When was england divided into counties

A 'principal area', in relation to England, is now defined as a non-metropolitan county, a. To discuss trialling these LexisPSL services please email customer service via our online form. Free trials are only available to individuals based in the UK. We may terminate this trial at any time or decide not to give a trial, for any reason. Trial includes one question to LexisAsk during the length of the trial. To view the latest version of this document and millions of others like it, sign-in to LexisLibrary or register for a free trial.

Of those counties, 37 of them split neatly into one of three groups. The shires Nearly half the counties — 19 of them — are very clearly named after their county town, or at least, a town that used to be. Those are deep breath Bedfordshire , Buckinghamshire , Cambridgeshire , Cheshire , Derbyshire , Gloucestershire , Herefordshire , Hertfordshire , Huntingdonshire , Lancashire , Leicestershire , Lincolnshire , Northamptonshire , Nottinghamshire , Oxfordshire , Staffordshire , Warwickshire , Worcestershire and — we got there in the end — Yorkshire.

All of these are basically obvious. Image: public domain. Hampshire is more complicated, but only a little. In Anglo-Saxon times, when the shires were first created, what is now Southampton was known among other names as Hamtun, and the county was named accordingly; occasional attempts since to rebrand the county as Southamptonshire have failed miserably. There are three other shires where the origin of the first bit of the name is, at least to modern eyes, a bit mysterious.

For reasons that seem to have been lost in time, the two words evolved in different directions — the latter into Shropshire, the former into Shrewsbury.

So the answer was right in front of me all along. Incidentally, the name evolved in a third direction, too, into Salop — an alternative name for both county and town. Okay, 23 down, 16 to go. This is easy. The ancient kingdoms Then there are those whose names relate to which Germanic tribe settled them in about the 6th century, and to its location relative to all the other places those same settlers went.

The easy ones are Essex , Middlesex and Sussex: the eastern, middle and southern areas settled by the Saxons. Middlesex, incidentally, never seems to have been a kingdom in its own right, but was for many years a part of Essex.

The counties as of Image: Wikimedia Commons. Why is there no county of Wessex, you may ask? There was a Kingdom of Wessex, which covered a substantial chunk of south central Britain. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. When the Normans arrived in England in AD they found a kingdom divided into a distinctive and complicated administrative geography.

These administrative entities clearly had a territorial composition. Using the boundaries of estates, parishes, and hundreds mapped at later dates, numerous scholars have sought to reconstruct the administrative geography described in Domesday Book. This archive contains digitised shapefiles of the administrative boundaries as they are believed to have existed in