Hides to Square Miles (hide to mi²)

1 hide equals 0.1875 square miles exactly.

1 hide = 0.1875 square miles

How to convert hides to square miles

To convert hides to square miles, multiply the number of hides by 0.1875. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply square miles by 5.333333333 (rounded).

square miles = hides × 0.1875

Example: 10 hides = 1.875 square miles.

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

Square Mile (mi²)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

640 acres or about 2.59 km². Used for the area of cities, states and countries in the US and UK.

A thousand Roman paces, mille passus, became the mile, and under Elizabeth I Parliament fixed the statute mile at eight furlongs, or 5,280 feet, in place of the older Roman-based value. The square mile inherits that length. Its most famous use came in the United States: the Land Ordinance of 1785 started the Public Land Survey System so that western land could be surveyed and sold to pay war debts, beginning with the Seven Ranges in eastern Ohio.

In that system a section is roughly one square mile, or 640 acres, and a township is 36 sections in a square six miles on a side. One square mile is nearly 2.59 million square meters. Chicago's Midway International Airport, at about 650 acres, covers roughly 1.02 square miles. Beware the phrase mile square: a region 20 miles square has 400 square miles, but so does a rectangle 10 by 40 miles. The US survey version of the mile was retired from 1 January 2023, but the international square mile remains the unit for cities, states and countries in the US and UK.

1 square mile = 2,589,988.11 square meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Square mile; Wikipedia: Public Land Survey System; Wikipedia: Mile

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