Winchester and York of 5,000 each; certainly that of York at the date of
Domesday could not have exceeded 7,000 persons, and we know that it
contained 1,800 houses in the time of Eadward the Confessor.

The organisation of the country continued on the lines of the old
constitution. But the importance of the simple freeman had now quite
died out, and the gemot was rather a meeting of the earls, bishops,
abbots, and wealthy landholders, than a real assembly of the people. The
sub-divisions of the kingdom were now pretty generally conterminous with
the modern counties. In Wessex and the east the counties are either
older kingdoms, like Kent, Sussex, and Essex; or else tribal divisions
of the kingdom, like Dorset, Somerset, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Surrey. In
Mercia, the recovered country is artificially mapped out round the chief
Danish burgs, as in the case of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire,
Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire, where the county
town usually occupies the centre of the arbitrary shire. In Northumbria
it is divided into equally artificial counties by the rivers. Beneath
the counties stood the older organisation of the hundred, and beneath
that again the primitive unit of the township, known on its
ecclesiastical side as the parish. In the reign of Eadgar, England seems
to have contained about 3,000 parish churches.




CHAPTER XVII.

THE DECADENCE.