counties. The county (otherwise the shire) was the main unit of provincial government in England from before the Norman Conquest until modern times. Domesday Book (1086) describes 32 shires. Five of these were subdivisions of the former kingdom of Wessex. Of these, Hampshire already existed in 757; the others may be as old. Five shires derive from former kingdoms absorbed into the dominions of the house of Wessex (Kent, Sussex, Essex, and East Anglia (divided into Norfolk and Suffolk) ). The shires of the midlands were nearly all created in the 10th cent. The only later additions to the system were Westmorland, Cumberland, Lancashire, Durham, Northumberland, and the anomalous Rutland. The Domesday shires had, to a remarkable extent, the boundaries which they were to retain for many centuries. By 1066 each shire (sometimes pairs of shires) had an official, the sheriff, responsible for the royal lands and the exercise of aspects of royal authority. The county court, meeting twice annually, was a principal forum for justice both civil and criminal.

After the Norman Conquest the principal changes were the construction of shire castles as cores of local authority and a great increase in the frequency with which the shire courts met. Although the importance of these courts diminished in the later Middle Ages, the most important new judicial authorities, the justices of the peace, were organized on a shire basis. The justices acquired many powers as time went on; their quarter sessions were the principal organs of local government until the establishment of County Councils by the Local Government Act of 1888. This Act divided some historic shires for governmental purposes. Their historic boundaries had been modestly rationalized by earlier legislation.

The only major innovation in shire government in the centuries before 1888 (setting on one side the events of the Civil War and Interregnum) was the creation of the office of lord-lieutenant in 1549. His function was to command the shire levies. From their very earliest days a predominant function of the shires had been military. Shire associations of regular regiments (which sometimes had a long history going back to the Militia Act of 1757) were made standard and universal by an act of 1881. This was an expression of the greater shire-consciousness of the later 19th cent., found also in the associations of archaeological societies, cricket clubs, and agricultural societies. An Act of 1972 brought major changes in county organization. Some historic shires were merged and new ones without historic antecedents created. Further changes were made in 1996.

James Campbell