THE CHILTERN HUNDREDS

CHILTERNS

The Chilterns is a range of wooded hills stretching from South Oxfordshire, across Buckinghamshire into Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.

HUNDRED

A Hundred is a unit of English local government, intermediate between a village and a shire, which survived into the 19th century. Originally the term probably referred to a group of 100 hides, a hide being the unit of land required to support one peasant family.

The term hundred first appears in the laws of King Edmund I (939 - 946), but an anonymous Ordinance of the Hundred, issued before 975, indicates that the hundred was already a long established institution.

The hundred had a court in which private disputes and criminal matters were settled by customary law. The court met once a month, generally in the open air, at a time and place known to everyone. Originally all dwellers within the hundred were expected to attend, but gradually suit of court (attendance) became restricted to the tenants of specific land.

The suitors normally acted as the judges, but the sheriff was judge on the two annual visits (his "tourn") he made to each hundred’s court.

Increasingly, hundred courts fell into the hands of private lords.

In medieval times the hundred was collectively responsible for various crimes committed within its borders if the offender was not produced.

These responsibilities were extinguished by statute in the 19th century, and any reasons for maintaining the hundred boundaries disappeared.

CHILTERN HUNDREDS

The Chiltern Hundreds comprise of five hundreds in Oxfordshire and three in Buckinghamshire, the manorial rights in which belonged to the Crown, which appointed stewards and bailiffs, now obsolete or merely nominal.

The stewardship of the three Buckinghamshire hundreds is applied for by a member of Parliament wishing to resign since the holding of an office of profit under the Crown forces him to vacate his seat, this stewardship being held by a legal fiction to be such an office.