The familia in Anglo-Saxon Society: ‘household’, rather than ‘family, home life’ as now understood

Words used for societal units do not always translate well from one language to another, and present difficulties within one language considered from age to age. The family unit is ideally so overlaid with love and sentiment, so fundamental to the sweet content of father, mother, children, and perhaps others closely tied or loosely connected by blood or affinity that it is hard for us to believe that there appears not to have been in Anglo-Saxon England a native word for ‘the family’ as an ideal grouping. The Anglo-Saxons had words for ‘household’, indeed with a pater familias very much at the head, and the unit including wife and children of course, but equally as a matter of course, servants and slaves in the house and in the fields, and cattle and sheep, often a very large unit. Many of the words used for such a unit are derivatives and compounds of hiw, and that is related to hi(gi)d, the word used for a unit of land, the ‘hide’. That unit is, however, not of some standard land measure, but probably of a variable area one or more of which would be sufficient to sustain a household, large or small, including monastic households, some of them very large with lands of many hides. One might wish to understand their unit, the ‘hide’, as consisting of some definite number of acres. That does not apply. There are several other Old English words for some kind of family unit, sibb, a word for the ‘extended family’ and for ‘peace’, and cynn, a word for ‘tribe, race’, and contained in post-Anglo-Saxon kith and kin. These words are not treated in this paper, which has the complexities of hiw and derivatives and compounds at its centre.