Hundred (county division)
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), and cantref (Welsh).
The origin of the division of counties into hundreds is described by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as "exceedingly obscure".
In many parts of the country, the Domesday Book contained a radically different set of divisions from that which later became established.
In south 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.
The Hundred Ordinance, which dates to the middle of the century, provided that the court was to meet monthly, and thieves were to be pursued by all the leading men of the district.
[14] The steward of the Chiltern Hundreds is notable as a legal fiction, owing to a quirk of British Parliamentary law.
The position has since been used as a procedural device to allow resignation from the British House of Commons as a (formerly) remunerated office of the Crown.
In the Domesday Book of 1086, the term is used instead of hundreds in Yorkshire, the Five Boroughs of Derby, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford, and also sometimes in Northamptonshire.
According to the first-century historian Tacitus, in Scandinavia the wapentake referred to a vote passed at an assembly by the brandishing of weapons.
[16] In some counties, such as Leicestershire, the wapentakes recorded at the time of Domesday Book later evolved into hundreds.
[17] Although no longer part of local government, there is some correspondence between the rural deanery and the former wapentake or hundred; especially in the East Midlands, the Buckingham Archdeaconry and the York Diocese.
[18] In Wales an ancient Celtic system of division called cantrefi (a hundred farmsteads; singular cantref) had existed for centuries and was of particular importance in the administration of the Welsh law.
[19] With the coming of Christianity, the llan (similar to the parish) based Celtic churches often took the borders of the older cantrefi, and the same happened when Norman 'hundreds' were enforced on the people of Wales.
The name is assumed to mean an area that should organise 100 men to crew four rowed war boats, which each had 12 pairs of oars and a commander.
[citation needed] Eventually, that division was superseded by introducing the härad or Herred, which was the term in the rest of the Nordic countries.
This word was either derived from Proto-Norse *harja-raiðō (warband) or Proto-Germanic *harja-raiða (war equipment, cf.
[21] Similar to skipreide, a part of the coast where the inhabitants were responsible for equipping and manning a war ship.
A härad functioned also as electoral district for one peasant representative during the Riksdag of the Estates (Swedish parliament 1436–1866).
In a rural hundred the lensmann (chief of local state authorities) was called nimismies ("appointed man"), or archaically vallesmanni (from Swedish).
In the Swedish era (up to 1809), his main responsibilities were maintenance of stagecoach stations and coaching inns, supplying traveling government personnel with food and lodging, transport of criminal prisoners, police responsibilities, arranging district court proceedings (tingsrätt), collection of taxes, and sometimes arranging hunts to cull the wolf and bear population.
Some Norwegian districts have the word herad in their name, of historical reasons - among them Krødsherad and Heradsbygd in eastern Norway.
Counties in Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania were divided into hundreds in the 17th century, following the English practice familiar to the colonists.
[22] Following American independence, the term "hundred" fell out of favour and was replaced by "election district".
