Tribal Hidage - Historiography

Historiography

Sir Henry Spelman was the first to publish the Tribal Hidage in his first volume of Glossarium Archaiologicum (1626) and there is also a version of the text in a book written in 1691 by Thomas Gale, but no actual discussion of the Tribal Hidage emerged until 1848, when John Mitchell Kemble's The Saxons in England was published. In 1884, Walter de Gray Birch wrote a paper for the British Archaeological Society, in which he discussed in detail the location of each of the tribes. The term Tribal Hidage was introduced by Frederic William Maitland in 1897, in his book Domesday Book and Beyond. During the following decades, articles were published by William John Corbett (1900), Hector Munro Chadwick (1905) and John Brownbill (1912 and 1925). The most important subsequent accounts of the Tribal Hidage since Corbett, according to Campbell, are by Josiah Cox Russell (1947), Cyril Hart (1971), Wendy Davies and Hayo Vierck (1974) and David Dumville (1989).

Kemble recognised the antiquity of Spelman's document and used historical texts (such as Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum) to assess its date of origin. He proposed locations for each tribe, without attempting to locate each one, and suggested that some Anglo-Saxon peoples were missing from the document. Birch, in his paper An Unpublished Manuscript of some Early Territorial Names in England, announced his discovery of what became known as Recension A, which he suggested was a 10th or 11th century copy of a lost 7th century manuscript. He methodically compared all the publications and manuscripts of the Tribal Hidage that are available at the time and placed each tribe using both his own theories and the ideas of others, some of which (for instance when he located the Wokensætna in Woking, Surrey) are now discounted. Maitland suspected that the accepted number of acres to each hide needed to be reconsidered to account for the figures in the Tribal Hidage and used his own calculations to conclude that the figures were probably exaggerated. John Brownbill advised against using Latin versions of the document, which he described as error-prone. He determined that the Old English manuscript was written in 1032 and was a copy of an original Mercian manuscript. Chadwick attempted to allocate each tribe to one or more English shires, with the use of key passages from historical texts.

In Hart's 1971 paper he attempts "a complete reconstruction of the political geography of Saxon England at the end of the 8th century". Assuming that all the English south of the Humber are listed within the Tribal Hidage, he has produced a map that divides southern England into Mercia's provinces and outlying dependencies, using evidence from river boundaries and other topographical features, place-names and historical borders.