Reading Old Land Records

Perch is a term used both for length and area measurements.

As a length, 1 perch = 16.5 feet.

As an area, 1 perch = a square perch, i. e. 16.5 ft x 16.5 ft.

The perch may seem like a rather odd unit, but it was convenient when considered in terms of fractions of a mile or acre.

1 mile = 320 (linear) perches, or 1/4 mile = 80 perches.

1 acre = 160 (square) perches

Perch is also used as a term to measure volume in masonry work where 1 perch = 16.5 ft x 1.5 ft x 1 ft. = 24.75 cu ft.

The hide was originally based on the amount of land needed to support one fighting man and his family, not area. Later attempts to quantify and standardize the hide resulted in 120 acres, an estimate of the area of land a family could till in one year. Hides were sometimes called "ploughs" for that same reason, based on the assumption each family owned one plough. In Scotland, the equivalent of a hide was called a "house", i.e. each family had a house, 100 houses equaling a hundred.

A good succinct definition of the term "Hundred" as it was used in Delaware is found on page 49 of John A. Munroe's History of Delaware:

"A Hundred is an old English subdivision of a county, its origin shrouded in mystery because the name is as old as the language and meant, in geographic terms, not much more or less when it was first used in this sense than it meant in colonial America. The name was used in many colonies but survived in America only in Delaware, probably because there the counties were all established so early--by 1680--that little reorganization was needed. In New England, the newer English term, town, replaced hundred, and in Pennsylvania and New Jersey the term township was adopted."

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds served as both tax districts and voting precincts in Delaware. Hundreds are not geographically uniform and as population and the complexity of government expanded in the 19th century they were occasionally subdivided. Thus, in Sussex, with which I am most familiar, presentday Georgetown Hundred is composed of the western part of the original Broadkill Hundred, Gumboro Hundred is composed of parts of Dagsboro and Broad Creek Hundreds, etc. Similar subdivisions occurred in Kent and New Castle Counties.

Anyone who is interested in a really technical discussion of the early use and evolution of the term hundred and such related terms as hide and hidage, might wish to consult Chapter 6 - The Beginnings of English Government - of Michael Wood's 1986 book Domesday: A Search for the Roots of England (1986, Facts on File Publications/BBC Books, NYC & London). While Wood's account is too detailed to reprint in full here, to summarize his account, the term hundred evolved from Anglo-Saxon and Roman terms used to refer to kind of mid-level tax and administrative subdistricts of counties. The smallest units were "hides" and a hundred consisted of one hundred hides. Wood notes that "These blocks of 100 hides can be connected with Bede's remarks ["the venerable Bede,"

Anglo-saxon historian -D.C.] about such districts being composed 'according to the English custom' of so many units of 'land for one family' - the English translation of which was 'hide': originally the amount of land which could support one peasant family. The hide, of course, was an abstract idea, whose actual area varied greatly from region to region depending on local conditions, quality of soil and so on; it could therefore be employed as a form of tax assessment whose rating could be moved up or down...." (Wood, p. 86)

Thus, "Hundred" as it has been used historically in Delaware and elsewhere in colonial America is pretty much in keeping with the medieval English use of the term, as Dr. Munroe said, although by the time the term found its way to America there was no longer any particular relationship to the original idea of a hundred being an area capable of supporting one hundred families. The business about a hundred being an area from which 100 fighting men could be drawn appears to be a myth that evolved from the one hundred family idea. - Dick Carter