SHIRE (AS. seise, scyre, di*trict, county, ju risdiction, business, from scirian, sucrinn, secon dary form of sciron, seeran, secoran, to cut off, shear, 0HO. setran, Ger. se/arca, to cut, shear; connected with Gk. xc(pco,, kc ircin, Lab. skirti, to cut). A term which seems to have originated before the time of King Alfred, and is applied to the districts, often called counties, into which Great Britain is divided. A considerable num ber of the counties of England, as Kent. Essex, Surrey, Norfolk, and Suffolk, were formed out of the petty Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which grad ually became consolidated into one kingdom. The substitution of ealdormen (or earls) for kings marks the gradual organization of the shires. It was usually found convenient to split up a large kingdom into several shires. The national and military head of the shire was the ealdor man, whose office was not necessarily hereditary, though it had a tendency to become so. Shire is applied to all the Welsh counties except Angle sea. In Scotland the English tendencies of the sovereigns from the time of Malcolm Caumore a ml the tide of immigration from the south brought in, among other innovations, the division into shires. Its introduction seems to have be
gun early in the twelfth century. Twenty-five shires or counties are enumerated in a public ordinance of the date 1305.
In England, south of the Tees, there was a subdivision of the shires into hum/reds (q.v.). which in some localities were called wapentakes • these hundreds or trapentakes were further subdividled into and it became incumbent on every one to be enrolled in a tything and hun dred for the purposes of government. In some of the larger counties there was an intermediate division between the shire and the hundred. Yorkshire had and still has its ridings (q.v.), Kent had its lathes. and Sussex its rapes. The division into hundreds and tythings never pene trated into the four northern counties of Eng land, or into Scotland, where the ward and quar ter were the immediate subdivisions of the county. Consult Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, vol. i. (6th ed., Oxford, 1896). See COUNTY; ANGLO-SAXONS.