The principal subdivision in a county is the hundred, a district which in its origin bore relation rather to the population than to any uniform geographical limits. Mr. Hallam considers it to have been a district inhabited by 100 free families, and that a different system pre vailed in the northern from that of the southern counties ; in proof of which be contrasts Sussex, which contains 65 hundreds, and Dorsetahire, which contains 43, with Yorkshire, which contains only 26, and Lancashire, only 6. In the counties north of the Trent, this sub division is often called a wapentake. That the division into hundreds was known among the Germans, even in the time of the Roman inva sion, is argued from two 'passage' in Tacitus (' De Mor. Germ.;) " ex oinni juventute delectos ante aciem locant—Definitur et numerus ; (often; ex aingulis ;la& aunt." And again, "Centeni aingulis (princi pibus) adsunt ex plebe comites, consilitnn simul et auctoritas." "Nihil nisi armati aunt;" and hence Spelman infers the identity of the icapentkek or military array (taking of weapons) and the hundred court. Sir Francis Palgrave says that the burgh was only the enclosed and fortified resort, the stockade of the inhabitants of the hundred. The subdivision of the hundred was the tithing, composed, as it is alleged, of ten free families, and having for an officer the tithing-man, bead constable.
Whether in the barbarous times to which it is attributed, so elabo rate a system as we have sketched could have prevailed, is at least moat doubtful; but the theory is that somewhere about the time of Edgar (A.D. 950), the county was divided into tithings, of which 12 made a hundred--for the Saxon hundred meant 120, and hence per haps the frequent use of the number 12 in;our legal processes. These hundreds were presided over by their dee-anus, or headborough, or hundred-man, and were represented in the shiremoto ; and this aggre gate body, the shire, presided over by its earl and bishop or sheriff, conducted its own internal affairs.
There are three counties-palatine, the earl of which had within his shire all the fiscal and judicial powers of the crown :—Chester, created by William the Conqueror ; the duchy of Lancaster, created by Edward III.—these two have been long annexed to the crown ; and Durham, formerly governed by the bishop, but annexed to the crown in 1836. In this year a part of the see of Ely, which had been a royal franchise, was annexed to the crown, as Flexhamshire in Northumberland had been in the reign of Elizabeth. [PALATINE COUNTIES.)