But, before passing to further questions of terminology, it will be well to give some instances of the application of the “five-hide unit,” and, as Bedfordshire has been specially referred to above, we may take our examples from that county. Accordingly, if with the aid of a map we follow the course of the Ouse through Bedfordshire, we shall pass near to Odell, Risely, and Radwell, assessed at ten hides each; Thurghley and Oakley at five; Pavenham, Stagsden, Cardington, Willington, Cople, and Northill at ten; Blunham at fifteen; Tempsford at ten; Roxton at twenty; Chawston at ten; Wyboston at twenty, and Eaton Socon at forty. Thus, within a narrow strip of one county we have found seventeen instances of this method of assessment, and there is no need to multiply cases in point. On almost every page of the survey in which we read of hides, we may find them combined in conventional groups of five, ten, or the like.
Not all England, however, was assessed in hides; three other systems of rating are to be found in the country. In Kent, the first county entered in Domesday Book, a peculiar system prevailed in which the place of the hide was taken by the “sulung,” consisting of four “yokes” (_iugera_), and most probably containing two hundred and forty acres, thus equalling a double hide.[327] The existence of the sulung in Kent as a term of land measurement can be traced back to the time when that county was an independent kingdom; the process by which the word came to denote a merely fiscal unit was doubtless analogous to the similar development which we have noticed in the case of the “hide.” Taken in conjunction with the singular local divisions of Kent, and with the well-known peculiarities of land tenure found there, this plan of reckoning by “sulungs” instead of hides falls into place as a proper survival of the independent organisation of the county.
Another ancient kingdom also preserves an unusual form of assessment in Domesday. In East Anglia we get for once a statement in arithmetical terms as to the amount which each vill must contribute to the Danegeld. Instead of being told that there are, say, five hides in a vill, and being left to draw the conclusion that that vill must pay ten shillings or more according to the rate at which the Danegeld is being levied on the hide, we are given the amount which each vill must pay when the hundred in which it is situated pays twenty shillings. This form of sliding scale is unknown outside Norfolk and Suffolk, and is even more obviously artificial than the assessment of other counties. Each hundred in East Anglia seems to have been divided into a varying number of “leets,”—and it has been suggested that each leet had to pay an equal amount towards the Danegeld due from the hundred,[328] but the assessment of East Anglia in other respects presents some special difficulties of its own, although they cannot be discussed here.