"Lancashire: Hundreds and Other Things," by Sherry Irvine, BA, CGRS, FSA(Scot) Of the four Lancashire CDs in the English Parish Records (EPR) series, three contain the term 'hundreds' in the title. Other EPR titles stick to county names, three mention dioceses, and Yorkshire has its 'ridings' -- North, East and West. (Riding is derived from an Old English word meaning third part, which explains why there never has been a 'south' riding.) So what are 'hundreds?' Are there one hundred in a county? Do all counties have them? The best way to begin is with a definition. Hundreds were sub-divisions of shires and counties, each with its own court. They were judicial, military, and taxation units that emerged before William the Conqueror. Domesday Book is arranged by counties and hundreds. Size varied, but the basis for drawing up the hundreds of a county was pretty much the same everywhere. It was an area that comprised one hundred families, or one hundred 'hides.' A hide (also known as a carucate) was a measure of land--the amount required by one free family and its dependents. This amount of land was defined in turn as that which could be tilled by one plough and a team of oxen in one year. The hundred was a practical division of local administration for a very long time. Genealogists encounter hundreds in directories; they are listed in the county sections within Samuel Lewis' Topographical Dictionary of England; they appear on maps. Among the records arranged this way are hearth taxes in the late 1600s and militia records of the 1700s. This ancient division is not found in every county. The four extreme northern counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, Durham, and Northumberland, were broken up into wards. On the eastern side of England, the equivalent of a hundred is the wapentake, a term which the Danes brought with them. Wapentakes are found in Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland, and Yorkshire. In several counties the hundred (or the wapentake) is a sub-division of a unit that falls between it and the county. Yorkshire has its ridings, Lincolnshire has three divisions (Lindsey, Kestevan, Holland); in the southeast, Kent has 62 hundreds within five 'lathes' and Sussex has 66 hundreds within six 'rapes.' Lancashire had six hundreds. There is something from all six of them among these CDs and the pairings make geographic sense (there are two hundreds on each of three CDs, and the fourth covers general sources and part of Neighboring Westmorland). Salford (contains Manchester) and West Derby (contains Liverpool) are the southern two, Blackburn and Leyland are in the middle, Amounderness and Lonsdale, the northern pair including the part of Lancashire across Morecambe Bay (now part of Cumbria). For comparison, Cornwall had nine hundreds, Essex had twenty, and Norfolk had thirty-three. The smaller divisions reflect the larger number of people per square mile and the greater fertility of the land. You cannot be a genealogist without an interest in and an affection for maps of all sorts. Sooner or later, you will need to know in which hundred a particular parish is located, or which hundreds need to be searched to collect all entries of one surname in one type of record.