The Burghal Hidage () is an Anglo-Saxon document providing a list of over thirty fortified places (burhs), the majority being in the ancient Kingdom of Wessex, and the taxes (recorded as numbers of hides) assigned for their maintenance.Hill/ Rumble. The Defence of Wessex. p. 5 The document, so named by Frederic William Maitland in 1897, survives in two versions of medieval and early modern date.Maitland. Domesday Book and Beyond. pp. 502 – 503 Version A, Cotton Otho B.xi was badly damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in Westminster in 1731, but the body of the text survives in a transcript made by the antiquary Laurence Nowell in 1562. Version B survives as a composite part of seven further manuscripts, usually given the title De numero hydarum Anglie in Britannia.Hill/ Rumble. The Defence of Wessex. p. 14 There are several discrepancies in the lists recorded in the two versions of the document: Version A includes references to Burpham, Wareham and Bridport but omits Shaftesbury and Barnstaple which are listed in Version B. Version B also names Worcester and Warwick in an appended list.
The Burghal Hidage offers a detailed picture of the network of burhs that Alfred the Great designed to defend his kingdom from the predations of Viking invaders.Stenton, F. (1971). Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Burhs and hides
After his victory over the Danes at the Battle of Edington (878) and the departure of another Viking army from Fulham in 880, Alfred the Great set about building a system of fortified towns or forts, known as burhs, in response to the Viking threat.Lapidge. Anglo-Saxon England p.76 These burhs included former Roman towns (where stone walls were repaired and perimeter ditches sometimes added), temporary forts and substantial new towns.Welch. Anglo-Saxon England. pp. 127 – 129
In the first half of the 10th century, Alfred's son Edward the Elder and his successors made this type of construction a key element in their campaigns against the Vikings, who had been in control of much of Danelaw. This culminated in the eventual creation of a unified Kingdom of England.
In the event of Danish attacks, the provision of fortified towns was a place of refuge for the Anglo-Saxon rural population who lived within a radius of each town. They also provided secure regional market centres and from around 973 the coinage was reminted every six or seven years by moneyers in about sixty of the burhs.
In early Anglo-Saxon England the hide was used as the basis for assessing the amount of food rent due from an area (known as feorm). Initially the size of the hide varied according to value and resources of the land itself.Rosamond Faith. Hide in Lapidge's. Anglo-Saxon England. pp. 238-239 Over time the hide became the unit on which all public obligation was assessed; as well as food rent, the manning and maintenance of the walls of a burh and the amount of geld payable was based on the hide. Tenants had a threefold obligation related to their landholding; the so-called ‘common burdens' of military service, fortress work, and bridge repair.Hollister. Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions. pp. 59-60 Later the hide was given a set acreage and in the Domesday book the most common size in use was .Maitland. Essay III. The Hide in Domesday Book and Beyond. pp. 490-520 However some areas such as Dorset and Wiltshire used units based on to .Dennis Haselgrove. The Domesday Record of Sussex in Brandons South Saxons pp. 194-195
In wartime, five hides were expected to provide one fully armed soldier in the king's service,Powicke. Military Obligation in Medieval England. pp.18-21 and one man from every hide was to provide garrison duty for the burhs and to help in their initial construction and upkeep. The continued maintenance of the burhs, as well as ongoing garrison duty, was also probably supplied by those inhabitants of the new burhs which were planned by the king as new towns. In this way the economic and military functions of the larger burhs were closely interlinked.Maitland. Essay III. The Hide in Domesday Book and Beyond. The hide also served as a unit of fiscal assessment for the collection of a tax, known as Danegeld, for which the original purpose was to raise money to buy off raiding Vikings; however after that threat had retreated it was retained as a permanent land-tax.E. Lipson, The Economic History of England, 12th ed., vol. 1 p. 16
Origins of the document The document probably dates from after 914 during the reign of Alfred's son, Edward the Elder. This assumes that it was compiled as part of the preparations for Edward the Elder's campaign against the Danes in 917. The list identifies 30 burhs in Wessex, two in Mercia and one in Hwicce.Campbell. Essays in Anglo-Saxon History. p. 173 fn. 8Haslam. King Alfred and the Vikings 'in' Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 13. p. 130. Bath was technically in Mercia at the time [but] defended the South and South Western part of Hwicce. The view that the Burghal Hidage is of early 10th-century date is based on the inclusion of Buckingham and Oxford, two settlements that were sited in Mercia not Wessex, and according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Buckingham was created as a burh by Edward the Elder in 918.Tait. Medieval English Borough. p 16Anglo Saxon Chronicle. 918. .....in the same year, before Martinmas, went King Edward to Buckingham with his army, and sat there four weeks, during which he built the two forts... The Chronicle also reports that Edward the Elder took possession of London and Oxford in 910; Buckingham being situated between the two would have also been included.Anglo Saxon Chronicle. 910. It is possible that the Burghal Hideage was created as a blue-print for the way that burhs were connected with hidation, originally worked out in Wessex, and applied to the situation in Mercia at that time. This received view has now been challenged from two directions – from the perspectives of the strategies involved,Haslam. King Alfred and the Vikings: strategies and tactics, 876-886AD, in Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 13. pp. 121-153. and a new interpretation of the coinage of King Alfred.Mark Blackburn, "The London Mint in the Reign of Alfred", in M.A.S. Blackburn and D.N. Dumville (eds) Kings, Currency and Alliances: History and Coinage in Southern England in the Ninth Century (1998) pp. 105-23; Simon Keynes, "King Alfred and the Mercians", in M. Blackburn & D.Dumville (eds), Kings, Currency and Alliances. History and Coinage in Southern England in the Ninth Century (1998), 1-45.
The order of citation of the individual burhs in the document, in a clockwise circuit around Wessex rather than on a shire by shire basis, indicates that at the time of the original composition of the document all the burhs were seen as being part of a single system. The defining characteristic of this system is that these fortified sites would have all been built at one occasion to serve a single strategic end, in that the functions of all the individual components of the system complemented the functions of each of the others. It follows that it cannot have originated, for instance, as a core number to which others were added at a later date. By the early 10th century this system was already long out of date and overtaken by events. It is not likely therefore to have survived as a viable and effective system to be recorded as such in the Burghal Hidage after 914. There would, furthermore, have been no reason to add Buckingham to a system which by 914 was already redundant in the rapidly evolving political situation of the times. There are therefore good grounds for suggesting that the system (and therefore the document which describes it) is considerably earlier in date.Hill. A gazetteer of Burghal Hidage sites in Hill/ Rumble The Defence of Wessex: The Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon fortifications. Manchester: University Press, pp. 189-231
Political and military context It has long been recognised that the system of burhs recorded in the Burghal Hidage was the creation of King Alfred, the received view being that they were in place by the time of the second Viking invasions in the 890s (based on the evidence in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of the existence of garrisons in many of them by this time), and that most of them were constructed in the 880s. However, the fact that nearly half the number of hides in the system were allocated to burhs on the northern border of Wessex with Mercia suggests a context for the creation of this system in the period when Mercia was occupied and controlled by the Vikings. This was the situation in the period from 874, when the Vikings at Repton installed Ceolwulf (II) as king of Mercia to replace Burgred. The most probable context on strategic grounds is in the short period between 877 and 879, when Mercia was partitioned between Ceolwulf and Guthrum. The creation of this system by King Alfred can therefore best be seen as both an in-depth defence of Wessex against possible invasion of Viking forces (such as indeed happened in the period 875-early 878), and as a strategic offensive against the Vikings who controlled Mercia and London at that time.
Work on the minting patterns of the coinage of the period has shown that King Alfred was in control of London and the surrounding area until about 877, exactly the time when the Vikings are recorded as partitioning Mercia and taking control of its eastern extent. Thereafter the coins minted in London are only in the name of the Mercian king Ceolwulf. After his decisive defeat of the Vikings at the Battle of Edington in early 878, Alfred was once again able to take the offensive. His victory must have earned him wide acclaim. It is this juncture which seems the most appropriate time for the start of the planning and construction of the system of burhs recorded in the Burghal Hidage. Throughout 878 Guthrum's Vikings were in control of Mercia and, arguably, London, with his base in Cirencester. The creation of burhs at Oxford and Buckingham at this time fits in with the likelihood that Alfred was able to regain control of this area which he had exercised before being deprived of it as a result of the Viking partition of 877, and their siting demonstrates that he was able to initiate a strategic offensive against the Vikings in Eastern Mercia and London. Alfred's standing enabled him to impose a level of conscription on the population of his kingdom to construct the burhs, to act as garrisons behind their defences, and to serve in his new army. Based on the figures provided by the hideage the size of Alfred's conscript army can be deduced. One man per hide would be the equivalent of 27,000 men, whereas one man per 5 hides of land would give 5,500 men. Alfreds practice was to divide his field army into two or three, so with additional support from the royal household troops and those of the leading nobility would provide Alfred with enough manpower to deal with any Viking attacks.Halshall. Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West. pp. 124-125