h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: The Development of the English County - A87786634
Author: Bluebottle - U43530

Original Entry: A2501029 English Counties, The Real Counties
Original Author: U688420 – Ianorth

In October 2005 Challengeh2g2 launched the County Challenge, where it had been planned to create a h2g2 article about each county in the UK. This is a Flea Market Rescue attempt of one of the articles that was considered to be part of that project.
As someone born sometime after 1974, I'd love it if I could get some input from those who remember the big county shake-up.
This entry deals specifically with England, which is long and complicated enough without making it worse by trying to tackle Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland too. If you wish that there was more information about those countries, why not write about them?
This entry contains more lists than I would like, but I think with the topic, it is inevitable if I wish to avoid a complicated table.

<BB<

"the Charlemagne region of Eighth Century France"

Charlemagne was a king, not a region.

You say "In 757 Hampshire was first county to be named as such". This means that Hampshire was called a county in 757. But later you say the word county didn't come in until after the Normal Conquest.

I think it is confusing to say that the Isle of Wight was like Jersey and Guernsey. These were never part of England, nor of the United Kingdom.

This is a long and confusing sentence:

In one night, people were no longer from Birmingham, Warwickshire or Worcestershire as the suburbs spread and the boundary of Warwickshire duly moved, but the West Midlands, a county so-named even though there was not an East, North or South Midlands.

Break it up.

Things are a lot simpler in the Republic of Ireland - there was only one attempt to divide up any of the counties, and it only lasted about a week.

Well done BB

This is not suggesting changes but there are several points

I have some question(s), given they all shires or counties eg Hampshire, Devonshire,... where did the suffix shire go in such as Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Durham and Norfolk. Have they lost part of the original name? eg; The County of Kent and were never named as counties.

Also was the original name of Hampshire Southamptonshire as in Northamptonshire giving the names to the county towns Southampton and Northampton.

Also (Salop) if you are going to give abreviations in a work of this quality prehaps you should do the lot eg: Staffs or none, this could make another entry.

good work

Good points raised there, thanks both. I've clarified Hampshire, removed the Charlemagne confusion. I've also hopefully clarified that Jersey and Guernsey are not in England and clarified the long sentence.
Hopefully Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Durham and Norfolk are clearer now too.
I've added a footnote to clarify that Hampshire has also been known as Southamptonshire to distinguish it from Northamptonshire (originally Northampton was outside the Kingdom of Wessex).

I agree that to avoid too much confusion I'll leave abbreviations out, and leave that to another entry. It is much easier that way. Do you have any idea how convoluted and heated the argument over whether the Isle of Wight should be abbreviated to IW, IoW or IOW is, and how long it has raged in the letters section of the local newspaper? (Much simpler to use 'the Island' instead, that way no-one is offended).

I thought Ianorth's original entry was too good to gather dust.

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Isle of Wight
both Suetonius and Vespasian refered to it as Vectis. Bede called it Vecta or wextiz. So untill abut it was the Isle of Vectis.

Wight may have roots in the old word wicht the Viking/Norse for small.
I favour it being called after king Cedric's (CIRCA 540 ad) nephew Wihtgar he had his base in thr Carisbrooke area AKA The Fort of the Men of Wihtgar. Over the years Wihtgar was shortened to Wight and fort became isle.

The Isle of Wight was recorded by the name Isle of Wit in the Doomsday book, and Lordship of the island was a royol appointment from about 1450. Henry de Beauchamp, 1st Duke of Warwick was even crowned King of the Isle of Wight.

So it is the Isle of Wight in my opinion, alowable aka Vectis. If vandals must debase its name to initals then IoW.

ancient lords including Harold Godwinson and Tostig Godwinson, Sweyn Forkbeard, William FitzOsbern would agree and can you imagine Queen Victoria living on the IOW ......


Well you did ask

Hi <BB<, I'm back again.

"The exceptions were shires that had previously been independent kingdoms or tribes."
-Nothing to change here, I just wanted you to know I found that interesting. I'd occasionally wondered why some counties were town-shire but others had different names.

"[County boroughs]"Their formation was not allowed ---not only on a local scale,--- as county councils would lose both a large proportion of their responsibilities and the revenue from a large urban area. "
-I think you can take out the bit highlighted.

That's it from me. It's a lot of information, but it's presented well. My village was one that was moved from Berkshire to Oxfordshire in 1974. Bellringers in the area are still part of the Old North Berks branch!

Some of your sentences are very hard to understand. I was trying to do a bit of fact-checking on this one, and the first thing I had to do was work out what you meant. For example,
"In 757 Hampshire was first shire to be named as such in a document, named after Hamtun, modern-day Southampton, which is Hampshire's county-town, with Winchester the capital of Wessex overall."

It reads as if the document is named after Hamtun, also named after modern-day Southampton, and the Winchester clause makes it truly hard to understand what the sentence means.

There are a lot of pieces like that all the way through. I find myself asking "what information is he actually trying to give me?"

So constructive advice:

1) Think about using shorter sentences for clarity
2) Decide whether you can cut out any of the information and still make your point
3) If all the information is indispensable consider using footnotes instead of tripping yourself up with all those subordinate clauses
4) Ask yourself "what am I actually trying to tell the reader?"

There's lots of information in there, but it's a bit hard to understand what you mean sometimes.

Hello all

For some reason I've not been able to load these comments in Alabaster or Goo for the last couple of days, and had to resort to Pliny

Links added per BobStafford's suggestion (in another conversation, so presumably he has had the same difficulty?)

The suggested section has been excised.
Vip, The Fish is from Berkshire and he is still very upset about the fact that much of Berkshire was moved to Oxfordshire in 1974, even though he wouldn't be born until over a decade later.

KB – I've rewritten or split up several sentences (including the Hampshire one) – if there are any that you find particularly confusing, can you identify them or the sentence they are contained within?

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I tried to comment on this earlier (in Alabaster) and all I got was an error. It seems to be OK now.

It's very easy to get bogged down in the detail of this entry and overlook the obvious fact that it is rather "listy". There are quite a few places in it where it just becomes a list of counties. And England has so many counties. Is there anything that could be done to make it more exciting and readable? Perhaps pack the county lists into a smaller space so that they can be skipped over to get to the interesting bits?

Perhaps only list the ones that have changed since the last list?

Looks like that error was widespread, but for whatever reason it seems to have gone away now.
I think you've both made a very good point – no-one really likes looking at lists. I still feel that it's important to be able to see what counties existed to begin with, and what counties are in existence now, but we don't need to see what is more or less the same information four times. In the middle two lists I've only listed the changes. The other counties have been relegated into footnotes so should anyone want to know whether a particular county existed or not in, say, 1888, they can still find out easily without it interrupting the look of the article.

Incidentally, when researching this project I discovered that we seem to have 3 Sussex sections:

C56363 – East Sussex
C453 – West Sussex
C219 – Sussex

This seems very odd. Surely we should either have
1: C219 Sussex or
2: C56363 East Sussex and C453 West Sussex.
To fit in with the other counties, such as the four Yorkshire counties, it would be correct if we had 2 Sussex divisions, East and West. The articles listed under Sussex could then be divided into East or West Sussex as appropriate (most of them seem to be East Sussex).

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Is everyone happy with this Entry now?

Interesting, but rather complex, topic. I had a read through of this a while ago, but didn't get round to commenting, sorry.

Reading again today, I find I can't understand the paragraph beginning "In the 1992 Act, the concept of a unitary authority was born"...

In the section Counties of England in the 21st Century, Cheshire is mentioned, but it is also mentioned in Footnote 13 that the county was split into two Unitary Authorities.

Hello – thanks for your comments. I would have replied earlier, but I've been having fun trying to defeat the captcha thingy...

I've re-written the paragraph that you mentioned and split it into two, so hopefully it reads better now.

Although Cheshire was split into two Unitary Authorities, it remains a single Ceremonial and Geographical County.

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Ah, yes - I did battle with the captcha thingy today as well...

"Although Cheshire was split into two Unitary Authorities, it remains a single Ceremonial and Geographical County."

Does it? I'm not sure... Maybe it is just a statistical point of view, but the Office for National Statistics lists 27 counties as at 2011 (County Durham is another one that changed to a Unitary Authority, as is Merseyside, which split into constituent Metropolitan Boroughs).

Cumbria
Lancashire
North Yorkshire
Derbyshire
Leicestershire
Lincolnshire
Northamptonshire
Nottinghamshire
Staffordshire
Warwickshire
Worcestershire
Cambridgeshire
Essex
Hertfordshire
Norfolk
Suffolk
Buckinghamshire
East Sussex
Hampshire
Kent
Oxfordshire
Surrey
West Sussex
Devon
Dorset
Gloucestershire
Somerset

Ah, I found Merseyside, plus Greater Manchester, Tyne and Wear, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, West Midlands, so I make it 35 including Inner/Outer London.

County Confusion indeed, sorry...

I had another read and spotted a couple more things:

In The 1992 Local Government Act section, there is repetition of Herefordshire and Worcestershire in the second paragraph.

The Unitary Authorities paragraph makes sense to me now, thanks

However, as with Counties, where I count 35 (ONS code 01) rather than your 46, I also count 56 Unitary Authorities (ONS code 06) rather than your 47...

I see that Lincolnshire is a county in addition to North Lincolnshire etc being Unitary Authorities, but I still don't see Cheshire in the Office for National Statistics (ONS) list.

I thought I had some understanding of this subject, but it is complex indeed... Sorry for adding to the confusion.

I've now changed this to emphasise the differences between England's Ceremonial (Geographical) Counties and the Administrative Counties. So for instance, geographically Southampton is in Hampshire and Southampton shares the same ceremonial Lord Lieutenant as Hampshire, but administratively Southampton is its own Unitary Authority.
I'd like to recommend that everyone now reads Gnomon's
A685596 Counties and Provinces of Ireland
It's a lot more straight-forward...

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