Note 175 — PART I TERRITORIAL STUDIES

It would seem impossible to resist the conclusion that in these widely differing rates we have traces of a polity as yet divided, of those independent kingdoms from which had been formed the realm. Kent, for instance, which had so steadily maintained, first, its independent existence, and then its local institutions, had succeeded in preserving an assessment that its neighbours had cause to envy. In the west, Cornwall similarly enjoyed a low, indeed a nominal assessment while that of Devon, though higher than this, was so significantly lower than those of Somerset and Dorset175 as to remind us that here, in part at least, the 'Welsh' long held their own. If the incidence of geld were shown by shading a map of England, on the plan so successfully adopted in Mr Seebohm's great work, it would show that the heavily assessed counties were those which formed the nucleus of the old West-Saxon realm.176 All round this nucleus the map would shade off sharply, another sudden change marking the Danish counties on the north, the Jutish kingdom on the east, and the British district in the south-west. It is, perhaps, worthy of remark that Shropshire was assessed twice as heavily as the adjoining county of Stafford, possibly because part of it was added, at a very early period, to the kingdom of the West Saxons. If Mr Eyton was right in his reckoning that Kesteven was assessed twice as heavily as Lindsey, and Lindsey, in turn, twice as heavily as Holland, it would illustrate the survival of local distinctions even within the compass of a modern county, as well as the 'shading off' tendency of which I have already spoken.