It is generally accepted that the Hundred of Blything was a pre-Norman political unit with its administrative centre at Blythburgh. Its position at the head of the navigable estuary of the River Blyth makes it an obvious point from which seaborne colonists could spread fan-like up its tributaries. The settlement is in a key position in the eastern river system mid-way between the north and south limits of the Hundred.

The first recorded tribal rulers of the hundred are the members the Wuffinga. This family gave rise to a dynasty of the Anglo Saxon Kings. The importance of Blythburgh as a royal manor is inferred from records of early Christian tombs, and its selection as the burial place of the Christian King Anna, in 654, and then for the burial of his son. Anna's lands stretched the entire breadth of Suffolk from Blythburgh to Exning, and the Midlanders had to march to Blythburgh to defeat him.

In Domesday Book the Blythburgh glebe was described as the personal property of Edward the Confessor, when it was about ten times the size of the average for other Suffolk churches, The property was inherited by William I, and the royal connection was continued into the 12th century when Henry III founded an Augustinian priory on his Blythburgh lands. Discovery of the ship burials at Sutton Hoo and Snape has focused attention on the Deben estuary as the invasion corridor. However, Anna gave these coastal lands south of Blything, stretching between the rivers Alde and Orwell, to endow his daughter's monastery at Ely. The gifting of this land on behalf of Etheldreda, as the five and a half hundreds of Wicklaw, points to Blything as the heartland of the early Anglo Saxons.

At the earliest point in their recorded history we only know of the hundreds by their names. Their importance to the Saxon administration is clear from the way the hundreds were used to categorise the Suffolk manors in the Domesday Book, and it is clear that the same groups of communities related to the hundred from then on, down to modern times, as units of local government.

It was not until the advent of map making in the 18th century that we can visualise the position of the boundaries running between settlements. The first county map showing Suffolk's hundred boundaries is that of Hodgkisson in 1783. The following investigation takes Hodskinson's map as the starting point for an analysis of the history of land management in relation to special features of the Hundred boundary.

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