Definition
Hundredum is the Latin form of "hundred," used in medieval English legal texts to denote three related but distinct things:
1. The territorial unit itself — a subdivision of a county or shire, comprising a district traditionally associated with one hundred households, hides of land, or fighting men, depending on the theory of origin.
2. The court of the hundred — the local tribunal that met periodically within that district to handle minor civil and criminal matters, exercise police functions, and collect dues. References to how the hundredum "ought to be held" (qualiter hundredum teneri debeat) appear in the laws attributed to Ine and in related Anglo-Saxon compilations preserved through Spelman.
3. The privilege or exemption from hundred-related obligations — specifically, the immunity of being quit from payments or customs owed to hundredors (the governors or officers of the hundred). In this third sense, hundredum functions as a franchise term, describing a lord's right to receive within his own lands the jurisdiction and revenues that would otherwise flow to the public hundred.
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Common Confusion
Hundredum should not be conflated with hundredors in the jury sense. By the later common law period, "hundredr" or "hundredar" had acquired a secondary meaning as a juror drawn from the hundred in which a disputed fact arose — a precursor to the vicinage requirement for juries. A researcher encountering "hundredors" in a pleading or writ must determine from context whether the reference is to officers of the hundred court, to jurors of the neighborhood, or to those entitled to hundred-court revenues. Burrill treats the officeholder sense; the jury sense requires consulting separate authorities on jury vicinage.
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Why It Matters in Research
Hundredum is a term that migrates across three distinct legal registers — administrative geography, local jurisdiction, and franchise privilege — and researchers who fix on one meaning risk misreading sources that invoke another.
**In administrative records**: Hundredum appears in Domesday materials, hundred rolls, and eyre records as a geographic and fiscal unit. When a medieval source asks who "holds" the hundredum, the question is typically about franchise jurisdiction, not mere territorial location.
**In jurisdictional history**: The hundred court was a living institution through much of the medieval period but was progressively displaced — first by the expansion of royal justice through the common law courts, then by the growth of manorial and borough jurisdictions, and eventually by the Justices of the Peace. By the Tudor period, the hundred court had largely atrophied, though hundreds persisted as administrative and electoral units into the nineteenth century and, for some purposes, longer. Researchers working in post-medieval sources should treat "hundred" primarily as a geographic and administrative designation rather than a functioning jurisdictional one.
**The franchise trap**: The third meaning — hundredum as privilege or immunity — is the most treacherous for modern researchers. A grant of hundredum to a lord meant that he, not the crown's hundredar, collected the dues and exercised the local police and judicial functions within his territory. This created a patchwork of private hundreds sitting alongside (and often absorbing) the public hundred structure. When reading charter or plea roll language about a lord's hundredum, the researcher is likely in franchise territory, not simply reading a geographic description.
**Corpus connections**: Hundredum connects directly to the vocabulary of leet jurisdiction, frankpledge, view of frankpledge, and tourn (the sheriff's circuit through the hundreds). It also appears in the context of suit of court obligations and in the early history of amercement. Researchers tracing the origins of English local government or the development of franchise jurisdiction will encounter hundredum repeatedly in Latin-language sources through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is brief but precise, capturing all three senses without conflating them. It correctly roots the term in the laws of Ine (LL. Incæ) as preserved and glossed by Spelman, and references the Laws of Edward the Confessor (LL. Edw. Conf. c. 35) for the plural hundreda in the sense of hundred courts. Burrill's observation that hundredum can denote the privilege of being "quit or free from payments or customs due to hundredors" is a notable refinement often missing from shorter treatments, which tend to stop at the geographic and jurisdictional senses.
What Burrill does not provide — and what no single dictionary entry can supply — is an account of how the hundred as an institution evolved, fragmented, and was absorbed into other structures over six centuries. For that arc, Maitland's work on township and borough, and Stubbs's Constitutional History, remain foundational, though researchers should treat both as products of Victorian legal historiography with their own interpretive frames.
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Jurisdictional Note
Hundreds existed as formal administrative units in England and Wales; the cognate divisions in other jurisdictions — wapentakes in the Danelaw counties, lathes in Kent, rapes in Sussex, ridings in Yorkshire — performed similar functions under different names. Researchers working in records from the northern or eastern counties should not assume "hundredum" is the operative term; the local Latin equivalent may differ.
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