Definition
Justices of the Hundred were judicial officers in the English common law system who held jurisdiction over the hundred — a subdivision of a county — and presided over the hundred court. They were, in substance, the lords or proprietors of hundreds who exercised judicial authority within that territorial unit. The office was administrative and jurisdictional in character: these figures were not royal judges riding circuit but local authorities whose judicial power derived from the grant or tenure of the hundred itself.
The hundred court over which they presided was a court of inferior and local jurisdiction, handling minor civil and, in some periods, petty criminal matters arising within the hundred's boundaries. The justices of the hundred should be understood as a product of the feudal and Anglo-Saxon organizational structure of English local government, in which territorial units below the county level carried their own distinct judicial machinery.
Common Confusion
Researchers should distinguish three uses of related terminology that appear in historical sources:
JUSTICES OF THE HUNDRED (this entry) refers to the judicial officers presiding over the hundred court — the lord or holder of the hundred exercising jurisdiction.
HUNDREDORS, in jury law, refers to jurors who were inhabitants of the hundred from which a jury was drawn. This usage appears in older English pleading and jury practice and has no connection to the judicial office described here.
JUSTICES IN EYRE were royal itinerant commissioners with general commissions to hear pleas across counties. They were creatures of royal authority rather than local tenure, and their jurisdiction was far broader than that of any hundred court.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs firmly to the history of English local government and the development of the common law court system. Researchers encountering it in primary sources — particularly in English legal records, county histories, or treatises predating the nineteenth century — should understand several things.
First, the term is extinct in practical legal usage. No modern American or English jurisdiction retains hundred courts or the officers associated with them. The hundreds as administrative units were progressively abolished or made obsolete in England, and they were never transplanted with any meaningful judicial function into American colonial or state governance (with narrow, largely nominal exceptions in a few mid-Atlantic colonies).
Second, the term appears most frequently in comparative and historical contexts when writers are explaining the layered structure of early English courts — hundred courts, county courts, courts leet, and the superior royal courts. When Blackstone and other institutional writers describe the hierarchy of English courts, the hundred court and its presiding officer form one rung of that hierarchy. Researchers mapping the evolution of Anglo-American jurisdiction will encounter this term as a waypoint in that genealogy.
Third, the distinction between justices of the hundred and justices in eyre is important to hold clearly. Rapalje and Lawrence's entry, which pairs hundredors against justices in eyre, captures a fundamental structural contrast: the justices of the hundred were local and fixed, limited to the hundred's jurisdiction, while the justices in eyre were royal commissioners sent through the counties with broad, itinerant authority. Conflating these two offices misreads the architecture of medieval English judicial administration.
Fourth, in American historical legal sources, references to "hundredors" in the context of jury law present a different usage entirely — hundredors as jurors drawn from the hundred — which is a distinct legal concept. Context will ordinarily distinguish the two, but researchers should not assume that every appearance of "hundredor" in a historical source refers to this judicial office.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines the term concisely and accurately: hundredors, lords of the hundreds, they who had the jurisdiction of hundreds and held the hundred courts. Rapalje and Lawrence reproduce substantially the same formulation but place the definition in a passage that usefully contrasts the justices of the hundred with justices in eyre. The contrast illuminates the term more than the bare definition does: the hundred justices had a limited, local, fixed commission; the justices in eyre had an indefinite, general, itinerant commission across multiple counties — resembling, the authors note, the later justices of assize, though differing from them in authority and procedure.
Neither source goes into depth on the historical development of the office, its feudal origins, or the process by which hundred jurisdiction was acquired through grant or prescription. Researchers needing that institutional history will need to move beyond dictionary sources to Pollock and Maitland's History of English Law, Stubbs's Constitutional History, or Blackstone's Commentaries, Book IV and the treatment of inferior courts in Book III. The dictionaries treat this as a settled, historical term requiring identification rather than analysis.
Jurisdictional Note
This term has no operative meaning in modern American or English law. Its relevance is confined to historical legal research, English legal history, and the study of pre-modern court structure. American colonial legal systems did not, as a general matter, adopt the hundred as a meaningful judicial unit, and no American jurisdiction today maintains anything corresponding to a hundred court or its presiding officer.