Note 131 — Chapter III · THE CONSTITUTION OF ENGLAND IN THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES.[82]
Reading edition
Many of our present shires are historically divisions of kingdoms (see above, p. 48), and the word Scír, connected with scérn or shear, of course actually means division. But the word is most likely a comparatively modern one; the Shire or Pagus answers to the German Gau, on which see Kemble’s chapter on the Gá, and the chapter in the first volume of Waitz, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, “Das Dorf, die Gemeinde, der Gau.”