Definition
The presiding officer of the hundred-court, a local Anglo-Saxon and early Norman administrative and judicial tribunal serving the territorial subdivision known as the hundred. The hundrededes man functioned as the chief judicial figure within that unit, responsible for convening and directing the court's proceedings, which handled minor civil and criminal matters among the inhabitants of the hundred.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources dealing with pre-Conquest and early post-Conquest English legal institutions. Researchers working in medieval English legal history, constitutional history, or the origins of local jurisdiction will encounter it in discussions of the hundred as an administrative unit. It has no modern operational counterpart and carries no continuing legal significance in any jurisdiction. Its primary research value is contextual: understanding the hundrededes man helps locate the early English roots of local judicial officers, from which later figures such as the justice of the peace and the sheriff partially descended. Researchers should be alert to variant spellings across sources — "hundredary," "hundredman," and "hundredarius" appear in Latin and anglicized forms in different periods — and should not assume terminological consistency across documents spanning the Anglo-Saxon to Angevin eras. The term does not appear in later common law dictionaries with any substantive entry, which itself signals that the office had lost practical significance well before the systematization of English common law.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's entry is spare: "The presiding officer in the hundred-court. Anc. Inst. Eng." The brevity reflects the term's status as a historical curiosity rather than a working legal concept by the time Bouvier compiled his dictionary. The reference to "Anc. Inst. Eng." points toward antiquarian legal scholarship on Anglo-Saxon institutions rather than any living body of law. No major American or English law dictionary of the nineteenth century developed the entry further, and Blackstone's Commentaries, while discussing the hundred as a territorial unit, does not extensively theorize the role of its presiding officer under this specific title. Researchers should consult specialized histories of Anglo-Saxon and early Norman governance for substantive treatment of the office.
Jurisdictional Note
Purely historical. The term is specific to England and has no analog in American, Scottish, or Welsh legal tradition in any operative sense. American colonial law inherited the county as the primary local unit, bypassing the hundred's judicial function almost entirely, though the hundred persisted as a nominal geographic designation in a small number of early American colonies.