Welcome to Early Medieval Land Tenure!

Our biggest problem when dealing with pre-Conquest land tenure is an almost complete lack of statistical sources (depending on whether you think The Burghal Hidage was an actual policy document, an ad-hoc record or mere wishful thinking) leading to a reliance for better or worse largely on Domesday Book, and attempting to infer as much as possible from that source's data as seems reasonable about the preceding centuries. We'll get on to the problems of Domesday Book itself in a minute.

What the most brief glance at Domesday Book will illustrate is that Bede's assertion that a Hide is the amount of land necessary to support a family is, by the 11th Century at least, woefully inaccurate. The situation may have been different in 7th Century Northumbria, but it's unlikely to have been that different. The first problem with the Hide is that it is not a discrete unit of measurement, nor is it universal. The carucate was popular in East Anglia, and the Sulung popular in Kent, while post-1066, the "Ploughland" reigns supreme. These terms are broadly held to be roughly analogous - ploughland and carucate at least share an etymological root - but while ploughland is at least at attempt at a set geographical unit, 'Hide' appears to have been largely a unit of productivity rather than size, and definitely resists any attempts to put a standardised measurement on it (Harvey, 2007; Baker and Brookes, 2011). It's likely that what Bede meant by "the land of one family" was, more explicitly, the average amount of land held by 7th Century Northumbrian Freeman households, who, as the highest tier of peasantry and those who owned their land outright and owed military service, were possibly the only class who would have occurred to Bede (Hill and Rumble, 1996). Certainly by the 10th and 11th centuries, this was not by any means 'the land of one family.' By the time of Domesday, the most common measure of land tenure, both among the Freeman class and tenant farmers, was the virgate, a quarter of a hide or ploughland and equivalent roughly to about 30 acres. Since approximately 30% of households at Domesday were 'smallholders' holding anywhere between 5 to 15 acres, it appears that a virgate was more than enough to sustain a household and provide a surplus in normal conditions. Holding a whole hide would likely make you quite comfortable, at least for a peasant.

It's worth noting at this point that a 'Hundred' doesn't really correlate with being a hundred hides; again this may once have been the case but doesn't really match up with the figures on the ground. As an example, in Blandford Hundred in Dorset, 153 Hides or Ploughlands can be found in the towns of Wimborne Minster, Moor Crichel and Shapwick alone, before you take into account other smaller villages such as Didlington, Horton or Petersham. It's also worth pointing out that rent was often not provided in terms of food from a tenants' own land, but rather in service on the manorial ploughlands attached to many settlements. Some of these obligations can be seen in texts like the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum, which also dealt with the expansion of military service obligation to tenant farmers following the Fyrd reforms. Rather than provide rent in kind, tenants were most often liable to provide a certain number of days per month or year to provide labour on their Lord's lands. These are the 'Lord's ploughlands' frequently found at settlements in Domesday. It was the labour on these fields which would ultimately provide food rent to manorial lords, but this did not come out of the tenant's own land holdings.

Trying to establish what is meant by a 'household' at Domesday is its own massive can of worms. Doomsday Book is a work focused primarily on manorial revenue, not demographics, and as a result its population data is quite vague, and its rate of omission has been estimated as high as 20%. In particular this would have included the number of households within any settlement who would need feeding but wouldn't necessarily actually hold land: herdsmen, tradesmen and craftsmen, day labourers and so forth. Estimates on the average size of a 'household' range from as low as 3 to as high as 8 or 9 depending on author, but broadly speaking we tend to estimate it at around 4-5. As you can see, a settlement listed with 30 households could theoretically have a population anywhere between 90 to 200 people, although we'd tend to estimate it would most likely be around 120.

In terms of working the land and practicality, even a hide or virgate wouldn't be worked contiguously, and certainly not anything on the scale of a whole Hundred. A Hundred would be comprised of multiple villages, the largest of which might have some 30+ or even 40+ Hides of land (~360-480 acres) supporting over a hundred households (Wimborne Minster had 52 ploughlands including manorial land supporting 166 households) and the smallest of which could have as few as two or three households working a single hide (such as Hanham in Gloucestershire). Agriculture worked in a three field rotation system to maximise long-term yields and protect the soil, so your average Freeman or villager who held a virgate of 30 acres would only have 20 in use in any given year, with the remaining 10 given over to fallow and, often, for cattle grazing. Of the remaining 20 acres, 10 would be engaged in the growing of primary crops - cereals such as oats, wheat or barley for example - while the other 10 would be used to grow pulses and legumes, crops which restore nitrates to the soil.

At a community level, fields were divided into acre strips and worked pseudo-communally. That is to say that our tenant farmer would hold 10 acre strips in one of the communal fields being used for cereals, 10 in the communal fields being used for legumes, and 10 in the fallow fields. Alongside working these, he would also carry out his service obligations on the strips belonging to his manorial lord when these were necessary. I say 'pseudo-communally' as, although our farmer is responsible for only his strips, he and his neighbours would all provide oxen to the communal plough teams, which would be herded together by hired oxherds and ploughmen, in order to plough the lands of the whole community in one go. Harvest is also likely to have been a similarly communal affair.

It's also important to distinguish tax from rent. Rent was levied by the landowner to the tenants and often paid either in kind or, more commonly in service, e.g. 3-4 days work a month. Tax was paid to the king and collected by royal officials. Æthelstan's London Codex (Æthelstan VI) from the 930s establishes simply:

We have declared that each one of us shall annually contribute four pence for our common benefit... And everyone shall pay his shilling* who has property which is worth thirty pence, except poor widows who have no land and no one to work for them.

*This is likely the Mercian shilling worth 4d rather than the West Saxon shilling worth 12d otherwise that's a very extortionate level of property tax.