Burhs, burghal territories and hundreds in the English central Midlands in the early tenth century (Part 2)

The first part of this paper has shown that the burghal territories of burhs created in the early tenth century in what later became Buckinghamshire and southwest Northamptonshire comprised one or more large ‘proto-hundreds’, typically of around 300–350 hides. As new cadastral units, these burghal territories are seen as essential aspect of the infrastructure of burghal formation. This hypothesis carries the implication that these units were subsequently subdivided into the hundreds of Domesday, which were typically of around 100 hides. From both a spatial and functional point of view these became subdivisions of the new shires which would have been formed at the same time. This thesis is examined here in the second part of this paper in relation to the development of burhs in the area of the shires of Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex, and of Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire further to the east. (The development of burhs in Essex is not considered here.) By the end of 917, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes clear, all this area (with Essex and East Anglia) had been taken under the control of King Edward the Elder, in effect extending the area of the West Saxon hegemony to the east coast.