The Medieval Hundreds Courts

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 midtenth 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 wellestablished 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 base

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r advocates. This appears to be one basis for the development of the structure as well as the power of segments of the nobility visavis one another, and visavis the king. Millar says that the name given to the most powerful hundreder in a given hundred was centenarius, and that this magistrate office began as an honorary elective one and putatively remained so for as long as the hundreds were functioning. As might be expected, however, a certain amount of what one could call Realpolitik influenced the election of the centenarius, with the result that real political power increasingly came to be anchored among those who held the office. This persisted into the Norman period. [The centenarius], like the tythingman, was originally chosen by the freemen of the district over which he presided; but as the richest man of the district was most likely to carry the election, so the longer any individual had remained in office, he became, from the many oppor tunities it afforded of increasing his riches, the more secure of holding it for the future; and for the same reason, the heir of his private fortune, to whom he communicated his family interest, had likewise the proba

Category: History - T