HIDE. This word can most accurately be rendered by the phrase "family land"; originally it denoted the amount of land necessary for the support of a free peasant family. The actual amount of land covered by this term is still and is long likely to be a matter under discussion. In the 12th and 13th centuries, when records are first abundant, the hide commonly appears as 120 acres of arable, with the meadow and the pasture-rights locally considered appurtenant to such a tenement. But the scanty evidence which comes from an earlier time suggests that, at least in Wessex, the hide had once been much smaller than this, and there are facts which point to a pre-Conquest southern hide of 48 acres. The large hide of 120 acres is best recorded in the eastern midlands, and its appearance there may in part be due to the influence of the large Scandinavian tenements intro duced into the neighbouring country by the Danish settlements of the ninth century. In any case, throughout England, the hide under lay the whole local organization of Early English society. It was the basis of the earliest taxation, the contributions made by dif ferent districts to the support of kings and eaidormen, and it seems to have formed also the basis according to which the primitive English militia, the fyrd, was raised. By the end of the old Eng lish period it had become unusual for a single peasant to hold an entire hide. The quarter hide, or yardland (Lat. virgata) had be come, and long continued to be, the normal peasant tenement. Long after the Norman Conquest, however, the hide was the unit according to which assessment to national taxation, such as dane geld (q.v.), was expressed. The Norman administration main tained the old English system by which most villages in the mid lands and the south and west of England were assessed at some round number of hides, such as 5, 10 or 25, an arrangement which undoubtedly descends from the time when the hide was the essen tial unit of agrarian economy. (F. M. S.) voluminous literature relating to the hide may conveniently be approached through J. H. Round, Feudal England (1895) ; F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond (1897) ; F. Liebermann, "Hufe" in Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (1898-1916) ; P. Vinogradoff, English Society in the Eleventh Century (1908) . The system of assessment based on the hide will be found explained in any of the articles on Domesday Survey contributed by Round in the Victoria History of the Counties of England, ed. H. A. Doubleday (190o).