The hide (or mansa) is an archaic English unit of land measurement originally intended to represent the amount of land sufficient to support a household. It is a measure of value and tax assessment, including obligations for food-rent (feorm), maintenance and repair of bridges and fortifications, manpower for the army (fyrd), and (eventually) the geld land tax. The hide was divided into four yardlands or virgates. It was hence nominally equivalent in area to a carucate, a unit used in the Danelaw. The hide's method of calculation is now obscure: different properties with the same hidage could vary greatly in extent even in the same county. Following the Norman Conquest of England, the hidage assessments were recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, and there was a tendency for land producing £1 of income per year to be assessed at 1 hide. The Norman kings continued to use the unit for their tax assessments until the end of the 12th century.
Original meaning The Anglo-Saxon word for a hide was hid (or its synonym hiwisc). Both words are believed to be derived from the same root hiwan, meaning "family". Bede in his Ecclesiastical History (c. 731) describes the extent of a territory by the number of families which it supported, as (for instance), in Latin, terra x familiarum meaning 'a territory of ten families'. In the Anglo-Saxon version of the same work hid or hiwan is used in place of terra ... familiarum. Other documents of the period show the same equivalence and it is clear that the word hide originally signified land sufficient for the support of a peasant and his household or of a family, which may have had an extended meaning. It is uncertain whether it meant the immediate family or a more extensive group. Charles-Edwards suggests that in its early usage it referred to the land of one family, worked by one plough and that ownership of a hide conferred the status of a freeman, whom Stenton refers as "the independent master of a peasant household".
Holy Roman Empire Hides of land formed the basis for tax levies used to equip free warriors (milites) of the Holy Roman Empire. In 807 it was specified that in the region west of the Seine, for example, a vassal who held four or five hides was responsible for showing up to a muster in person, fully equipped for war. Three men who each possessed one hide were grouped such that two of them were responsible for equipping the third, who would go to war in their name. Those holding half-hides were responsible for readying one man for every group of six. This came about as a way of ensuring that the liege took to the field with a fully equipped and provisioned force.
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