Hide

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)Approximate value

About 120 acres, the land needed to support one household. The Domesday Book assessed England in hides, but the real size varied by region.

1 hide = 485,622.7707 square meters (approximately).

Approximate value. Standards for the hide varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.

About the hide

Old English hid, tied to a word for family, named land that could support one peasant household. Bede, writing around 731, described territory by the number of families it fed, and the hide grew into the main tax unit of Anglo-Saxon England, assessed in the Domesday survey of 1086 against figures for 1066.

Treating it as an area is risky. Wikipedia calls it a measure of value rather than of size and says the old idea of a fixed 120 acres cannot be sustained, though Cambridgeshire entries do reckon a hide as 120 geld acres, which were units of assessment and not ground area. Four virgates made a hide in most counties, but Sussex used eight, and Kent counted in sulungs.

The figure used here, about 120 acres or roughly 485,600 square meters, is the traditional round number. Northern and eastern counties under Danish law used the carucate instead, nominally the same size, divided into eight oxgangs.

Sources: Wikipedia: Hide (unit); Wikipedia: Carucate; Domesday Book Online: Glossary

Hide conversion chart

1 hide expressed in every other area unit:

More Medieval English units

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• oxgang (area)
• virgate (area)
• barleycorn (length)
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• span (length)
• cubit (length)
• ell (length)
• moment (time)
• baker's dozen (counting & quantity)
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