The purpose of this research is to examine the English medieval institution known as the hundreds courts. The plan of the research will be to set forth a working definition of the term hundred as used in connection with medieval English judicial practice, and then to discuss the evolution and transformation of the hundreds from the late Saxon period (late ninth to mid tenth centuries) to and after the Norman Conquest. As appropriate, reference will be made to specific milestones in the history of the hundred courts that have significance for the continued development of the English judicial system as a key constituent of the whole of English political organization.
The origin of the term hundred is seen to be rather indeterminate for the reason that the practices associated with the term appear, in the legal history of England, very much in place by the time the term has come into wide use. One view of the term is that it has an "obscure" history but that in the tenth century, when it was routinely referred to, it appears to have been a well established unit of county judicial administration in what was then late Saxon England.1 Other terms assigned to the English judiciary, and indeed to English counties, in the late Saxon and early Norman period are based on what must be considered grounded in the institutional equivalent of the decimal system. The tithes or tythings, as well as hundreds and the figure of the centenarius, or the lord of a given hundred, is based on units of ten and one hundred, deriving from Latin roots.2 That the term hundred was early on considered a unit and not simply a number is indicated by the
fact that in Old English, the standard form of usage required
the use of a genitive following the use of the word, as in, "a hundred of men."3 In other words, a unitary measure of persons, presumably of high social stature, was being referred to. This unit as a legal subdivision of the principal divi...