Definition
An Anglo-Saxon and early Norman administrative subdivision of an English county (shire), comprising a grouping of townships or vills notionally capable of supporting one hundred households or one hundred fighting men. The hundred served simultaneously as a unit of territorial administration, a fiscal unit for tax assessment, and a jurisdictional unit for local courts. The court of the hundred — sometimes called the hundred court or court leet of the hundred — met periodically to handle minor civil and criminal matters, police local order, and enforce royal writs at the sub-county level.
The latinized form *hundreda* appears in formal legal instruments, pleadings, and writs of the medieval period where precision of territorial description was required. The anglicized form "hundred" carries the same meaning throughout the common law tradition.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encounter *hundreda* almost exclusively in medieval English legal records: Domesday Book entries, pipe rolls, eyre rolls, pleadings in actions of *trespass* or *debt* where venue was laid by hundred, and writs directing a sheriff to act within a named hundred. Several practical traps exist.
First, the hundred's boundaries were not uniform. Some hundreds were "soke" hundreds, in which jurisdictional rights had been granted to a private lord rather than exercised by the crown through the sheriff. These private hundreds (sometimes called *liberty* hundreds) appear in records differently from royal hundreds, and conflating the two can produce errors in reconstructing chains of jurisdiction or land tenure.
Second, the hundred as a fiscal unit survived long after its administrative and judicial significance had faded. Rates, subsidies, and poor law assessments were still computed by hundred into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in some counties. A researcher finding the term in a Tudor or Stuart tax record should not assume the hundred retained its full medieval judicial character at that date.
Third, the *hundredors* — the twelve men of the hundred summoned to provide the jury in certain actions — are a distinct procedural concept linked to the hundred's territorial identity. Corpus materials dealing with jury composition and venue in early common law actions will connect directly to this term.
Fourth, for American researchers: the hundred survived as an administrative division in a small number of American colonies and early states, most notably Delaware, where hundreds remain formal subdivisions to the present day. Primary sources from colonial Maryland and Virginia also use the term. The American usage tracks the English administrative model but is entirely stripped of judicial content.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary gives a minimal entry, citing only Spelman's *Glossarium Archaeologicum* for the Latinized form. Burrill's brevity here is characteristic of his treatment of purely historical Anglo-Saxon institutions — he records the term and its authority but does not elaborate on function. Researchers should not mistake this sparse treatment for insignificance; the hundred is a load-bearing concept in any work touching English local administration, land law, or early procedure.
Spelman (the implicit authority behind Burrill's citation) provides substantially more detail in the *Glossarium* and remains the classical reference for the term's Latin variants and territorial meaning. Cowell's *Interpreter* and Jacob's *Law Dictionary* similarly treat the hundred as a functional administrative and judicial unit, with Jacob noting the court's jurisdiction over personal actions under forty shillings. Neither Cowell nor Jacob is represented in the present source set, but researchers working in historical dictionaries will find those entries useful complements.
What the historical dictionaries collectively underemphasize is the distinction between the royal hundred and the private hundred held by franchise — a gap that matters considerably for land tenure research and jurisdictional tracing.
Jurisdictional Note
The term is specific to English legal history and those American jurisdictions that inherited English county structure directly. Delaware retains hundreds as official civil divisions. Outside these contexts, the term has no operative legal meaning in modern practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Anglo-Saxon and Early English Administrative Law; Local Courts in the English Common Law Tradition.