Maitland began the third essay in his magisterial Domesday Book and Beyond with something of an apology:

The question that was dreary and old at the end of the nineteenth century nevertheless remains equally inescapable at the start of the twenty-first. As Maitland saw, understanding the meaning of the hide – in Old English híd, híwisc, or híwscipe – is pivotal to some of the most important debates about Anglo-Saxon England. At their heart, these debates have been concerned with the basic structures of English society and land tenure. Put simply, was Anglo-Saxon society based on communities of extended families or tribes of free peasant farmers who eventually succumbed to lordship and villeinage, or were the manor and manorial lordship features of English society from the very beginnings? If recent work has moved away from these basic oppositions, there remains, nevertheless, a concern to assess the relative freedom or unfreedom of the bulk of the Anglo-Saxon population. Understanding the hide likewise has the potential to inform debates about the origins of Anglo-Saxon England and the debt that it owed to the Roman or Celtic past.