Hide (unit)

The "Hide" is an obsolete English unit of land area. It is believed to have represented the amount of land sufficient to support one free peasant family and their household. Its size varied considerably depending on the quality of the land, the region, and the period in question.

While often described as being equivalent to 120 acres, this is a simplification. In practice, a hide could range from as little as 60 acres to as much as 180 acres or even more. It wasn't a fixed measurement but a tax assessment unit. The value of a hide was relative to its agricultural productivity. Better land, capable of supporting a family more easily, might be a smaller acreage hide, while poorer land would comprise a larger acreage hide.

The hide was primarily used during the Anglo-Saxon period in England, from roughly the 7th century to the Norman Conquest in 1066 and beyond. Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, used the hide as a fundamental unit for assessing land value and tax obligations. Land was often described in terms of how many hides it comprised.

The hide gradually fell out of use as a primary unit of land measurement following the Norman Conquest, replaced by other units like the carucate (also known as a ploughland). The carucate, like the hide, also represented the amount of land one plough team could till in a year. While different in name, the carucate often closely corresponded to the hide, reflecting a similar principle of land assessment based on productivity. The use of the hide eventually diminished completely as more standardized and geographically consistent measures were adopted.