A hundred is an administrative division that is geographically part of a larger region. It was formerly used in England, Wales, some parts of the United States, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and in Cumberland County in the British Colony of New South Wales. It is still used in other places, including in Australia (in South Australia and the Northern Territory). Other terms for the hundred in English and other languages include wapentake, herred (Danish and Bokmål Norwegian), herad (Nynorsk Norwegian), härad or hundare (Swedish), Harde (German), hiird (North Frisian), kihlakunta (Finnish), kihelkond (Estonian), and cantref (Welsh). In Ireland, a similar subdivision of counties is referred to as a barony, and a hundred is a subdivision of a particularly large townland (most townlands are not divided into hundreds).
Etymology The origin of the division of counties into hundreds is described by the Oxford English Dictionary as "exceedingly obscure". It may once have referred to an area of 100 hides; in early Anglo-Saxon England a hide was the amount of land farmed by and required to support a peasant family, but by the 11th century in many areas it supported four families. Alternatively the hundred may have been an area originally settled by one "hundred" men at arms, or the area liable to provide one "hundred" men under arms. In this early medieval use, the number term "hundred" can be unclear, meaning the "short" hundred (100) or in some contexts the long hundred of 120. There was an equivalent traditional Germanic system. In Old High German a huntari is a division of a gau, but the Oxford English Dictionary states that the link between the two is not established.
England
Administrative functions
From the 11th century in England – and to a lesser extent from the 16th century in Wales – to the middle of the 19th century, the annual assemblies had varying degrees of power at a local level in the feudal system. Of chief importance was their more regular use for taxation, and six centuries of taxation returns for the divisions survive to this day. Groupings of divisions, small shires, were used to define parliamentary constituencies from 1832 to 1885. On the redistribution of seats in 1885 a different county subdivision, the petty sessional division, was used. Hundreds were also used to administer the first five national censuses from 1801 to 1841. The system of county divisions was not as stable as the system of counties being established at the time, and lists frequently differ on how many hundreds a county had. In many parts of the country, the Domesday Book of 1086 contained a radically different set of divisions from that which later became established. The numbers of divisions in each county varied widely. For example Leicestershire had six (up from four at Domesday), whereas Devon, nearly three times the size, had 32. By the end of the 19th century, several single-purpose subdivisions of counties, such as poor law unions, sanitary districts, and highway districts, had sprung up, which, together with the introduction of urban districts and rural districts in 1894, mostly replaced the role of the parishes, and to a lesser extent the less extensive role of hundreds. The division names gave their name to multiple modern local government districts.
Description
In southern and western England, a hundred was the division of a shire for military and judicial purposes under the common law, which could have varying extent of common feudal ownership, from complete suzerainty to minor royal or ecclesiastical prerogatives and rights of ownership. Until the introduction of districts by the Local Government Act 1894, hundreds were the only widely used assessment unit intermediate in size between the parish, with its various administrative functions, and the county, with its formal ceremonial functions. The term "hundred" is first recorded in the 10th-century laws of King Edmund I as a measure of land and the area served by a hundred court. In the Midlands, they often covered an area of about 100 hides, but this did not apply in the south; this may suggest that it was an ancient West Saxon measure that was applied rigidly when Mercia became part of the newly established English kingdom in the 10th century. The Hundred Ordinance, which dates to the middle of the 10th century, provides that the court was to meet monthly, and thieves were to be pursued by all the leading men of the district. During Norman times, the hundred would pay geld based on the number of hides. To assess how much everyone had to pay, a clerk and a knight were sent by the king to each county; they sat with the shire-reeve (or sheriff) of the county and a select group of local knights. There would be two knights from each hundred. After it was determined what geld had to be paid, the bailiff and knights of the hundred were responsible for getting the money to the sheriff and the sheriff for getting it to the Exchequer. Above the hundred was the shire, under the control of a sheriff. Hundred boundaries were independent of both parish and county boundaries, although often aligned, meaning that a hundred could be split between counties, or a parish could be split between hundreds. Exceptionally, in the counties of Kent and Sussex, there was a subdivision intermediate in size between the hundred and the shire: several hundreds were grouped together to form lathes in Kent and rapes in Sussex. At the time of the Norman Conquest, Kent was divided into seven lathes and Sussex into four rapes.
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