House of

901-937.

CHAP. V. like, must, from the first, have tended to become the The judicial officer we find him under Ælfred, and to Alfred. take his place in the shire-moot in that capacity beside bishop and ealdorman. It is possible, however, that in Ine's day this shire-organization did not extend beyond the area of the Gwent, with, perhaps, its dependency of the present Berkshire. Wessex, indeed, was already spreading beyond its older bounds; besides Sussex or Surrey or the districts across the Thames, the West Saxons to the east of Selwood saw a new Wessex to the west of that forest, in the regions of the Dorsætan and of the Somersætan. Their conquests, however, in this quarter, were far from being completed in the reign of Ine; the conquest, in fact, of the southwest, dragged on until the reign of Ecgberht, and it is likely enough that, amid the troubles of the kingdom during this period, the organization of the loosely compacted folks of "sætan," or settlers, that spread over its various regions, did not receive any definite form till that time. From Ecgberht's day, however, we have grounds for believing that the whole of the WestSaxon kingdom was definitely ordered in separate "pagi," each with an ealdorman at its head, and these "pagi" can hardly have been other than shires.' In the names of the bulk of them, however, we note a striking difference from the names of the two ear

In the course of the Danish descents, at this time, the Chronicle mentions ealdormen of Hamtonshire, of the Wilsætan, of Surrey, and of Berkshire to the east of Selwood; of Dorset, Somerset, and Devon to the west of it. Asser mentions "Wilton-scire" in 878. He speaks of Chippenham "quæ est sita in sinistrali parte Wiltun-scire" -(ed. Wise), p. 30. In his translation of Orosius, Ælfred speaks of Halgoland as a "scyr."

House of

lier shires. The district no longer draws its name CHAP. V. from the central "tun." In the case of Somerset, The indeed, such a tun seems to have existed at Somer- Elfred. ton, but it does not give its name to the shire. The 901-937. Somersætan, like the Dorsætan, had, perhaps, never arrived at even the rude unity which, in the Wilsætan, is seen raising their central township to an importance that enabled it to supersede their name, and to give its own name to the district; while farther west the settlement was so sparse that even the settlers failed to print their name exclusively on the land, and it retained its old Welsh title of Devon, or Dyvnaint, side by side with Defnsætan.

in Mercia.

In the eastern dominion of the West-Saxon kings The shire the new institution adapted itself equally to the older kingdoms. Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Essex, became shires equally with the "sætan" of the west, though the retention of their older names showed the strength of their national tradition.' That the shire had spread over them by Ethelstan's time, we may gather from the tenor of his laws, which speak of the shire as the settled political and judicial division throughout Wessex at large. It is more doubtful when it spread over Mid-Britain. Into

'Kent, however, is "Kent-shire" in the record of its folk-moot, under Æthelstan.-Thorpe, Anc. Laws, i. 216.

Æthelstan's laws, as I have before pointed out, only concern Wessex; but they concern all Wessex, as their reception in Kentish and Surrey Witenagemots proves. The "shire" is always referred to as an old and settled thing. At Thunresfeld, probably in Surrey, the witan pledged themselves "that each reeve should take the wed in his own shire."-Thorpe, Anc. Laws, i. 241. The London gildbrothers trace a track "from one shire to another."-Ibid. 237. "Let forfang everywhere, be it in one shire, be it in more, be fifteen pence."—Ibid. 225.

House of

CHAP. V. English Mercia it can hardly have been introduced The before the annexation of that district by Eadward in Elfred. 919; and as the few remaining years of that king 901-937. are spent in warfare, it probably dates from the days of Æthelstan. The Mercian kingdom, as its bishops' sees show, had been arranged in five distinct regions the land of the Lindiswaras, that of the Hwiccas, the original Mercia with its dependencies and its royal city at Tamworth, the land of the Middle Engle about Leicester, and the land of the South Engle, with its see at Dorchester. None of these bore the name of shires; and in the earliest shireorganization their existence is only partially recognized. The land of the Lindiswaras, indeed, became Lincolnshire, that of the Middle Engle may be equiv alent to Leicestershire; but the other divisions are broken into smaller districts. Thus, in the new ordering of English Mercia, the land of the Hwiccas was broken into the shires of Gloucester and Worcester, while that of the Hecanas became Herefordshire; the clearings of the Hwiccas, in the south of Arden, were formed into a shire about Æthelflæd's new fortress of Warwick, as the dependent districts of the original Mercia along the Dee were made a shire for the fortress of Chester, and the lands of the old South Mercians at the head-waters of the Trent a shire for the fortress of Stafford. All these districts drew their names, like the earlier WestSaxon shires, from their central "town," save Shrop

1 I cannot agree with the suggestion that Ælfred may have formed the shires of English Mercia. In that case the bounds of the Mercian shires would correspond with the then bounds of the Danelaw. This they do not do; which makes a date after the conquest of the Danelaw pretty certain.

shire, among whose "scrob," or bush, no local centre CHAP. V. may as yet have grown into life.

The House of

Elfred.

The shire

Danelaw.

This connection of the shire with its town centre would necessarily be strengthened when Æthelstan, 901-937. or his successors, extended the shire system over Guthrum's kingdom, or the Five Boroughs; for, as in the we have seen, the Danes, with their jarls and holds, had, for the most part, clustered in the towns, and ruled from thence the districts about them. The historic continuity of these districts, indeed, remained for the most part unbroken. The land of the Lindiswaras became Lincolnshire; Nottinghamshire may represent a people of the North Engle, as Derbyshire the northern, and Staffordshire the southern divisions of the original Mercians; Leicestershire included the land of the old Middle Engle, as Northamptonshire, it may be, that of the South Engle; while North-Gyrwa and South-Gyrwa land reappeared as Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire. But here, as in the rest of Mid-Britain, the shirenames are wholly different in character from those to the south of the Thames. The two "folks" of East Anglia alone recall the folk-districts and ancient kingdoms of southern Britain; Gainas and Hwiccas, Hecanas and Magesætas, Middle Engle and South Engle, the very name of Mercia itself, alike disappeared from local nomenclature. What, however, distinguishes this district from the rest of Mid-Britain is that here we find a trace of purely artificial divisions. When Eadward, in 912, annexed London and Oxford, each town already had "lands which owed obedience thereto," lands which could

1

1

Eng. Chron. a. 912.

House of

Ælfred.

901-937.

CHAP. V. hardly have been other in extent than the present The Middlesex and Oxfordshire, though the phrase itself is fair evidence that they had not, as yet, been brought within the shire system. Middlesex, as we have seen, owed its being to the severance of London from the rest of Essex; and in the "lands " about Oxford we may possibly see the district won at a time when it served as a frontier town against Guthrum's realm. Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Bedfordshire are other instances of purely military creation, districts assigned to the fortresses which Eadward raised at these points.'

The shirereeve.

In one important point the organization of the West-Saxon shires does not seem to have been fully carried out in those of the rest of Britain. In Wessex each shire had its ealdorman, the representative, no doubt, of its old local independence, and the head

The arrangement of the whole kingdom in shires is, of course, a work which could not be completed until it was permanently united under Eadgar; and the existing subdivisions of southern England are all traceable back to his day at the latest.”—Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 129. In East Anglia the shire-system may have been of late introduction. Indeed, it can hardly have been definitely settled before the Norman Conquest, as its divisions seem to have been often regarded as a single shire up to that time, and the retention of the tribal nomenclature in Norfolk and Suffolk, instead of names drawn from its town centres, implies that the "shire" had won a weaker hold than elsewhere. The northern shires are of yet later date; we only hear of "Yorkshire" on the verge of the Conquest. "Durham is the county palatine of the Conqueror's minister, formed out of the patrimony of St. Cuthbert. Lancashire was formed in the twelfth century by joining the Mercian lands between Ribble and Mersey with the northern hundreds, which, in Doomsday, were reckoned to the West Riding of Yorkshire. Cumberland is the English share of the old Cumbrian or Strathclyde kingdom; Northumberland and Westmoreland are the remnants of Northumbria and the Cumbrian frontier.”—Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. 129.