I can't find much pre-Norman information about what a hide actually was besides a reference to "space for a family" and it being roughly 120 acres. This seems like a lot of land for a mother, father and even several children to subsist on so I was wondering if a hide housed an extended family of a patriach and several grown sons with their families?
How would so-called cottage industries have worked during this era? Would several hides have had each one of them doing their own blacksmithery, tanning, milling and spinning or would there have been experts that serviced all of them? Would houses have been in the middle of their fields or would they have been on the edge alongside a few other hides forming a natural village?
What would have been farmed, I assume it would have been a subsistence polyculture with a few livestock, some form of legume, a vegetable garden and either one grain (wheat) or several taking up the lion's share of the fields?
Hello, I answered most of your question here. Although some of the naming conventions change post-1066, the general organisation doesn't really, and a lot of the land distributions and uses would have remained the same throughout the period.
You're right that while land was assessed in hides (Anglo-Saxon), 'ploughlands' (post-1066), carucates (literally 'ploughlands', from the Latin, usually used pre-1066) or sulungs (maybe equivalent to a hide, a popular measurement in Kent), it typically wasn't held in hides. The most commonly held parcel of land was the virgate (or 'quarter'), likely around some 30 acres. While they were typically held by individual tenants, fields appear to have been largely worked communally, suggested by the presence of communal plough teams in numbers roughly the same as that of the 'hides'. Hides, ploughlands, etc. were importantly assessed in terms of productivity rather than discrete size, so a 'hide' in East Anglia could be radically different from a 'hide' in Derbyshire. Pasture and meadow was typically assessed alongside the Hidage measure rather than as part of it. Sheep were a major economic crop and were widespread. Cattle could be. Oxen were very common as working animals. Horses were also fairly common.
If you're looking specifically at the sixth century, then you're more likely to see a two- rather than three-field crop rotation, as that really arrives in the 8th century, but there's still a movement towards rotation over earlier infield-outfield agriculture.