Definition
Plural of hundredor. In English law, the term carries two related but distinct meanings:
1. The inhabitants or freeholders of a hundred — that is, the persons residing within a hundred (a historical subdivision of an English county) who, in the earliest period of common law, served as suitors or judges of the hundred court. In this sense, hundredors were not merely witnesses or participants but exercised a quasi-judicial function within their local administrative unit.
2. Persons impaneled, or qualified to be impaneled, upon a jury, who dwelt within the hundred in which the cause of action arose. Under early English jury practice, it was required that some portion of every jury panel consist of hundredors — local residents presumed to have direct knowledge of the facts and parties in dispute. This requirement reflected the original character of the English jury as a body of informed neighbors rather than neutral strangers.
A third and separate meaning, noted in Bouvier's Law Dictionary, designates the inhabitants of a hundred who were held collectively liable under statute for losses sustained by persons within the hundred through robbery or specified acts of violence. Several statutes imposed this communal liability, treating the hundred as a corporate unit responsible for maintaining the peace within its borders.
Common Confusion
Hundredors should not be confused with the hundred itself, which was the administrative territorial unit. Hundredors are the persons — the inhabitants or freeholders — associated with that unit, not the unit itself. Researchers encountering the singular hundredor in older texts should also note that the term shifts in meaning depending on context: it may refer to a juror-qualification requirement, a judicial function in the hundred court, or a party to statutory collective liability, all within the same era of English legal history.
Why It Matters in Research
This term is an essentially extinct feature of English law and has no direct American legal counterpart. Researchers will encounter it almost exclusively in pre-modern English sources, treatises on English common law origins, or historical scholarship on jury development.
The most significant research trap is failing to distinguish which of the three meanings a source is invoking. A treatise discussing the jury requirement is talking about a procedural qualification rule. A source discussing statutory liability is discussing a form of communal civil responsibility. A source on hundred courts is describing a judicial or administrative role. The same word carries different legal weight in each context.
The jury-composition meaning is the most frequently cited in common law treatises and is the sense used by Blackstone (3 Bl. Comm. 359, 360) and Stephen (4 Steph. Comm. 370). Researchers tracing the history of jury selection, the vicinage requirement, or the evolution from the presentment jury to the modern trial jury will find hundredors directly relevant. The original rationale — that jurors should be local persons with knowledge of the dispute — is ancestral to the modern vicinage concept, though the formal requirement of hundredors on a panel was abandoned well before American independence.
The statutory collective-liability meaning is most fully treated in Bouvier and connects to a distinct line of English legislation running from the Statute of Winchester (1285) through eighteenth-century riot and robbery acts. Researchers working on early tort history, communal liability, or the history of policing will need to follow the specific statutes Bouvier enumerates.
Because hundredors appear in sources as both a jury-practice term and a liability term, a keyword search across the corpus will return mixed results. Context-reading is essential before drawing any doctrinal conclusions.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries are broadly consistent on the first two meanings — freeholders of a hundred exercising judicial or jury functions — with minor variation in emphasis. Black's (both editions) and Burrill agree closely, each noting the suitor/judge function and the jury-panel requirement, and each citing Crompton's Jurisdiction of Courts and the same Blackstone and Stephen passages. Burrill adds a reference to 3 Bl. Comm. 352, extending the jury discussion slightly.
Bouvier takes a different approach, foregrounding the statutory collective-liability meaning and listing the governing statutes in detail, while treating the jury and court functions more briefly. This is a meaningful editorial divergence: Bouvier's entry is the most useful for researchers focused on the liability doctrine, while Black's and Burrill are more useful for jury history. No single entry synthesizes all three meanings with equal depth.
All four dictionaries treat hundredors as an exclusively English institution — none attempts to map the concept onto American practice, which is appropriate. What none of the historical sources adequately flags is how early the jury-composition requirement effectively became a dead letter, making the term largely historical even within its own era of compilation.
Jurisdictional Note
Hundredors are a feature of English law with no recognized American equivalent. The concept of the hundred as an administrative and judicial unit was not transplanted meaningfully into American colonial or state law. The vicinage requirement for juries — the closest doctrinal descendant — developed along independent constitutional lines in American jurisprudence.