close. As our virgate is compounded of acres, so this Hufe is compounded of acres, or day’s-works, or mornings (Morgen). When the time for accurate measurement comes, these day-work-units differ somewhat widely in extent as we pass from one district to another. The English statute acre is, as we have already said[1719], an unusually large day-work-unit. It contains 40.46 ares, while in Germany, if there is nothing exceptional in the case, the Morgen will have no more than from 25 to 30 ares[1720]. This notwithstanding, the Hufe, is generally supposed to contain either 30 or else 60 Morgen, the former reckoning being the commoner. In the one case it would resemble our virgate, in the other our half-hide.

The Königshufe.

Then, however, we see—and it has occurred to us that some solution of our difficulty might lie in this quarter—that in Germany there appears sporadically a unit much larger than the ordinary Hufe, which is known as a Königshufe or mansus regalis. This is sometimes reckoned to contain 160, but sometimes 120 Morgen. It seems to be an unit accurately measured by a virga regalis of 4·70 meters and to contain 21,600 square virgae. In size it would closely resemble an English hide of 120 statute acres; the one would contain 47·736, the other 48·56 hectares. To explain the appearance of these large units by the side of the ordinary Hufen, it has been said that as the Emperor or German king reigned over wide territories and had much land to give away, he felt the need of some accurate standard for the measurement of his own gifts, so that he might be able to dispose of ‘five manses’ or ‘ten manses’ in some distant province and yet know exactly what he was doing. This theory, however, does not tell us why the unit that was thus chosen and called a king’s Hufe or ‘royal manse’ was much larger than an ordinary manse or Hufe, and we seem invited to suppose that at some time or another a notion had prevailed that when an allotment of land in a village was made to a king, he should have for his tenement twice or thrice or four times as many strips as would fall to the lot of the common man[1721].

The English hide and the Königshufe.

The suggestion then might be made that the manse, terra unius familiae, terra unius manentis, of our English documents is not the typical manse of the common man, but the typical king’s-manse. We might construct the following story:—When England was being settled, the practice was to give the common man about 30 acres to his manse, but to give the king 120. Thus in the administration of the royal lands a ‘manse’ would stand for this large unit. Then this same unit was employed in the computation of the feorm, victus or pastus that was due to the king from other lands, and finally the royal reckoning got so much the upper hand that when men spoke of a ‘manse’ or a ‘family land’ they meant thereby, not the typical estate of the common man, but a four times larger unit which was thrust upon their notice by fiscal arrangements.

The large hide on the Continent.

Some such suggestion as this may deserve consideration if all simpler theories break down. But it is not easily acceptable. It supposes that in a very early and rude age a natural use of words was utterly and tracelessly expelled by a highly technical and artificial use. This might happen in a much governed country which was full of royal officials; we can hardly conceive it happening in the England of the seventh and eighth centuries. Moreover, the continental evidence does not lie all on one side. There was, for instance, one district in Northern Germany where the term Hufe was given to an area that was but a trifle smaller than 120 acres of our statute measure[1722]. Also there are the large Scandinavian allotments to be considered. Even in Gaul on the estates of S^t. Germain the mansus ingenuilis sometimes contained, if Guérard’s calculations are correct, fully as much arable land as we are giving to the hide[1723]. Nor, though we may dispute about the degree of difference, can it be doubted that the Germanic conquest of a Britain that the legions had deserted was catastrophic when compared with the slow process by which the Franks and other tribes gained the mastery in Gaul. Just in the matter of agrarian allotment this difference might show itself in a striking form. The more barbarous a man is, the more land he must have to feed himself withal, if corn is to be his staple food. There were no ecclesiastics in England to maintain the continuity of agricultural tradition. Also the heathen Germans in England had a far better chance of providing themselves with slaves than had their cousins on the mainland. Also it seems very possible that throughout the wide and always growing realm of the Frankish king, the fiscal nomenclature would be fixed by the usages which obtained in the richest and most civilized of those lands over which he reigned, and that the ‘manse’ that was taken as the unit for taxation was really a much smaller tenement than supported a family in the wilder and ruder east. Besides, when in Frankland a tax is imposed which closely resembles and may have been the model for our danegeld, the mansus ingenuilis pays twice as much as the mansus servilis[1724]. This suggests that the Frankish statesmen have two different typical tenements in their minds, whereas in England all the hides pay equally.

The large hide not too large.

No doubt at first sight 120 arable acres seem a huge tenement for the maintenance of one family. But, though the last word on this matter can not be spoken by those ignorant alike of agriculture and physiology, still they may be able to forward the formation of a sound judgment by calling attention to some points which might otherwise be neglected. In the first place, our ‘acre’ is a variable whose history is not yet written. Perhaps when written it will tell us that the oldest English acres fell decidedly short of the measure that now bears that name and even that a rod of 12 feet was not very uncommon. Secondly, when our fancy is catering for thriftless barbarians, we must remember that the good years will not compensate for the bad. Every harvest, however poor, must support the race for a twelvemonth. Thirdly, we must think away that atmosphere of secure expectation in which we live. When wars and blood-feuds and marauding forays are common, men must try to raise much food if they would eat a little. Fourthly, we must not light-heartedly transport the three-course or even the two-course programme of agriculture into the days of conquest and settlement. It is not impossible that no more than one-third of the arable was sown in any year[1725]. Fifthly, we may doubt whether Arthur Young was further in advance of Walter of Henley than Walter was of the wild heathen among whom the hides were allotted; and yet Walter, with all his learned talk of marl and manure, of second-fallowing and additional furrows, faced the possibility of garnering but six bushels from an acre[1726]. Sixthly, we have to provide for men who love to drink themselves drunk with beer[1727]. Their fields of barley will be wide, for their thirst is unquenchable. Seventhly, without speaking of ‘house-communities,’ we may reasonably guess that the household was much larger in the seventh than it was in the eleventh century. We might expect to find married brothers or even married cousins under one roof. Eighthly, there seems no reason why we should not allow the free family some slaves: perhaps a couple of huts inhabited by slaves; there had been war enough. Ninthly, the villein of the thirteenth century will often possess a full virgate of 30 acres, and yet will spend quite half his time in cultivating his lord’s demesne. Tenthly, in Domesday Book the case of the villanus who holds an integral hide is by no means unknown[1728], nor the case of the villanus who has a full team of oxen. When all this has been thought over, let judgment be given. Meanwhile we can not abandon that belief to which the evidence has brought us, namely, that the normal tenement of the German settler was a hide, the type of which had 120 acres of arable, little more or less.

The large hide and the manor.

If we are right about this matter, then, as already said[1729], some important consequences follow. We may once and for all dismiss as a dream any theory which would teach us that from the first the main and normal constitutive cell in the social structure of the English people has been the manor. To call the ceorl’s tenement of 120 acres a manor, though it may have a few slaves to till it, would be a grotesque misuse of words, nor, if there is to be clear thinking, shall we call it an embryo manor, for by no gradual process can a manor be developed from it. There must be a coagulation of some three or four such tenements into a single proprietary unit before that name can be fairly earned. That from the first there were units which by some stretch of language might be called manors is possible. The noble man, the eorl, may have usually had at least those five hides which in later days were regarded as the proper endowment for a thegn, and these large estates may have been cultivated somewhat after the manorial fashion by the slaves and freed-men of their owners. But the language of Bede and of the charters assures us that the arrangement which has been prevalent enough to be typical has been that which gave to each free family, to each house-father, to each tax-payer (tributarius) one hide and no more; but no less. Such a use of words is not engendered by rarities and anomalies.

Last words.

However, we would not end this essay upon a discord. Therefore a last and peaceful word. There is every reason why the explorers of ancient English history should be hopeful. We are beginning to learn that there are intricate problems to be solved and yet that they are not insoluble. A century hence the student’s materials will not be in the shape in which he finds them now. In the first place, the substance of Domesday Book will have been rearranged. Those villages and hundreds which the Norman clerks tore into shreds will have been reconstituted and pictured in maps, for many men from over all England will have come within King William’s spell, will have bowed themselves to him and become that man’s men. Then there will be a critical edition of the Anglo-Saxon charters in which the philologist and the palæographer, the annalist and the formulist will have winnowed the grain of truth from the chaff of imposture. Instead of a few photographed village maps, there will be many; the history of land-measures and of field-systems will have been elaborated. Above all, by slow degrees the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about common things, will have become thinkable once more. There are discoveries to be made; but also there are habits to be formed.

INDEX.