Note 173 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES

For such an enquiry it is especially needful to insist on breadth of treatment. In the first place, the modern area of the counties may vary more or less from the original extent;173 in the second we have no proof that the assessment had always been the same, though the tendency in early days, no doubt, was to stereotype such figures. We must not, therefore attempt close or detailed investigation but if, on a review of the whole evidence, we detect certain broad features, uneffaced by the hand of time, we may fairly claim that we have in these the traces of a principle at work, the witness to a state of things prevailing in the distant past.