21 Facts About Tribal Hidage

Tribal Hidage is a list of thirty-five tribes that was compiled in Anglo-Saxon England some time between the 7th and 9th centuries.

Original purpose of the Tribal Hidage remains unknown: it could be a tribute list created by a king, but other purposes have been suggested.

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.

Tribal Hidage has been of importance to historians since the middle of the 19th century, partly because it mentions territories unrecorded in other documents.

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 when Mercia held hegemony over them.

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Some historians have proposed that the Tribal Hidage is not a list of peoples, but of administrative areas.

Tribal Hidage'storians disagree on the date for the original compilation of the list.

Frank Stenton wrote that "the Tribal Hidage was almost certainly compiled in Mercia", whilst acknowledging a lack of conclusive evidence.

Tribal Hidage warns against assuming that the minor peoples possessed any "means of defining themselves as a distinct gentes".

Sir Henry Spelman was the first to publish the Tribal Hidage in his first volume of Glossarium Archaiologicum and there is a version of the text in a book written in 1691 by Thomas Gale, but no actual discussion of the Tribal Hidage emerged until 1848, when John Mitchell Kemble's The Saxons in England was published.

The term Tribal Hidage was introduced by Frederic William Maitland in 1897, in his book Domesday Book and Beyond.

Tribal Hidage proposed locations for each tribe, without attempting to locate each one, and suggested that some Anglo-Saxon peoples were missing from the document.

Tribal Hidage methodically compared all the publications and manuscripts of the Tribal Hidage that are available at the time and placed each tribe using both his own theories and the ideas of others, some of which are now discounted.

Maitland suspected that the accepted number of acres to each hide needed to be reconsidered to account for the figures in the Tribal Hidage and used his own calculations to conclude that the figures were probably exaggerated.

Tribal Hidage determined that the Old English manuscript was written in 1032 and was a copy of an original Mercian manuscript.

Tribal Hidage'storians have used the Tribal Hidage to provide evidence for the political organisation of Anglo-Saxon England and it has been "pressed into service by those seeking to interpret the nature and geography of kingships and of 'peoples' in pre-Viking England", according to N J Higham.

Tribal Hidage suggests that an independent Middle Anglia once existed, seemingly consisting of twenty of the peoples that were listed in the Tribal Hidage.

Tribal Hidage considers the possibility that many of the tribes named in the Tribal Hidage were no more than administrative units and that some names did not originate from a tribe itself but from a place from where the people were governed, eventually coming to signify the district where the tribe itself lived.

Tribal Hidage suggests the tribes were dependent administrative units and not independent kingdoms, some of which were created as such after the main kingdoms were stabilized.

Davies and Vierck believe the smallest of the groups in the Tribal Hidage originated from populations formed into tribes after the departure of the Romans in the fifth century and suggest that these tribes might sometimes have joined forces, until large kingdoms such as Mercia emerged around the beginning of the 7th century.

Scott DeGregorio has argued that the Tribal Hidage provides evidence that Anglo-Saxon governments required a system of "detailed assessment" in order to construct great earthworks such as Offa's Dyke.