THE HIDE EXAMINED.

BY SIR JOHN B. PHEAR.

(Read at Teignmouth, July, 1904.)

THE city of Exeter is the subject of the first entry in the Devonshire Domesday Book, and from it we learn, amongst other things, that in the time of King Edward the Confessor the city did not pay geld, except when London and York and Winchester paid, and that the amount then paid was half a mark of silver for military purposes. The entry goes on to say (in the words of the Association's translation):"When an expedition went by land or by sea this City did service to the same amount as five hides of land."

We are thus naturally led at once, on the first page of Domesday, to put to ourselves the question: What did the fiscal authorities of William the Conqueror's time understand by the term " a hide of land"?

In other close following entries to that of Exeter, as, for instance, those of Sulfretone and Alseminstere, there appears the further statement:

:

"Nescitar quot hidæ sint ibi quia
nunquam geldabat."

Nevertheless, in both the entries of these two last-named manors we find that it was fully recorded how much land there was for the ploughs, and how many ploughs there were, as well on the villains' land as on the lord's demesne land. It would therefore seem to be a reasonable inference from these examples that the number of hides in a manor could only be arrived at through the award at some time of a competent assessing authority, and was not deducible merely from the quantity of arable land and number of ploughs within the manor.

The hide, so far as we can gather from the use of the word, may perhaps be generally described as the unit of size, in terms of which the relative magnitudes or strengths of the manorial communities were reckoned and compared with one another, to be employed as the means of effecting the equitable distribution among them of certain pecuniary and other burdens or duties to which they (the different manorial communities) were liable in common.

What precisely, however, was the scope or meaning of the word when it was originally used or suggested for this purpose is not now known, though this has been the subject of much learned discussion and investigation.

In legal documents of the seventh century or later, couched in medieval Latin and dealing with seigniorial rights, where the subject of the grant is expressed as land of so many hides, the word often appears variously as the equivalent of, or in some sort interchangeable with "casatus," or "tributarius," or "Mansa," etc. Thus, for example, in a grant made by King Eadred (in 947) we find this passage :—

"bis denas mansas quod anglice dicitur twentig hida."

And in the latter end of the twelfth century the author of the invaluable Dialogus de Scaccario, in reply to the question,

"Quid est hida?”

answered,

"Ruricolæ melius hoc norunt ; verum sicut ab ipsis accepimus hida a primitiva institutione ex centum acris constat."

Du Cange also states as a quotation from Henry of Huntingdon of much the same date:

"Hida Anglice vocatur terra unius aratri culturæ sufficiens per annum."

In the foregoing instances it would seem that the mention of a given number of hides is taken to imply the like number of casati, or of tributarii, or of mansæ, or of one hundred acres of land, or of a plough's annual capacity to till, as the case may be, and we may perhaps not unreasonably infer that the original hide contained all these elements. For some reason the modern tendency has been to give the greater prominence to the land element; and inasmuch as under the primitive three-course system of co-operative cultivation the amount of arable land sufficient for one fully equipped plough of eight bullocks appears to have been,

in fact, generally reckoned to be one hundred and twenty acres, it has come about that the hide has been very commonly taken to mean one hundred, or one hundred and twenty acres of land.

For my own part, however, I find it difficult to convince myself that originally, at any rate, the hide had any direct or definite relation to acreage or to any surface measurement of land.

So far as etymology may be trusted to afford us any guidance, it would seem to show, Toller says, that the word "hide" is connected with "hiwan" and with "hiwisc," of which the meaning conveyed by Latin translations appearing in charters and other legal documents is "household" or "family," in the sense of being under domestic rule, and has no reference to land.

Dr. Murray, in the New English Dictionary, gives an exhaustive series of examples which serve to support the like views, adding the following quotation from Maitland's Domesday and Beyond (p. 510):—

"They know but one tenemental unit.

"It is the 'hiwisc,' the terra unius familiæ, the terra unius manentis, the manse, the hide."

But there is nowhere to be found in these passages or references, so far as I am aware, any indication how the amount or specific quantity of land, if any, belonging to or which constitutes or goes by the name of the hiwisc or hide is to be arrrived at.

It is worth noting here that the early Norman lawyer was, according to Coke (Coke upon Littleton, 856), accustomed to use an ancient technical phrase, "hyde and gaine," to designate the whole interest in his holding of the tenant in socage, where "gaine" is an old French word which, under the equivalent form of "gainage," is rendered in Boyer's Dictionary by "profit that comes from the tillage of land." So that the phrase "hide and gaine” would seem to be in modern form equivalent to "messuage and land usufruct," and in that shape goes far to support the inference that the word hide in its primitive or dominant meaning denoted the dwelling-house and premises of the villain as distinguished from the land which he took part in tilling.

Taking, however, the hide to be, as Professor Maitland represents it, the one generally recognised tenemental unit, we ought on a careful examination of such of the circumstances and conditions under which the occupation of

land at that time took place, as can be with reasonable accuracy now ascertained, to be able to arrive at the discovery and specification of some persistent entity adequate to answering with sufficient completeness the popular conception of the hide.

In an investigation of this kind it is plainly most important that the inquirer should be careful, as Dr. Vinogradoff rightly warns us, to avoid unintentionally importing into a primitive state of society, through inexactness of language, conditions of status and tenure which are incidents characteristic of a later and more advanced social development.

Bearing this in mind, and assuming, as appears most probable, that in the earlier stage of the Anglo-Saxon land system in England the land was not the subject of property and did not belong to an owner, public or private, in the sense in which it does so belong in these modern times, we may briefly describe the principal features of the system as follows:

The country was parcelled out into village groups or communities, each occupying a well-defined district or tract of land, of which part was arable land in actual cultivation, part pasture or meadow, and part woodland or waste. And there were few or no permanent enclosures, except such as there might be in the shape of fences surrounding the dwellings, farm premises, garden plots, and so on.

Each such village community was under the authority and administration of a lord or chief, denominated dominus in the medieval Latin, which was the official and legal language of that date, and the land within the village boundaries was divided into two parts-namely, the villagers' part, termed the folcland, and the lord's part, the demesne (dominicum). See Note, p. 389.

The communities differed greatly among themselves in regard to the extent of ground occupied by them and the number of their inhabitants, but each of them generally comprised three wholly distinct classes of members, namely:

First, the villagers proper, constituting the bulk of the population, and commonly termed in medieval documents the villani (villains).

Second, the lord's slaves, servi or serfs, employed by him in his demesne.

Third, a few free (liberi) independent persons belonging to the lord's establishment, or living within his demesne. The cultivation of the land, both the demesne and the

folcland, was the business of the villani and the serfs associated together for this purpose, and working under a somewhat complex but very complete system of cooperative servitude, a system which had grown out of and was strictly regulated by ancient custom.

Mr. Seebohm, pursuing a happy method of sustained and patient research, has succeeded in going back over the centuries, and has ascertained for us with much completeness what the leading features of this early system probably were. We need not, however, for the present trouble ourselves with any of its details, at least as regards its effect on individuals.

It will be sufficient for us to bear in mind Mr. Seebohm's general conclusion, to the effect that the dominant factor in the agriculture of those days was the plough, which in its most powerful and effective form needed a team of eight bullocks to draw it. And inasmuch as few or no individuals among the villains could by himself furnish anything like that number of bullocks, the team usually had to be made up by contribution from several of them, the contributors thus forming a sort of partnership plough group (by origin probably a family group), with strict rules incident thereto, regulating the work of the ploughing and the rights of the members of the plough group to share in the usufruct of the land so cultivated.

It has been already mentioned that the land of the village under cultivation was not generally protected by fences, but was allowed to remain open and unenclosed.

In the course, however, of ploughing and of other operations of tilling it was necessary to deal with the land by parcels according to the lie of the ground. The ploughing of any portion of ground commenced with a furrow forty rods long or thereabouts, that being the length of the furrow which would ordinarily be made in one drive without stopping by a fully equipped plough, and which for that cause had become recognised by custom as the normal agricultural furrow length or "furlong."

The ploughing was continued by adding furrow after furrow, all of the same furrow length and each parallel, and so close in juxtaposition to the preceding that the sod cut and turned over by the plough in making the one furrow fell into and filled the furrow which immediately preceded it.

In this way the ground, merely as a result of the ploughing, became divided into roughly quadrilateral figures or parcels, one side of each of which was always one furlong