Hides to Acres (hide to ac)

1 hide equals 120 acres exactly.

1 hide = 120 acres

How to convert hides to acres

To convert hides to acres, multiply the number of hides by 120. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply acres by 0.008333333333 (rounded).

acres = hides × 120

Example: 10 hides = 1,200 acres.

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 these units

Hide (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.

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.

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

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

Acre (ac)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

43,560 square feet or exactly 4,046.8564224 m², about 40% of a hectare. Originally the area a yoke of oxen could plow in a day.

Ploughland gave the acre its name: it traces to Old Norse akr, meaning cultivated land, and is related to German Acker and Latin ager. In medieval England it was a farming measure, the land one man with a team of eight oxen could plough in a day. The traditional strip was 40 perches long and 4 perches wide, which is 660 by 66 feet, or ten square chains. The shape was never the point, and the article on the unit stresses that any area of 43,560 square feet is an acre.

An acre is 43,560 square feet, 4,840 square yards or 1/640 of a square mile, close to 0.4 hectare. For Americans, it is roughly 88 by 55 yards, about 90 percent of a football field without the end zones. The Weights and Measures Act 1878 fixed it at 4,840 square yards in Britain, where trade use ended in 1995. The 1959 international acre is exactly 4,046.8564224 m²; the US survey acre, about 4,046.872 m², differed slightly, and US survey units were retired after 2022.

1 acre = 4,046.856422 square meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Acre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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