Another objection that may be raised to my hypothesis is that the Hundred, as an area for police and rating, was a comparatively late institution, and that if the artificial system of assessment were as ancient as I suggest, it could not have operated, as we saw, in Cambridgeshire, it did operate, through the 'Hundred'. It is, however, admitted that the _thing_ represented by the 'Hundred' was, whatever its original name, of immemorial antiquity, as the intermediate division between the Vill and the Shire or kingdom. Approaching the subject from the legal standpoint, Professor Maitland has pointed out that the Hundred having a proper court, which the Vill had not, was the older institution of the two, and has skilfully seized on the differentiation of villages originally possessing one name in common as a hint that some such subdivision may have been going on more widely than is known. It seems to me to be at least possible that the district originally representing a Hundred, and named, as we are learning, in most cases from the primitive meeting-place of its settlers, was reckoned as so many multiples of five or ten hides, and that this aggregate was subsequently distributed by its community among themselves.[177] If it be not presumption to touch on the controversies as to the Hundred,[178] I would suggest that while agreeing with Dr Stubbs, that the name of 'Hundred' may be traced to the ordinance of Edgar[179]--which did not, however, create the district itself--I cannot reconcile it with the view to which he leans in his _Constitutional History_, that 'under the name of geographical hundreds we have the variously sized _pagi_ or districts in which the hundred warriors settled'; and that we should 'recognize in the name the vestige of the primitive settlement, and in the district itself an earlier or a later subdivision of the kingdom to which it belonged'.[180] For my part, I have never been able to understand the anxiety to identify the district known, in later days, as a 'Hundred' with an original hundred warriors, families, or hides. The significant remark on the 'centeni' by Tacitus, that 'quod primo numerus fuit, jam nomen et honor est', would surely lead us to expect that by the time of the migration the 'Hundred' had become, like the 'hide' of Domesday, a term even more at variance with fact. Indeed, in his masterly 'Introductory sketch', Dr Stubbs observed that the 'superior divisions' made by the 'new-comers' would 'have that indefiniteness which even in the days of Tacitus belonged to the Hundreds, the _centeni_ of the Germans', and that their 'system' would be 'transported whole, at the point of development which it has reached at home'.[181]