Excerpt from The Academy, Vol. 25: A Weekly Review of Literature, Science, and Art; January-June, 1884 The chapter dealing with the House of Alfred is distinguished by a learned and original essay on the beginnings of the English shires, which are attributed, after a cogent argument, to the customs of that oldest Wessex which lay between the Southampton Water and the great Forest of Selwood. Our system of county government began to exist, on this theory, even before Somerset and Dorset had begun to attain that rude unity which had already given importance to Wilton and South em ton as the centres of the oldest shires. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.