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These narrower limits it long retained, and the usual phrase in all future legislation by which the assemblies of the Anglo-Irish define their jurisdiction is "the four shires."
It is impossible for us to traverse many shires in our search for old houses. But a word must be said for the priceless contents of many of our historic mansions and manors. These often vanish and are lost for ever.
Report on the State of Ireland: State Papers, Vol. II. p. 22. Baron Finglas, in his suggestions for a reformation, urges that "no black rent be given ne paid to any Irishman upon any of the four shires from henceforward." Harris, p. 101.
William therefore forsook the old practice of dividing the whole kingdom into earldoms. In the peaceful central shires he would himself rule through his sheriffs and other immediate officers; he would appoint earls only in dangerous border districts where they were needed as military commanders. All William's earls were in fact marquesses, guardians of a march or frontier.
Though none of his own letters of this time have survived, it is clear from an Order of the Privy Council that shortly after the affair at Bothwell he was again entrusted with the control of the rebellious shires.
It need hardly be pointed out that no regular division into shires can have existed so early, and, as we have already insisted, the Thames itself was not a permanent boundary between any two definable societies, yet those who regard the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as historical would show one Penda had appeared a few years before as the chief of a group of men with a new name, the Mercians probably a loose agglomeration of tribes occupying the middle strip of England; a group whose dialect and measures of land are, perhaps, the ancestors of the modern Midland dialect and most of our measures.
In the looser and more diffused society of the rural Teutons, the tribe is spread over a shire, and the aggregation of shires makes a kingdom, embracing cities, towns, and rural districts held together by similar bonds of relationship to the central governing power.
After our hero had opened her heart by the present of half a guinea, she explained, that she 'could not JUSTLY say where he was, because that he never let anybody of his own people know where he was any day; he had several different houses and places in different parts, and far-off counties, and other shires, as she heard, and by times he was at one, and by times at another. The names of two of the places, Toddrington and Little Wrestham, she knew; but there were others to which she could give no direction.
On the very highest supposition she then had less than one third of her present population, and less than three times the population which is now collected in her gigantic capital. The increase of the people has been great in every part of the kingdom, but generally much greater in the northern than in the southern shires.
Beyond the Humber the sturdy north-country barons, who had wrested the Great Charter from John, remained true to their principles, and had also the support of Alexander II., King of Scots. The magnates of the eastern counties were as staunch as the northerners, and the rich and populous southern shires were for the most part in agreement with them.
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