Hundred (country subdivision)

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A hundred is a geographic division used in England, Scandinavia, South Australia and some parts of the USA, which historically was used to divide a larger region into smaller administrative units. Alternative names include "Wapentake", "Herred" and "Härad".

The name is derived from the number one hundred and it may in some areas once have referred to a hundred men under arms—in England, however, it was that amount of land sufficient to sustain one hundred families.

It was a traditional Germanic system described as early as AD 98 by Tacitus (the centeni). Similar systems were used in the traditional administrative regimes of China and Japan.

1 England
- 1.1 Other terms
2 Scandinavia
3 United States
4 Australia
5 See also

[edit] England

In England a hundred was the division of a shire for administrative, military and judicial purposes under the common law [1]. Originally, when introduced by the Saxons between 613 and 1017, a hundred had enough land to sustain approximately one hundred households headed by a hundred-man or hundred eolder. He was responsible for administration, justice, and supplying military troops, as well as leading its forces. The office was not hereditary, but by the 10th century the office was selected from among a few outstanding families.

Hundreds of Cornwall in the early 19th century.

Hundreds were further divided. Larger or more populous hundreds were split into divisions (or in Sussex, half hundreds). All hundreds were divided into tithings, which contained ten households. Below that, the basic unit of land was called the hide, which was enough land to support one family and varied in size from 60 to 120 old acres, or 15 to 30 modern acres (6 to 12 ha) depending on the quality and fertility of the land. Compare with township.

Above the hundred was the shire under the control of a shire-reeve (or sheriff). Hundred boundaries were independent of both parish and county boundaries, although often aligned, meaning that a hundred could be split between counties (usually only a fraction), or a parish could be split between hundreds.

The system of hundreds was not as stable as the system of counties being established at the time, and lists frequently differ on how many hundreds a county has. The Domesday Book contained a radically different set of hundreds than that which would later become established, in many parts of the country. The number of hundreds in each county varied wildly. Leicestershire had six (up from four at Domesday), whereas Devon, nearly three times larger, had thirty-two.

Hundreds gradually dropped out of administrative usage, and by the 19th century several different single-purpose subdivisions of counties, such as Poor Law Unions, rural sanitary districts, and Parliamentary divisions, sprung up, filling the administrative role they had previously played. Hundreds have never been formally abolished.

Several ancient hundred names give their name to modern local government districts.

The Chiltern Hundreds are notable as a legal fiction, owing to a quirk of British Parliamentary law. A Crown Steward was appointed to maintain law and order in the area, but the position's duties ceased to be required in the 16th century, and the holder ceased to gain any benefits during the 17th century. The position has since been used as a procedural device to allow resignation from the House of Commons.

[edit] Other terms

A wapentake is a term derived from the Old Norse vápnatak [2], the rough equivalent of an Anglo-Saxon hundred. The word denotes an administrative meeting place, typically a crossroads or a ford in a river where attendance or voting would be denoted or conducted by the show of weapons.

The counties of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and Lincolnshire were divided into wapentakes, just as most of the remainder of England was divided into hundreds.

In Yorkshire, a Norse wapentake usually replaced several Anglo-Saxon hundreds. This process was complete by 1086 in the North and West Ridings, but continued in the East Riding until the mid 12th century.

In some counties, such as Leicestershire, the wapentakes recorded at the time of the Domesday Book evolved into hundreds later on. In others, such as Lincolnshire, the term remained in use.

The term ward was used in a similar manner in the four northern counties of Cumberland, Durham, Northumberland and Westmorland.

Lathes in Kent and rapes in Sussex consisted of several hundreds, and filled some roles usually associated with hundreds.

In Wales the hundred replaced traditional units such as the cantref (or cantred) or commote. Irish counties were divided into baronies.

[edit] Scandinavia

The term hundare (hundred) was used in Svealand (older Sweden) and present-day Finland. Eventually that division was superseded by introducing the härad, which was the the name in the rest of Scandinavia (also Herred). This word was either derived from Proto-Germanic *harja-raiðō (warband) or Proto-Norse *harja-raiða (war equipment, cf. Wapentake)[3].

Hundreds were not organized in Norrland, the northern sparsely populated part of Sweden-Finland.

It is not entirely clear when hundreds were organised in the western part of Finland. The name of the province of Satakunda, roughly meaning hundred, hints at influences from the times before the Northern Crusades, Christianization, and incorporation into Sweden.

[edit] United States

Counties in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were divided into hundreds in the seventeenth century, in imitation of the British system. They survive in Delaware (see List of Delaware Counties and Hundreds), and were used as tax reporting and voting districts until the 1960s, but now serve no administrative role, their only current official legal use being in real-estate title descriptions.[4]

The hundred was also used as a division of the county Maryland. Carroll County, Maryland, was composed in 1836 by taking the following hundreds from Baltimore County: North Hundred, Pipe Creek Hundred, Delaware Upper Hundred, Delaware Lower Hundred and from Frederick County: Pipe Creek Hundred, Westminster Hundred, Unity Hundred, Burnt House Hundred, Piney Creek Hundred, and Taneytown Hundred.

Some plantations in early colonial Virginia used the term hundred in their names, such as Martin's Hundred, and Flowerdew Hundred.

[edit] Australia

In South Australia land titles still record which hundred a parcel of land is located in. Similar to the notion of the South Australian counties listed on the system of titles, hundreds are not generally used when referring to a district and are little known by the general population. A hundred is traditionally one hundred square miles. [5]