Tribal Hidage - Importance For Historians

Importance For Historians

The Tribal Hidage is a valuable record for historians. It is unique in that no similar text has survived: the document is one of a very few to survive out of a great many records that were produced by the administrators of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, a "chance survivor" of many more documents, as Campbell has suggested. Hart has observed that "as a detailed record of historical topography it has no parallel in the whole of western Europe". The Tribal Hidage lists several minor kingdoms and tribes that are not recorded anywhere else and is generally agreed to be the earliest fiscal document that has survived from mediaeval England.

Historians have used the Tribal Hidage to provide evidence for the political organisation of Anglo-Saxon England and it has been "pressed into service by those seeking to interpret the nature and geography of kingships and of 'peoples' in pre-Viking England", according to N. J. Higham. In particular, the document has been seen as invaluable for providing evidence about the Mercian state and those peoples that were under its rule or influence.

Alex Woolf uses the concentration of tribes with very small hidages between Mercia and East Anglia as part of an argument that there were in existence "large, multi-regional provinces, some of which were surrounded by small, contested territories". Stenton positions the Middle Anglian peoples to the south-east of the Mercians. He suggests that an independent Middle Anglia once existed, seemingly consisting of twenty of the peoples that were listed in the Tribal Hidage. The expansion of Wessex in the tenth century would have caused the obliteration of the Middle Anglia's old divisions, by which time the places listed would have become mere names. Middle Anglia in the 7th century constitutes a model for the development of English administrative units during the period, according to Davies and Vierck, who demonstrate that it was created by Penda of Mercia when he made his son Peada king of the Middle Angles at the time that they were introduced to Christianity.

James Campbell refutes suggestions that the hides given for each tribe were the sum of a system of locally-collected assessments and argues that a two-tier system of assessment, one for large areas such as kingdoms and a more accurate one for individual estates, may have existed. He considers the possibility that many of the tribes named in the Tribal Hidage were no more than administrative units and that some names did not originate from a tribe itself but from a place from where the people were governed, eventually coming to signify the district where the tribe itself lived. Barbara Yorke suggests that the -sætan/sæte form of several of the place-names are an indication that they were named after a feature of the local landscape. She also suggests the tribes were dependent administrative units and not independent kingdoms, some of which were created as such after the main kingdoms were stabilized.

The term Tribal Hidage may perhaps have led scholars to underestimate how the names of the tribes were used by Anglo-Saxon administrators for the purpose of labelling local regions; the names could be referring to actual peoples (whose identity was retained after they fell under Mercian domination), or administrative areas that were unconnected with the names of local peoples. Campbell suggests that the truth lies between somewhere between these two possibilities. Davies and Vierck believe the smallest of the groups in the Tribal Hidage originated from populations formed into tribes after the departure of the Romans in the fifth century and suggest that these tribes might sometimes have joined forces, until large kingdoms such as Mercia emerged around the beginning of the 7th century. Scott DeGregorio has argued that the Tribal Hidage provides evidence that Anglo-Saxon governments required a system of "detailed assessment" in order to construct great earthworks such as Offa's Dyke.

The kingdom of East Anglia is recorded for the first time in the Tribal Hidage. According to Davies and Vierck, 7th century East Anglia may have consisted of a collection of regional groups, some of which retained their individual identity. Martin Carver agrees with Davies and Vierck when he describes the territory of East Anglia as having unfixed borders, stating that "political authority appears to have primarily invested in people rather than territory".