The Hundreds

It is from "the Hundreds" of ancient England that the title of "The Book of the Hundreds" is derived. This article directs its attention to the Hundreds for the purpose of demonstrating the fact that when our Father's "old paths" are abandoned, all of His children (as it was with the children of Israel) fall into captivity under the lordship and despotism of merchandising men.

Long ago in England, while that remote island, at large, was under the rule of the Anglo-Saxon kings of the earth, small groups of Godly men and their families gathered together within their shire (later, the king's county) to deal with that which they knew is upon our Lord's shoulder -- government. Within these shires, groups of families called tithings (ten families) further united into ten tithings under the Lordship of the Christ to form what we know today as "the Hundred." In this, they were aware of our Father's Proverb,

Proverbs 29:26, "Many wait on the favor of rulers, but justice comes to a man from the Lord."

Therefore, the members of the various Hundreds, as a whole, took responsibility for the crimes and defaults of each and every one of its members, and were therefore diligent as to who remained within their respective Hundred and who did not belong. With each and every member involved, they formed their own hundred and shire courts, chose their own constable of the hundred and reeve of the shire (later, the king's constable and sheriff), etc., all independent of the pagan creations of the "king's prerogative" and "divine right of kings" so-called, and dispensed justice as The Word directed.

That was the way it was for several centuries, until the subsequent generations composing each Hundred began "to look to the favor of rulers." Though there is little known concerning the specifics of the change that came about, we must recognize that those subsequent generations must have forgotten, as their forefathers never forgot, that their lives were not their own but belonged to the King of Kings, and not to the merchant kings of the earth and their swarms of officers.

Hereafter is a short history of what is known today of the transition from these localized governments that were truly upon the Christ's shoulder (the light yoke), to governments that joined themselves to the kings and merchants of the earth (the heavy yoke), and took on the burdens that men put upon other men's backs. In its transition, we see how and why we are left with still another history of the un-Godly governments of men contained in the first 95 pages of "The Book of the Hundreds." In Truth, we but only need to look to The Word to know these things, and thereby avoid them before they come about:

Proverbs 23:1-3, "If thou sit to sup at the table of a prince, consider attentively the things set before thee: and apply thine hand, knowing that it behooves thee to prepare such: but if thou art very insatiable, desire not his provisions; for these belong to a false life."

The following condensed history of the transition from a Godly government within the Hundreds, to a false life under the rulership of earthly kings, and their merchant churches, governors, presidents, etc., is from a book titled "The Hundred and The Hundred Rolls":

"Superseded by the Poor Law Union and the Urban and Rural District, the Hundred has receded so rapidly into the mists of the past that the first associations to be called up by its name are likely to be those of remote antiquity--of the Germany of Tacitus, the Gaul of Clovis or the England of Edgar the Peaceable.

Both the hundred and the shire courts were held at stated intervals (once a month) during the time of the Anglo-Saxons. Before the Norman conquest of 1066 judicial activities, both secular and spiritual, had been concentrated in these local assemblies, at which the local custom was declared and enforced, titles to property were established, and violence condemned, if not punished. Justice was administered and law declared by those who attended the court. The shire-moot (shire court) and hundred-moot (hundred court) met in the open air.

By declaring custom and determining procedure in doubtful cases these courts were in effect making law, though law of only local application; in the Middle Ages no clear dividing line could be drawn between jurisdiction and legislation. The shire-moots of the tenth and eleventh centuries are sometimes referred to as the witan of such or such a shire; they were indeed as organs of self-government of far more practical importance than the central witan--that indeterminate collection of nobles and clergy whose powers varied inversely with those of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Out of the early hundreds came the office of constable who was responsible for keeping the peace, the maintenance of watches, and, for the mustering of the armed men of the hundred. And, while the shire itself did not escape its share of public duties, the men of the hundred had personal status that was outside the purview of the king's law.

Then after 1066, William the Conqueror called on the shire-moot for co-operation. For a king who had from the first steadily maintained that he was the lawful heir of the Confessor, and who stood for the principles of justice in accordance with the laws of God and of man, the shire-moot was bound to be the tribunal for settling controversies as to the claims of Norman bishops and earls who had been granted all the lands and the rights of English predecessors. Not only the Archbishop of Canterbury but many other men between 1066 and 1087 made good their claims in a shire court by the witness of the good men, or, more particularly, the old men, of the shire, a specially appointed royal delegate presiding to see that justice was done and to record the judgment. By 1086 the shires must have been used to the sight of the king's justice sitting in their court, and to the new procedure of the sworn inquest as a means of getting definite answers to definite questions. William's successors continued to use the hundred-moot and shire-moot for their own purposes.

With the advent of Henry I, it was decided by royal proclamation that it was necessary to forbid sheriffs to summon extraordinary shire-moots and hundred-moots without royal warrant. Under Henry I, as visits of royal justices became more regular, the trans-formation of shire-moot into king's court must have become a stereotyped process. At a special joint assembly of the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk before a royal steward in 1148, or thereabouts, the old knight whose testimony settles the matter observes incidentally that for fifty years he has been attending shire courts and hundred courts, since before the days of King Henry, when peace and justice flourished in the land.

But Henry II did more than return to his grandfather's tradition: he took the decisive step which drew the courts of the shire into the main stream of constitutional development. It was not merely to use its old procedure on the king's behalf; it was to be taught a new procedure: the suitors of the court were to become not only judges but jurors. The king's justice's, now sitting in the shire court, were to call upon the knights of the shire and the men of the hundred to give answer, in sworn dozens, to questions put to them--not only to specific questions as to royal dues, but to sweeping questions such as: 'Is there anybody in your hundred whom you suspect to be a thief or a receiver of thieves?' Gradually there opened up by means of these juries of presentment a way for the complaints and wishes of the country-side to reach the king. The demand for information was in effect transformable into an invitation to complain; and complaints came to the king's court of a fullness that would have been embarrassing if they had been seriously taken as a programme for action. The contact was established, not merely a personal but an official contact, between the courts of the shire and the king's court.

By 1258, the king was far off; the earls and barons were usually absentees, represented in the county by their stewards; it was the knights who ran the local government, both as holders in turn of the post of sheriff as coroners, and as suitors and controllers of the county court, where their duties were steadily increasing as the century advanced. Here they were required to discuss taxation, to hear the king's letters and ordinances, to elect the county coroners, to serve on special juries and inquests, and to appoint plenipotentiaries to speak for the whole county in the king's court, both on fiscal and on political matters. Alongside the sheriff and his clerk, concerned with the batch of writs to be dealt with, of legal business to be got through, of criminal inquiries to be made, of debts to be collected, if possible before the court broke up, and of royal proclamations to be published, we can see the body of knights, jealous for the custom of the county and their own rights as suitors, not above bribing the sheriff to favour their individual causes, but ready in a moment to sink their differences in defense of the vested interests of their body, and to draft common petitions or representations to the king if any magnate or official had attacked those interests. Thus we find the gentlemen of Devon drawing up the list of charges still preserved at Oxford against their sheriff, Roga of Pridias, in 1272, accusing him of oppression of both rich and poor and of invasion of the liberties of the shire, winding up with the complaint that he is not a native of the county and a demand for his dismissal. The shire courts, in becoming an agent of the central government, had not ceased to be the articulate embodiment of local esprit de corps.

As for the hundreds, royal proclamations became the recognized law, and it was the sheriff's business to summon twice a year each hundred to the great court, or tourn, where a much larger attendance was exacted; and it was an event of some importance to the central government, for it produced a good deal of revenue. But the outstanding significance of the tourn is that it linked up the hundred to the royal system of police and criminal law, just as the local inquests in land cases linked it to the new royal justice in civil matters." Excerpts from pages 1-19 of The Hundred and Hundred Rolls,(1930), by Helen Cam.