Anglo-Saxon England

The Tribal Hidage is a late seventh century assessment list, or tribute list, which includes all the dominant tribes in the Mercian kingdom in England, plus territories which were under its domination.

Each tribe was assessed by the number of hides under their control (Old English 'hida', meaning a unit of land). The document was probably compiled under the reign of Berthwald (675-685) or Ethelred (685-702).

In its own way it is an early form of the eleventh century Domesday Book, and represents the growing power of the Mercian monarchy over all of southern England, something the kingdom would maintain throughout the eighth century.

Although this description is a consensus view, others argue that the Tribal Hidage is a document for Northumbrian domination. Historian N J Higham contends that it was drawn up in the 620s by Edwin of Northumbria as an expression of his overlordship of Mercia. However, this seems to be easily dismissed by the lack of northern kingdoms in the list, including the northern half of Elmet which, by the end of the seventh century, seems to have been divided between Mercia and Northumbria.

Through the list, the Mercian king would have been able to assess the taxes which were due to him from each of the many peoples under his control at a time when England was not one nation. Instead it still consisted of multiple kingdoms, each of which was made up of many peoples, sub-groupings, or even regions which had been under Anglo-Saxon control for less than a century. The only exclusion is Cornwall west of the Camel estuary, which was still under independent British control at the time.

The original manuscript has been lost, but it still exists in three, slightly different versions, known as Recension A (dated to 1034, and probably written in Mercia, it is now in the British Library), Recension B (which is from Henry Spelman's Archæologus in modum Glosarii ad rem antiquam posteriorem, published in 1626, which is believed to be derived from a Latin version of the Tribal Hidage), and Recension C (from six manuscripts from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries).

The manuscript

This list is taken mainly from Recension A as formatted by Tony Jebson. Suggested locations are influenced to a minor extent by Cyril Hart, and by Wendy Davies & Hayo Vierck.

Main Sources

British Library - Harley 3271 f 6v

Brown, Michelle P & Carol Ann Farr - Mercia, Leicester University Press, London 2001

Davies, Wendy & Hayo Vierck - The Contexts of the Tribal Hidage: Social Aggregates and Settlement Patterns, Fruhmittelalterliche Studien 8, 1974

Hart, Cyril - The Tribal Hidage, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, Vol 21, 1971, pp 133-157

Jebson, Tony - Tribal Hidage, Georgetown University, 1994

Text copyright © P L Kessler & Edward Dawson. An original feature for the History Files.