he standardized the coinage, exported the West Saxon institution of the ‘shire’ to the rest of England where we can still find them – in fact they’ve since found their way into Scotland and Wales too – and established shire and local courts based on ‘hundreds’, areas of a hundred ‘hides’. A hide was the amount of land deemed sufficient to support a family. Many of the familiar trappings of the English state were being put in place.
