Definition
A subdivision of an English county, falling between the county and the tithing in the hierarchy of Anglo-Saxon territorial organization. Historically, a hundred comprised ten tithings — each tithing being a group of ten families of freeholders bound together by mutual suretyship, known as frankpledge. The hundred had its own court (the hundred court), its own governing officer (the high constable), and, most significantly, a collective legal responsibility: its inhabitants could be held liable as a body for crimes committed within its boundaries if the offender was not produced for justice.
The origin of the name is disputed. Leading accounts trace it to one of three sources: (1) the hundred contained one hundred free families or frankpledges; (2) it comprised one hundred hides of land; or (3) it furnished one hundred fighting men in wartime. The historical sources do not agree, and the number was not in any case strictly invariable in practice.
Establishment of the hundred is conventionally attributed to King Alfred, though this attribution is contested by scholars. The institution persisted in English law well into the modern era — not merely as an antiquity but as a live unit of civil administration, capable of generating legal liability against its inhabitants.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A numerical value equal to 100 (10²), occurring after ninety-nine.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The product of ten multiplied by ten; also, a division of a country in England, supposed to have originally contained a hundred families or freemen.
Webster's 1913 is unusual in capturing both meanings simultaneously, which reflects the word's dual life in nineteenth-century English. For legal researchers, the risk is the reverse of the usual common-versus-legal gap: the numerical meaning is so dominant in modern usage that the territorial and administrative meaning of the word is easily overlooked when it appears in historical legal instruments, pleadings, or jurisdictional descriptions.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Hundredor: An inhabitant of a hundred; historically also a person qualified to serve as a juror within the hundred's territorial limits, and the executive officer responsible for administering the hundred.
Hundred court: The local tribunal convened for the hundred's inhabitants, with jurisdiction over minor civil and criminal matters arising within its bounds. Distinct from the county court and from the leet.
Rape (Sussex) / Lathe (Kent): Intermediate territorial divisions found in specific English counties that functioned analogously to, but were larger than, the hundred. Researchers should not assume "hundred" was the universal term across all counties.
Why It Matters in Research
The hundred matters to legal researchers primarily in three contexts.
First, collective liability. The hundred's corporate responsibility for unreported crimes — particularly robbery and other felonies — generated a cause of action against hundred inhabitants that survived in English statute law for centuries. Researchers encountering claims against "the inhabitants of the hundred" in historical reports are dealing with this doctrine, not a modern municipal liability theory. Context clues will not always make this obvious.
Second, venue and jurisdiction. Pre-modern English pleading frequently required specification of the hundred in which an act occurred. Identifying which hundred corresponded to a given geographic location can be essential to tracing early cases, property records, or jurisdictional disputes. County histories and ordnance survey records are often more useful for this than legal sources alone.
Third, jury qualification. The hundredor as qualified juror — someone drawn from the hundred where facts arose — reflects a system in which local knowledge was a prerequisite, not a disqualification, for jury service. Researchers working on the history of jury selection must understand this framework to read early materials accurately.
The hundred has no American legal analogue of any significance, though the term appears in colonial American records reflecting the English inheritance. Delaware retained hundreds as formal administrative subdivisions well into the twentieth century, making it the primary jurisdiction where the term appears in American legal documents with live administrative meaning.
Historical Dictionary Support
The major historical dictionaries agree on the structural description — ten tithings, frankpledge, the hundred court, and collective responsibility — and there is no meaningful disagreement among Black's, Bouvier's, Burrill's, or Anderson's on these points.
Burrill offers the most careful treatment of the naming dispute, citing Spelman and noting explicitly that "the number of one hundred does not seem to have been invariable" — a caution the other dictionaries state less precisely.
Bouvier adds the collective liability dimension most directly, noting that when an offence is committed within a hundred, inhabitants may be liable to make good the damage if they fail to produce the offender. This is the legally operative feature for most historical litigation touching the hundred, and it is underweighted in Black's first edition, which emphasizes institutional structure over liability consequence.
The Rapalje & Lawrence excerpt as provided appears to reference burglary or breaking and entering, suggesting the entry in that source addressed the hundred's liability in the context of specific felonies — a more granular treatment that researchers consulting that dictionary should locate in full context.
None of the historical dictionaries adequately address the Delaware survival of the hundred as an active administrative unit, which is the most practically significant residue of the institution in American legal records.
Jurisdictional Note
In England, the hundred was progressively displaced by civil parishes and later by county councils through nineteenth-century local government reforms, though it lingered in some administrative contexts. In the United States, Delaware is the sole jurisdiction of note that retained hundreds as formal civil divisions with administrative and electoral functions into the modern era; Delaware's hundreds still appear in deed descriptions and election records. Researchers working in other American jurisdictions will encounter the term only in historical or colonial materials.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Anglo-Saxon Territorial Organization; Frankpledge and Collective Liability; History of the English County Court