A HISTORY OF SUSSEX should we expect it during the period when the county was assessed by manors and not by vills — and, indeed, no system at all can at first be discerned in the geld figures even when they have been tabulated. The assessment of the hundreds T.R.E. varies from 265 hides (Steyning) to i| ('Latille') and 1 1 ('Tifeld'),and practically the only point of resemblance between the various totals lies in their almost unanimous avoidance of any semblance of a round number. It is difficult to believe that such can have been the original condition of the hundreds, and it is worth noticing that it is possible to form the Domesday hundreds into groups strictly in accordance with their positions on the map, each of which groups is approximately a simple multiple of eighty hides — taking the figures given T.R.E.' Moreover the only hundred of which we can assert the antiquity with any degree of certainty is that of Mailing, held entirely and for more than two centuries before the survey by the archbishop ; and this was assessed at 80 hides. In view of the hundred being supposed to have originally contained one hundred hides this suggests a pre-Conquest reduction, or ' beneficial hidation,' of twenty per cent. ; and this theory receives support from another important source. The total number of 80-hide units in Sussex is found to be forty-two and a half, which gives an original, unreduced assessment of 4,250 hides, which is in remarkably close agreement with the 4,350 hides attributed to Sussex in the early hidage roll known as the Burghal Hidage.^ ^ ^ ^ Whether any such wholesale reduction did take place or not, it is clear that beneficial hidation was in progress before the end of the Confessor's reign, from a number of entries which state that there were so many hides in the manor, but they paid geld for a smaller number. Mr. Round has shown ^ that this refers to an earlier assessment and not to the existence of areal hides. A good instance is to be found in the first entry in the Sussex survey, where it is said of Godwin's manor of Bosham ' then there were 56I hides but it paid geld for 38 ' (fo. 16). It is, however, in the Norman period that beneficial hidation becomes so pronounced a feature of the Sussex Domesday. At first sight the reduction of assessment appears most wild and arbitrary. Nothing could have much less appearance of method than the assessment of the archbishop's holdings, where Pagham is reduced from 50 hides to 34, Lavant from 18 to 9I, Patching from 12 hides to 3 hides 3I virgates, and Tarring from 18 hides to 7 hides i virgate. It is not until we add up the totals and find that an assessment of 214 hides has been reduced to 160 hides i virgate that we realize that the archbishop had obtained an abatement of twenty-five per cent, on his whole » This is not the place for the elaboration of what is after all only a theory, but I may mention that I discovered this grouping by 8o-hide units accidentally, while vainly endeavouring to re-constitute the Domesday hundreds into loo-hide groups ; and that the groups, which vary from 3 units to half a unit, are usually less than two and never more than six per cent, at variance with the sum required on the 80- hide hypothesis. Whether it would be possible tore-constitute each of the original 80-hide units from its components I have not yet discovered. ' Dom. Bk. and Beyond, p. 502. s V.C.H. Hants, i. 404. 360
