Hide

A variable medieval land unit of approximately 120 acres, notionally sufficient to support a single peasant household.

Used heavily in the Domesday Book, the hide was never a fixed geometric area but a productive assessment reflecting how much land a farming family could cultivate in order to pay royal taxes. Its counterpart in the northern and eastern counties settled by the Danes was the carucate, which described a comparable extent but was reckoned from the capacity of an eight-ox plough team rather than the needs of a household. Both were subdivided further: a quarter of a hide made a virgate, and an eighth of a carucate made an oxgang. Hides were grouped into hundreds, at least in principle a district of a hundred hides, and the hundred was the unit in which the assessment was actually administered: its court met monthly, its jurors answered for its taxes, and its boundaries appear throughout Domesday. In the Danelaw counties the equivalent division was the wapentake, from the Old Norse for a weapon-taking. Neither was a measure in itself, but both were the frames within which measures were counted, and both outlasted the assessments by centuries: hundreds remained a functioning division of English local government into the nineteenth century, long after anyone had reckoned land in hides.