[Sidenote:  The hundred court.] The ancient Romans had the brotherhood, and called it a curia.  The Roman people were organized in clans, curies, and tribes.  But for military purposes the curia was called a century, because it furnished a quota of one hundred men to the army.  The word century originally meant a company of a hundred men, and it was only by a figure of speech that it afterward came to mean a period of a hundred years.  Now among all Germanic peoples, including the English, the brotherhood seems to have been called the hundred.  Our English forefathers seem to have been organized, like other barbarians, in clans, brotherhoods, and tribes; and the brotherhood was in some way connected with the furnishing a hundred warriors to the host.  In the tenth century we find England covered with small districts known as hundreds.  Several townships together made a hundred, and several hundreds together made a shire.  The hundred was chiefly notable as the smallest area for the administration of justice.  The hundred court was a representative body, composed of the lords of lands or their stewards, with the reeve and four selected men and the parish priest from each township.  There was a chief magistrate for the hundred, known originally as the hundredman, but after the Norman conquest as the high constable.

[Sidenote:  Decay of the hundred.] [Sidenote:  Hundred meetings in Maryland] By the thirteenth century the importance of the hundred had much diminished.  The need for any such body, intermediate between township and county, ceased to be felt, and the functions of the hundred were gradually absorbed by the county.  Almost everywhere in England, by the reign of Elizabeth, the hundred had fallen into decay.  It is curious that its name and some of its peculiarities should have been brought to America, and should in one state have remained to the present day.  Some of the early settlements in Virginia were called hundreds, but they were practically nothing more than parishes, and the name soon became obsolete, except upon the map, where we still see, for example, Bermuda Hundred.  But in Maryland the hundred flourished and became the political unit, like the township in New England.  The hundred was the militia district, and the district for the assessment of taxes.  In the earliest times it was also the representative district; delegates to the colonial legislature sat for hundreds.  But in 1654 this was changed, and representatives were elected by counties.  The officers of the Maryland hundred were the high constable, the commander of militia, the tobacco-viewer, the overseer of roads, and the assessor of taxes.  The last-mentioned officer was elected by the people, the others were all appointed by the governor.  The hundred had also its assembly of all the people, which was in many respects like the New England town-meeting.  These hundred-meetings enacted by-laws, levied taxes, appointed committees, and often exhibited a vigorous political life.  But after the Revolution they fell into disuse, and in 1824 the hundred became extinct in Maryland; its organization was swallowed up in that of the county.