A fascinating Anglo-Saxon document, the Burghal
Hidage , provides a list of fortified places in the ancient kingdom of Wessex.
(22.) Sayyah M, Kamalinejad M,
Hidage RB, Rustaiyan A.
The Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of Southern Britain AD 450-650: Beneath the Tribal
Hidage (reprint, 2014)
(18.) Sayyah M, Kamalinejad M, Bahrami
Hidage R, Rustaiyan A.
This is a well-produced volume of thirteen papers following a conference at University College, London, in 2007 supported by the British Academy, which in turn arose from Beyond the Burghal
Hidage, a three-year project sponsored by the Leverhulme Fund.
The "Wreocensaetna" - the people of Wroxeter, or settlers by the Wrekin - appear in the so-called Tribal
Hidage, a document listing the peoples who were paying taxes or tribute to the king of Mercia.
(25) Danegeld was a very old tax and like carucage was based on a measure of land known as a
hidage. It was levied originally to provide resources to fight the Danes, hence its name, but only appears to have been given the name danegeld in the 12th century.
In southern Britain, the land is divided into "hides," which originally referred to the amount of land that could support one peasant family." (7) Formal records, for example, the Tribal
Hidage being one of the earliest, were kept and used as the basis for the imposition of taxes.
and Bede's Ecclesiastical History, with their own examples of creativity in the representation of the past; the Burghal
Hidage, a census of Anglo-Saxon settlements that was drawn up early in the tenth century to serve as an aid to taxation and military duties; a number of lives of English saints, whether composed in prose or verse, including AElfric's late tenth-century lives of the royal saints King Oswald and King Edmund; and Beowulf and the Finnsburh Fragment, with their stories relating to great kings and heroes of the Northern world, to the extent that those poems can be ascribed to the tenth century in the form that we now have them.
Dodgson, 'A linguistic analysis of the place-names of the Burghal
Hidage', in The Defence of Wessex: The Burghal
Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications, ed.
The tax assessments are reported in hides and fiscal acres and are often referred to as the
hidage system.