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Concept
Hundred (county division)
Summary
A hundred is an administrative division that is geographically part of a larger region. It was formerly used in England, Wales, some parts of the United States, Denmark, Southern Schleswig, Sweden, Finland, Norway, the Bishopric of Ösel–Wiek, Curonia, the Ukrainian state of the Cossack Hetmanate and in Cumberland County in the British Colony of New South Wales. It is still used in other places, including in Australia (in South Australia and the Northern Territory).
Other terms for the hundred in English and other languages include wapentake, herred (Danish and Bokmål Norwegian), herad (Nynorsk Norwegian), hérað (Icelandic), härad or hundare (Swedish), Harde (German), hiird (North Frisian), satakunta or kihlakunta (Finnish), kihelkond (Estonian), kiligunda (Livonian), cantref (Welsh) and sotnia (Slavic).
In Ireland, a similar subdivision of counties is referred to as a barony, and a hundred is a subdivision of a particularly large townland (most townlands are not divided into hundreds).
The origin of the division of counties into hundreds is described by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as "exceedingly obscure". It may once have referred to an area of 100 hides; in early Anglo-Saxon England a hide was the amount of land farmed by and required to support a peasant family, but by the eleventh century in many areas it supported four families. Alternatively the hundred may have been an area originally settled by one "hundred" men at arms, or the area liable to provide one "hundred" men under arms. In this early medieval use, the number term "hundred" can itself be unclear, meaning the "short" hundred (100) or in some contexts the long hundred of 120.
There was an equivalent traditional Germanic system. In Old High German a huntari is a division of a gau, but the OED believes that the link between the two is not established.
List of hundreds of England and Wales
From the 11th century in England, and to a lesser extent from the 16th century in Wales, and until the middle of the 19th century, the annual assemblies had varying degrees of power at a local level in the feudal system.
Official source
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