The Geþyncðo states that "...if a ceorl prospered, that he possessed fully five hides of land of his own [7] a bell and a castle-gate, a seat and special office in the king's hall, then was he henceforth entitled to the rights of a thegn."
This made me question just how many ceorls possessed any number of hides at all. How exactly was it possible for hides to be representative of enough land to sustain a household if there were people who were landless and worked on the manor of a thegn or other landed noble?
Additionally, with the land tenures of folcland, lænland, and bocland, would they have been applied to individual hides or have nothing to do with them at all? If it's the former, how would any king draw out new estates to be acquired without displacing the people living on folcland or confiscating lænland/bocland?
I'm assuming the landed nobility must have held their estates as bocland, but who did they acquire these lands from unless folcland was converted by way of a royal charter granting ownership?
The idea that a hide of land was enough to sustain a household is a slightly odd one that seems to have stuck around without any real evidential basis. While we unfortunately lack contemporary pre-Conquest land tenure records, the evidence of Domesday Book (which theoretically reflects land holding customs at least in the same vein as those during the reign of Edward the Confessor, and thus presumably much earlier) illustrates that the most common land holding - by both Freemen and tenant farmers - was a virgate, a quarter of a hide at very, very approximately some 30 acres. Almost as many households again were smallholders, supporting themselves on holdings anywhere between 5 and 15 acres. Bearing in mind that such a bordar was likely on the more marginal fringes of a community, it was nonetheless theoretically possible for 1/24 of a hide to support a household.
There's considerable debate as to the extent of Freeman-ship in pre-Conquest England given its scale and distribution in Domesday. Freemen are far more numerous in former Danelaw areas, but still represent on average only about 14% of listed households, and most on average hold 'only' a virgate. It's hypothesised (Hadley, 2000) that the greater proportion of Freemen in the former Danelaw represents not necessarily land settled through conquest by the Danes, but rather a greater expropriation of previously free-held land during the increasing bureaucratic centralisation of Wessex in the late 9th and early 10th centuries. Tenure could of course flow the other way: when Æthelstan granted Freeman status to the people of Malmesbury in the wake of Brunanburh, it was presumably at the cost of expropriating that land from its previous landlord, unless of course that was royally-held land. War and conquest provided a ready source of land which could be granted, thus providing a convenient means of rewarding service and simultaneously expanding control and stability over newly-held territory. Æthelflæd of Mercia, for example, is quick to grant land for new settlement in the environs of Derby after her army stormed that burh and captured it from the Danes in 916. Likewise, the securing of the Cheshire Plain through the burhs at Chester and Eddisbury provided a ready source of new land.
Of course, land is finite, and by the 11th Century we arrive in the curious situation whereby Edward the Confessor is not the majority landowner in England. That he remains powerful is an indication that by this point, the monarchy had gained sufficient centralised power and authority as an institution to weather the king himself not being so freely able to grant bookland. There is the occasional episode of expropriation of bookland: the brief and troubled reign of the young Edward 'the Martyr' in particular is marked by the large-scale expropriation of ecclesiastical land granted by his father Edgar by both the Ealdormen of Wessex and Mercia.