Tribal Hidage

The Tribal Hidage is a list of thirty-five tribes that was compiled in Anglo-Saxon England some time between the 7th and 9th centuries. It includes a number of independent kingdoms and other smaller territories and assigns a number of hides to each one. The list of tribes is headed by Mercia and consists almost exclusively of peoples who lived south of the Humber estuary and territories that surrounded the Mercian kingdom, some of which have never been satisfactorily identified by scholars. The value of 100,000 hides for Wessex is by far the largest: it has been suggested that this was a deliberate exaggeration.

The original purpose of the Tribal Hidage remains unknown: many scholars believe that it was a tribute list created by a king, but other possibilities have been suggested. The hidage figures may be purely symbolic and merely reflect the prestige of each territory, or they may represent an early example of book-keeping. Many historians are convinced that the Tribal Hidage originated from Mercia, which dominated southern Anglo-Saxon England until the start of the 9th century, but others have argued that the text was Northumbrian in origin.

The Tribal Hidage has been of great importance to historians since the middle of the 19th century, partly because it mentions territories unrecorded in other documents. Attempts to link all the names in the list with modern places are highly speculative and all resulting maps are treated with caution. Three different versions (or recensions) of the Tribal Hidage have survived, two of which resemble each other: one dates from the 11th century and is part of a miscellany of works; another is contained in a 17th-century Latin treatise; the third version, which has survived in six mediaeval manuscripts, has many omissions and spelling variations. All three versions appear to be based on the same lost manuscript: historians have been unable to establish a date for the original compilation. The Tribal Hidage has been used to construct theories about the political organisation of the Anglo-Saxons, and to give an insight into the Mercian state and its neighbours at a time when Mercia held hegemony over a number of other peoples. It has been used to support theories regarding the origin and location of the tribes in the list and the way in which the tribes were systematically assessed and ruled by others. Some historians have proposed that the Tribal Hidage is not a list of peoples but of administrative areas.

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