The Anglo-Saxon hid was the holding…

When King Edward the Elder, son of the heir of Alfred the Great, recaptured the East Midlands from the Danes after 917, he reconstituted the division of the newly-recaptured territory into hundreds, each of which was subdivided into a 100 hides for the
purposes of collecting the geld, or land tax, for the fyrd, or compulsory military service.

The Anglo-Saxon hid was the holding which supported a peasant and his household. The area of a hide varied: It averaged 120 acres of arable land in Cambridgeshire, but it was much smaller further west. When the Shire of Northampton was re-established in the years following its reconquest, it was divided into 32 hundreds, each of 100 hides, but by the time the Doomsday Book was compiled in 1086, it had been reorganised into 29 hundreds, each made up of a varying number of hides, which ranged between 66 and 139 half-hides making 2,728 three-quarter hides in all.