Why does this archaic unit still grip the British imagination? Because the shire offers what modernity destroys: a bounded comprehensibility . In a world of global flows and abstract regions, the shire is human-scale. It is the territory you could traverse in a day on horseback or by bicycle. It is the scale of the local newspaper, the hunt, the farmers’ market, the rivalry between "north" and "south" of the county.
The word shire comes from the Old English scir, meaning an official charge or a district under the care of a governor. The system was first established by the Anglo-Saxons in the Kingdom of Wessex as early as the 8th century. As Wessex gained control over the rest of England, they exported this system of local government. By the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066, most of England was already divided into these units, each overseen by a shire-reeve—the origin of the modern word sheriff. shires of uk
