Note 83 — Chapter X · IONIC PORTION OF HELLAS. — ATHENS BEFORE SOLON.

So in reference to the Anglo-Saxon Tythings and Hundreds, and to the still more widely-spread division of the Hundred, which seems to pervade the whole of Teutonic and Scandinavian antiquity, much more extensively than the tything;—there is no ground for believing that these precise numerical proportions were in general practice realized: the systematic nomenclature served its purpose by marking the idea of graduation and the type to which a certain approach was actually made. Mr. Thorpe observes, respecting the Hundred, in his Glossary to the “Ancient Laws and Institutes of England,” v. Hundred, Tything, Frid-Borg, etc. “In the Dialogus de Scaccario, it is said that a Hundred ‘ex hydarum aliquot centenariis, sed non determinatis, constat: quidam enim ex pluribus, quidam ex paucioribus constat.’ Some accounts make it consist of precisely a hundred hydes, others of a hundred tythings, others of a hundred free families. Certain it is, that whatever may have been its original organization, the Hundred, at the time when it becomes known to us, differed greatly in extent in various parts of England.”