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Shire   Listen
noun
Shire  n.  
1.
A portion of Great Britain originally under the supervision of an earl; a territorial division, usually identical with a county, but sometimes limited to a smaller district; as, Wiltshire, Yorkshire, Richmondshire, Hallamshire. "An indefinite number of these hundreds make up a county or shire."
2.
A division of a State, embracing several contiguous townships; a county. (U. S.) Note: Shire is commonly added to the specific designation of a county as a part of its name; as, Yorkshire instead of York shire, or the shire of York; Berkshire instead of Berks shire. Such expressions as the county of Yorkshire, which in a strict sense are tautological, are used in England. In the United States the composite word is sometimes the only name of a county; as, Berkshire county, as it is called in Massachusetts, instead of Berks county, as in Pensylvania. "The Tyne, Tees, Humber, Wash, Yare, Stour, and Thames separate the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, etc."
Knight of the shire. See under Knight.
Shire clerk, an officer of a county court; also, an under sheriff. (Eng.)
Shire mote (Old. Eng. Law), the county court; sheriff's turn, or court. (Obs.)
Shire reeve (Old Eng. Law), the reeve, or bailiff, of a shire; a sheriff.
Shire town, the capital town of a county; a county town.
Shire wick, a county; a shire. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Shire" Quotes from Famous Books



... power to fight with the Scots.] In this meane while the archbishop Thurstan, to whom the charge of defending the countrie cheefelie in the kings absence apperteined, called togither the Nobles and gentlemen of the shire and parties adioining, whom with so pithie and effectuall words he exhorted to resist the attempts of the Scots (whose cruell dooings could kepe no measure) that incontinentlie all the power of the northparts was raised, [Sidenote: Sim. Dunel. Capteines of the armie.] ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (4 of 12) - Stephan Earle Of Bullongne • Raphael Holinshed

... the grand jury was in session. There were many people in the streets of the shire town. They moved with a slow foot, some giving their animation to squints of curiosity and shouts of recognition, some to profanity and plug tobacco. Squire Day and Colonel Judson were to argue the famous maple-sugar case, and many causes of local ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller

... case argued by law students as an exercise. An ancient English meeting of the freemen of a shire. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... heard a story told identical with one he had heard forty years before from a different man thirty miles away; and this story contained old Gaelic words the meaning of which the teller did not know. A gamekeeper from Ross-shire also testified to similar customs at his native place: the assemblies of the young to hear their elders repeat, on winter nights, the tales they had learned from their fathers before them, and the renown of the travelling tailor and shoemaker. When a stranger came to ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... continual emigrations from Ireland and Scotland, will soon render our colonies independent on the mother-country." In August, 1773, three gentlemen of the name of Macdonell, with their families and four hundred Highlanders from Inverness-shire sailed for America to take possession of a grant of land "in Albany." On the 22d of June previously between seven and eight hundred people from the Lewis sailed from Stornoway for the colonies. On the first of September, 1773, four hundred and twenty-five ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black

... in H...shire, a widow; her son, my cousin Fred, was preparing for the Army. I wanted a change, and went by advice to stay there. Fred was a year older than me, wild and baudy to the day of his death, he talked ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous

... remain even when tribal kingdoms disappear and the people is concentrated in one or two realms. The chief centres for the formulation and application of folk-right were in the 10th and 11th centuries the shire-moots, while the witan of the realm generally placed themselves on the higher ground of State expediency, although occasionally using folk-right ideas. The older law of real property, of succession, of contracts, the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... those that are witty and true to us, and I will lay my crown to pawn it will do. There are two that are come to my thoughts already, that I think will be arch at this work, and they are Mr. Penny-wise-pound-foolish, and Mr. Get-i'the-hundred-and-lose-i'the- shire; nor is this man with the long name at all inferior to the other. What, also, if you join with them Mr. Sweet-world and Mr. Present-good; they are men that are civil and cunning, but our true friends and helpers. Let these, with as many more, engage in this ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan

... dwellings of the Elfin race." It is further stated that one popular belief in the Scottish Highlands is that the Fians are still lying in the hill of Tomnahurich, near Inverness, and that "others say they are lying in Glenorchy, Argyleshire."[30] Now, both the Inverness-shire mound and the mounds in Glenorchy are also popularly regarded as the abodes of Fairies.[31] The vitrified fort on Knock-Farril, in Ross-shire, is said to have been one of Fin McCoul's castles;[32] and Knock-Farril, or rather "a knoll opposite Knock-Farril" is remembered as the abode of ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie

... bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the shire of Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly. On the Carrick side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle conformation, cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and there with farms and tufts of wood. Inland, it loses itself, joining, I suppose, the great herd of similar ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Shear or Shire Lane formerly ran from the east end of Carey Street to the Strand, and formed the parish boundary. This was a narrow, dirty lane of the vilest reputation before its demolition, but it had known better days. A very famous tavern stood in the lane, first called the Cat and Fiddle, ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... the country, and entirely illegal. It would not even be tolerated in England, he said, if a private gentleman should receive a military appointment in Warwickshire or Norfolk without the knowledge of the lord-lieutenant of the shire. He had treated the contumacious Sonoy with mildness during a long period, but without effect. He had abstained from violence towards him, out of reverence to the Queen, under whose sacred name he sheltered himself. Sonoy had not desisted, but ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... shire which he inhabited is called Halgoland. He says that no human being abode in any fixed habitation to the north of him. There is a port to the south of this land, which is called Sciringes-heal. Thither he said that a man could not sail in a month, if he watched in the night, and every day had ...
— The Discovery of Muscovy etc. • Richard Hakluyt

... our unpopularity in Peebles-shire, I had no opportunity of meeting other young people in their homes; and I knew no family except my own. The wealth of art and music, the luxury of flowers and colour, the stretches of wild country both in Scotland and high Leicestershire, ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... exclaimed. By then I had recognised those who were looking at me most fiercely, and they commenced whispering one to another some secret charms, still keeping their gaze upon me; the hubbub then broke out again and everyone laying hands upon me, lifted me shoulder-high, like a knight of the shire, and off like the wind we go, over houses and lands, cities and realms, seas and mountains, unable to notice aught so swiftly were they flying. And to make matters worse, I began to have doubts of my companions from the way they frowned and scowled ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... which still was pale, even if she blushed and answered "Yes, sir." "Are you here alone?—no relation, no woman friend with you?" "Yes." "And do they treat you well?" "Yes." "From what part of England?" "From —-shire." ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... and the maintenance in proper Honour and Splendour of the Church, he was too good a Christian and citizen not to shrink from seeing his native land laid waste by the blind savageness of a Civil War. And although, he paid Cess and Ship-money without murmuring, and, on being chosen a Knight of the Shire, did zealously speak up in the Commons House of Parliament on the King's side (refusing nevertheless to make one of the lip-serving crowd of courtiers of Whitehall), and although, when churchwarden in his parish, he ever preserved the laudable custom of Whitsun and Martinmas ales for the good ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... daughter named Lucy, of whom Master Bradene of Northamptonshire is descended. Can F. R. R., or any genealogist, inform me whether this Master Bradene is descended from Simon de Bradney, one of the Knights of the Shire for Somersetshire in the year 1346? In Collins's Somersetshire, vol. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various

... certain at Dover that Mr. Edw. Montagu did go beyond sea when he was here first the other day, and I am apt to believe that he went to speak with the King. This day one told me how that at the election at Cambridge for knights of the shire, Wendby and Thornton by declaring to stand for the Parliament and a King and the settlement of the Church, did carry it against all expectation against Sir Dudley North and Sir Thomas Willis! I supped to-night with Mr. Sheply below at the half-deck table, and after that ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... of Lord Byron,' said the dapper-looking individual, mouthing his words and smirking—'the illustrious poet, which have been just brought from Greece, and are being conveyed to the family vault in —-shire.' ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... and gladden us like the discovery of a hidden treasure. Some such ancestral hall we have occasionally encountered, in unlooked-for quarters, in our native county of Lancaster, or in its smiling sister shire; and never without feelings of intense delight, rejoicing to behold the freshness of its antiquity, and the greenness of its old age. For, be it observed in passing, a Cheshire or Lancashire hall, time-honored though it be, with its often renovated ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... and conversation while he was as yet living without God and without hope in the world. The country on which he confessed that he now looked back with so much shame and detestation was not England or Bedfordshire, but the wicked life he had lived in that land and in that shire. And when Charity asked him as to whether he was a married man and had a family, she knew quite well that he was, only she made a pretence of asking him those domestic questions in order thereby to ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte

... symbols which bring home to the peasant or artisan a consciousness that he belongs to a national entity. Their interests centred round the village green; the "best" men travelled further afield to the hundred and shire-moot, but anything beyond these limits was distant and unreal, the affair of an outside world with which they had no concern. Anglo-Saxon patriotism ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... I saw this opening rose That holds the summer in its hand, And with its beauty overflows And sweetens half a shire of land, It was a black and cindered thing, Drearily rocking in the cold, The relic of a vanished spring, A rose ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... instance, advertised as being so similar to linen that only an expert could tell the difference. That was Strong's invention. Before he invented the Piccadilly collar so-called, paper collars had a brilliant glaze that would not have deceived the most recent arrival from the most remote shire in the country. Strong devised some method by which a slight linen film was put on the paper, adding strength to the collar and giving it the appearance of the genuine article. You bought a pasteboard box containing a dozen of these collars for something ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr

... situation there outside the town hall while he talked. Two men from the shire town, wearing the nickel badges of deputy sheriffs, stood at the foot of the stairs. A group of men that he knew to be his loyal supporters from his own village were standing at one side. He strolled over ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... brothers-in-law, the Earl of Salisbury and Bishop of Durham, and the Earl of Warwick, alias the King of the Isle of Wight, were on their way to the Parliament that was summoned anent the King's marriage. The unwilling knights of the shire and burgesses of Northampton who would have to assist in the money grant had asked his protection; and all were to start early on the Monday—for Sunday was carefully observed as a holiday, and the whole party in all their splendours attended high ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge

... generation every farm and hamlet possessed its oral recorder of tale and song. The pastoral habits of the people led them to seek recreation in listening to, and in rehearsing the tales of other times; and the senachie and the bard were held in high esteem" (Inverness-shire, ibid., xiv. 168). "In the winter months, many of them are in the habit of visiting and spending the evenings in each other's houses in the different hamlets, repeating the songs of their native bard or listening to the legendary tales of some venerable senachie" ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... When the king heard that, he went ( then went he) westward with his army to Ashdown. 2.Lovest thou me more than these? 3.The men said that the shire which they lived in was called Halgoland. 4.All things were made (wyrcan) by God. 5.They were fighting for two days with (against) the Danes. 6.King Alfred fought with the Danes, and gained the victory; but the Danes retained possession of the battle-field. ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith

... Because gentlemen dwell with us in the country villages, our cities are less, is nothing to the purpose: put three hundred or four hundred villages in a shire, and every village yield a gentleman, what is four hundred families to increase one of our cities, or to contend with theirs, which stand thicker? And whereas ours usually consist of seven thousand, theirs consist of forty ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... papers, or exciting public attention in any way. We will call it, for the sake of a name, 'The Babel and Lowriver Steam Navigation Company.' Lowriver is a pleasant, genteel little village, which has of late years sprung suddenly into existence on the coast of ——shire, and has been growing, for the last seven years, with each succeeding summer, more and more a place of favourite resort with the inhabitants of Babel. Mr Montague Whalebone took an early liking to the place, and built a row of goodly houses by the water-side, and a grand hotel at the end ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various

... the Highland and semi-Highland districts of the north corresponded in many of its traits to the seventeenth century of the Saxon-peopled districts of the south; and Donald Roy was one of the most notable of the class. The anecdotes regarding him which still float among the old recollections of Ross-shire, if transferred to Peden or Welch, would be found entirely in character with the strange stories that inlay the biographies of these devoted men, and live so enduringly in the memory of the Scottish people. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... he turned his face eastward, discovered Victoria Falls on the Zambesi, and finally arrived at Cuilimane on the coast. On his second series of journeys (1858-1864) he explored the Zambesi, the Shire, and the Rovuma rivers in the East, and discovered Lake Nyasa. On his final expedition (1866-1873), in hunting for the upper courses of the Nile, he discovered Lakes Tanganyika, Mweru, and Bangweolo, and the Lualaba ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various

... the Council no sooner saw the popular reaction than they proclaimed Mary Queen; and this step was at once followed by a declaration of the fleet in her favour, and by the announcement of the levies in every shire that they would only fight in her cause. As the tidings reached him the Duke's courage suddenly gave way. His retreat to Cambridge was the signal for a general defection. Northumberland himself threw his cap into the air and shouted with his men for Queen Mary. But his submission failed to avert ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... whole business to find desolate corners, where I could camp without the fear of interruption; and hence, being in another part of the same shire, I bethought me suddenly of the Pavilion on the Links. No thoroughfare passed within three miles of it. The nearest town, and that was but a fisher village, was at a distance of six or seven. For ten miles of length, and from a depth ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... were fighting the battles of vanity and the affections down in the southern shire in quite a rural district, among mills and ash-trees, and houses with gardens and garden bowers, William and Dulcie were combating real flesh-and-blood woes—woes that would not so much set your ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... vive ton tine' fa ri'na rinse bro'mine mar'i time shire li'chen pi a'no width ob lique' vir'u lent si'ren vis'count cyn'o sure ti'ny vi'rile is'o late li'en spike'nard vol'a tile an'ile trib'une en fran'chise ei'der qui'nine, de ci'sive, tri'o ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey

... able administrators. Gradually, with prolonged peace, the hereditary element choked and swamped the nominated element. The abbots disappeared, the lords multiplied. The peer ceased to be the leader of a shire, and sank into a mere idle landowner. Wealth alone grew at last to be a title to the peerage. The House of Lords became a House of Landlords. And the English people submitted to the claim of irresponsible wealth or irresponsible ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... of the Congo, Cameron found numerous pile dwellings, whose owners moved about in dug-out canoes and cultivated fields on land,[586] as did their Swiss confreres of twenty centuries ago. Livingstone, in descending from Lake Nyassa by the Shire River, found in the lakelet of Pamalombe, into which the stream widened, similar water huts inhabited by a number of Manganja families, who had been driven from their homes by slave raiders. The slender reeds of the papyrus thicket, lining the ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... boastful exclamation by the owner of "a thoroughbred imported Percheron, or a thoroughbred imported French coacher, or a thoroughbred imported Scotch Clyde, or a thoroughbred imported English coacher, or a thoroughbred imported English Shire, or a thoroughbred imported English ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various

... Perhaps the old shire of Derby, with its many rich examples, can present to view nothing equal in historic and legendary interest to this old mansion. Its turrets and towers, its windows and its walls, its capacious kitchens, and its fine halls and ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday

... shire of Leicester, close by the River Weak—or at least it stood there when last I saw it. It is ten long years since I crossed its drawbridge and not twelve months of my life have been spent ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott

... islands of the Outer Hebrides, called respectively North and South, forming part of Inverness-shire; separated by the island of Benbecula, with a population of over 3000 each; engaged chiefly ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Curl appeared in the potato in Lancashire in 1764. It was in that Shire the potato was first planted in England; and we are told the Curl appeared in those districts of it in which it was first planted. The nature of the disease is indicated by its name. The stalk became discoloured and stunted almost from the beginning of its growth; it changed its natural ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... local gatherings of the principal men. A district formed from a greater or less number of townships, with a meeting for the settlement of disputes, the punishment of crimes, the witnessing of agreements, and other purposes, was known as a "hundred" or a "wapentake." A "shire" was a grouping of hundreds, with a similar gathering of its principal men for judicial, military, and fiscal purposes. Above the ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney

... called by the title of Old Mortality, was we'll known in Scotland about the end of the last century. His real name was Robert Paterson. He was a native, it is said, of the parish of Closeburn, in Dumfries-shire, and probably a mason by profession—at least educated to the use of the chisel. Whether family dissensions, or the deep and enthusiastic feeling of supposed duty, drove him to leave his dwelling, and adopt the singular mode of life in which he wandered, like a palmer, through Scotland, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... a bar spread in the Shire hall at Barnip, an' afore they missed him he ate enough fer ten Shire Councillors. He completely rooned that banquet. That was the third time he'd gone on th' spree, an' ther Perfesser 'ad warned him if it 'appened again he'd get ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... you it isn't! We knew him when we were abroad, and we know what he is, and we know his mother very well. When we were in England we were a week with them down at their beautiful place in ——shire,—the loveliest time! You see she was over here with Mr. Carleton once before, a good while ago; and mamma and papa were polite to them, and so they shewed us a great deal of attention when we were in England. We had the loveliest time down there you can possibly conceive. ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... and cry! Some assert, then some deny In a near or far shire; Call each other names and laugh, Jeer and chuckle, joke and chaff— ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various

... constant receipt of news from Lausanne. Of Mary Boyle, I daresay you have seen and heard more than I have lately. Rumours occasionally reach me of her acting in every English shire incessantly, and getting in a harvest of laurels all the year round. Cavendish I have not seen for a long time, but when I did see him last, it was at Tavistock House, and we dined together jovially. Mention of that locality reminds me that when you ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens

... Thomas Hoo, of the Hoo and Kimpton, both in Hertfordshire. Mr. Keate was created a baronet by King Charles II., 12th June, 1660. Sir Jonathan was sheriff of the county of Hertford, 17 Charles II., and knight of the same shire in Parliament, in the thirtieth of the same reign. By his first wife he had issue, Gilbert Hoo, his heir, Jonathan, Susan, Elizabeth: all died sine prole. He married, secondly, Susanna, daughter of John Orlebar, citizen of London, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 213, November 26, 1853 • Various

... couldn't, I'm so busy," was the immediate reply. "I'm going to Scotland the first or second week in August. The doctor advises me to give my voice a long rest; and the Cunynghams have asked me to their place in Ross-shire. Besides, I don't care about singing in London when there's nobody but country cousins, and none too many of them. Of course I'll have to go down and bid the old folks good-bye before starting for Scotland, and Francie, too. Mind you tell that wicked Francie that I am very angry ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... Christmas Island Shire Council (9 seats; members elected by popular vote to serve four-year terms) elections: held every two years with half the members standing for election; last held 20 October 2007 (next to be held in 2009) election results: percent of vote - ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the sons of a farmer in Inverness-shire, whom a sudden flood stript of every thing, even to the very soil which he tilled. The farmer and his son William made their way southward, until they arrived in the neighborhood of Bury, in Lancashire, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... Deerhound and the fashionable Pomeranian, the St. Bernard and the Miniature Black and Tan Terrier, and is perplexed in contemplating the possibility of their having descended from a common progenitor. Yet the disparity is no greater than that between the Shire horse and the Shetland pony, the Shorthorn and the Kerry cattle, or the Patagonian and the Pygmy; and all dog breeders know how easy it is to produce a variety in type and ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... their freedom. Thanks to compact organization, they were loosening the bonds of their dependence on the lords or bishops to whom most of them paid taxes; and the alliance of their representatives with the knights of the shire (country gentlemen) in the House of Commons, now a separate division of Parliament, was laying the foundation of the political power of the whole middle class. But the feudal system continued to rest ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... was ordered to move to Leesburg, near which we pitched our shelters. This is an old, aristocratic village, the shire-town of Loudon County. It is situated in a lovely valley, at the terminus of the Loudon and Hampshire Railroad, and is only about two miles from the Potomac, and an equal distance from Goose Creek, which is a considerable stream. Though ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier

... exceptional price. Oxen, which were chiefly valued as working animals, were about 13s. apiece[92]; cows, 9s. 5d. Farm horses were of two varieties: the 'affer' or 'stott', a rough small animal, generally worth about 13s. 5d., and the cart-horse, probably the ancestor of our shire horses, whose average price was 19s. 4d. A good saddle-horse fetched as much as L5. Sheep were from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 5d. each. In Hampshire in 1248 shoeing ten farm horses for the plough for a year cost 5s.; making a gate cost 12d. As Walter of Henley said, it cost a penny a week ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... This shire may be divided as it were into three stories or stages. Chippenham vale is the lowest. The first elevation, or next storie, is from the Derry Hill, or Bowdon Lodge, to the hill beyond the Devises, called Red-hone, which is the limbe or beginning ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey

... his estate again augmented by an inheritance from his elder brother, sir Bevil Granville, who, as he returned from the government of Barbadoes, died at sea. He continued to serve in parliament; and, in the ninth year of queen Anne, was chosen knight of the shire for Cornwall. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... already, so that a little matter may have them free of the fetlocks; and in that case, look ye, ye will say I desire to take out the balance of the gold in curses upon a generation called the Ogilvies of Angus Shire, in what way soever the church may best come at them. ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... of the House of Commons we may go back to the thirteenth century. In 1254 the king summoned to Parliament not only the bishops, abbots, earls, and barons, but also two knights from every shire. Then, in an irregular Parliament, convened in 1265 by Simon de Montfort, a great baronial leader against the king, two burgesses from each of twenty-one towns for the first time sat with the others and helped to decide how their liberties were to be protected. These knights ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... Church, when it became a large-scale organization, able to overcome the dilemma. It was not till thirteenth-century England that a way out was found. Edward I in summoning two burgesses from each borough and two knights from each shire to his model Parliament in 1295, hit on a method of doing business which was destined to revolutionize the art of government. He stipulated that the men chosen by their fellows to confer with him must come, to quote ...
— Progress and History • Various

... enjoying his grave little surprise, "only the trams of his mortar-barrow! And there's that noisy tinkler body, Tim Cleary, the Shire Irishman, in the lock-up for wanting to fight the Provost of Dumfries, and he'll get eight days for certain. But the Provost is paying the lodgings of his wife and family in the meantime. It will be a rest for them, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... Italy they fry in Oyl, and eat with Pepper: They are commonly discovered by a Nasute Swine purposely brought up; being of a Chessnut Colour, and heady Smell, and not seldom found in England, particularly in a Park of my Lord Cotton's at Rushton or Rusbery in Northampton-shire, and doubtless in other [31]places too were they sought after. How these rank and provocative Excrescences are to be [32]treated (of themselves insipid enough, and only famous for their kindly taking any Pickle or Conditure) that they may do the less Mischief we might here set down. ...
— Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets • John Evelyn

... eminent geologist, when visiting in the Highlands:—The professor was walking on the hills one Sunday morning, and partly from the effect of habit, and partly from not adverting to the very strict notions of Sabbath desecration entertained in Ross-shire, had his pocket hammer in hand, and was thoughtlessly breaking the specimens of minerals he picked up by the way. Under these circumstances, he was met by an old man steadily pursuing his way to his church. For some time the patriarch observed the movements of ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay

... veins of the same kind, only two or three feet wide, may be seen in the bed of the Water of Leith, traversing the horizontal strata, the one is above St Bernard's well, the other immediately below it. But, more particularly, in the shire of Ayr, to the north of Irvine, there are to be seen upon the coast, between that and Scarmorly, in the space of about twenty miles, more than twenty or thirty such dykes (as they are called) of whin-stone. Some of them are of a great thickness; and, in some places, ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... 745; direction &c. 693. [nations] national government, nation, state, country, nation-state, dominion, republic, empire, union, democratic republic; kingdom, principality. [subdivisions of nations] state government[U.S terminology], state; shire[England]; province[Canada]; county[Ireland]; canton[Switzerland]; territory [Australia]; duchy, archduchy, archdukedom[obs3]; woiwodshaft; commonwealth; region &c. 181; property &c. 780. [smaller subdivisions] county, parish[Louisiana]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... and poorer. When Horace was ten years old, his land was sold. The family were now very poor. They moved from New Hamp-shire. They settled in Ver-mont. They lived in a poor ...
— Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans • Edward Eggleston

... they were soon mounted and in order; and in all the form, and with some of the dignity of danger, proceeded to escort the Countess of Derby through the hilly and desert tract of country which connects the frontier of the shire with the neighbouring county of Cheshire. The cavalcade moved with considerable precaution, which they had been taught by the discipline of the Civil Wars. One wary and well-mounted trooper rode about two hundred yards in advance; followed, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... we now value so much. In Lancashire, busy Lancashire, the same thing was happening, and even in the middle of Yorkshire and Derbyshire the sea must have come up and washed a silent shore where a vast forest spread out over at least 700 or 800 square miles. In Stafford-shire, too, which is now almost the middle of England, another small coal-field tells the same story, while in South Wales the deep coal-mines and number of coal-seams remind us how for centuries and centuries forests must have flourished and have ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley

... a church in This attractive little shire, He beheld a smallish urchin Shooting arrows at the spire; In a spirit of derision, "Look alive!" the eagle said; And, with infinite precision, Dropped a ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl

... Rumanika's, when I first viewed the Mfumbiro cones, and gathered all my distant geographical information there, that these highly saturated Mountains of the Moon give birth to the Congo as well as to the Nile, and also to the Shire branch of ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke

... said she, 'it was the song they sing in Shire-Carnarvon about the golden cloud over Snowdon and ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... helped him for awhile in so doing. Arnulf is famous at Pembroke.[52] Roger the Poitevin, so called from his marriage, had been lord of that land between Mersey and Ribble, which afterwards went to patch up the modern shire of Lancaster. Presently the brothers quarrelled. Robert of Belleme refused to give Arnulf and Roger any share in their father's inheritance. Then they forsook him, and Arnulf took an active part against him on behalf of Duke Robert. We read how, in June, 1103, he seized his brother's munitio of ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman

... East, and Middle Saxons. Surrey is the Sothe-reye, or south realm; Kent is the land of the Cantii, a Belgic tribe; Devon is the land of the Damnonii, a Celtic tribe; Cornwall, or Corn-wales, is the land of the Welsh of the Horn; Worcestershire is the shire of the Huiccii; Cumberland is the land of the Cymry; Northumberland is the land north of the Humber, and therefore, as its name implies, used to extend over all the North of England. Evidently the southern tribes and kingdoms by conquest reduced the size of this ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... ever been summoned since the foundation of the monarchy. Besides the barons of his own party, and several ecclesiastics, who were not immediate tenants of the crown, he ordered returns to be made of two knights from each shire, and, what is more remarkable, of deputies from the boroughs, an order of men which, in former ages, had always been regarded as too mean to enjoy a place in the national councils.[**] This period is commonly esteemed the epoch of the house of commons in England; and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... weeks later the sad tidings reached the sorrowing parents from the Zambesi that their eldest daughter Mary, the wife of Dr. Livingstone, had been called to her rest. A white marble cross, near Shupanga House on the Shire River, marks the spot where this sainted martyr to the cause of Africa's regeneration sleeps ...
— Robert Moffat - The Missionary Hero of Kuruman • David J. Deane

... from whom the Old Rosses of Balnagown, of whom the last representative in the male line was the late George Ross of Pitcalnie. This Hugh obtained the lands of Philorth in Aberdeen-shire, and between 1362 and 1372 he exchanged them with his brother, Earl Hugh, for the lands of North Argyle, including the Castle of Ellandonnan. The territories exchanged included Strathglass, Kintail, and other lands ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... shall cause writings to be made and seal them with my seal, the which they shall have with them, containing everything that ye demand; and to the intent that ye shall be the better assured, I shall cause my banners to be delivered into every bailiwick, shire and countries.' ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed

... criminal law was originally dispensed in the free gilds into which the city was divided, under the presidency of an alderman. These divisions were afterwards called wards, and were analogous to the corresponding division of the shire into hundreds. In each ward was held a court-leet, or ward-mote, dating from the time of Alfred, though the actual institution of wards by that name is no later than the reign of Edward I. Civil causes, in London at least, were tried before a peculiar tribunal, ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen

... very large jug indeed. To be sure, he wondered as much at me e who did not finish a jug; and I could not help reflecting, that living always in the world makes one as unfit for living out of it, as always living out of it does for living in it. Knightley, the knight of the shire, has been entertaining all the parishes round with a turtle-feast, which, so far from succeeding, has almost made him suspected for a Jeu,, as the country parsons have not yet learned to wade into ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... told by that saint's biographer, St. Adamnan, Ernan was favoured with a vision in which the saint's death was revealed to him. St. Ernan died in his Irish monastery at an advanced age in the year 640. The church of Killernan, in Ross-shire, is named after him. Another dedication to this saint is thought by some ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett

... the peninsula between the two rivers they probably found a populous town on the older site. This conjecture would account for the name given to the new colony—Southhame tune—ultimately borne by the county-town and the origin of the shire name. It is as the natural outlet for the trade of Winchester and Wessex, standing at the head of one of the finest waterways in Europe, that Southampton became the present thriving ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... farmer, well to do in ——shire, fell ill of an acute and dangerous disorder. (By the by, every one was anxious to know if "poor" Mrs. Small's husband was better.) He died,—Mrs. Small was, of course, in decent affliction. But the word of pity was always ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various

... force to surrender, would serve as a convenient frontier against the English. To this end, advancing near the city, and having pitched his tents, he sat down before it with his whole army. In the mean time Archbishop Thurstan, having already summoned the nobles and gentry of the shire and parts adjacent, had, by powerful persuasions incited them to defend their country against a treacherous, bloody, and restless enemy: so that before the King of Scotland could make any progress in the siege, the whole power of the north was united against him, under the Earl of Albemarle, and ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift

... the cruelty of these executions, some even of the peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian, pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives who fell in their way. One strange story have we of these times of blood and persecution: Kirkton the historian and popular tradition tell us alike of a flame which often ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... dispersed population; so that the character of the people and the circumstances under which they lived were alike favorable to the establishment of the county system pure and simple. To quote the pithy statement of Professor Macy, "The southern county was a modified English shire, with the towns left out. Local government in New England was made up of English towns ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary

... triumphant juncture, Mr. Freely one morning observed that a stone-carver who had been breakfasting in the eating-room had left a newspaper behind. It was the X-shire Gazette, and X-shire being a county not unknown to Mr. Freely, he felt some curiosity to glance over it, and especially over the advertisements. A slight flush came over his face as he read. It was produced by the following announcement:—"If David Faux, ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot

... field through all the shire The eye beholds the heart's desire; Ah, let not only mine be vain, For lovers should be ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman

... a society less provincial than that of more than one shire that was nearer to London by a thousand leagues. It dwelt upon the banks of the Chesapeake and of great rivers; ships dropped their anchors before its very doors. Now and again the planter followed his ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... at first, proved in the end providential—a timely clearance for a more congenial craft—since the women of the State had organized a Woman's State Temperance Society, and advertised a Convention to meet the following week at Delavan, the populous shire town of Walworth County, fifty miles distant in the interior. Thither the friendly Leaguers proposed to take us. Meantime it was arranged that Mrs. F. and I should address the citizens of Milwaukee. A capacious church was engaged for ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... a brave shire, and breeds brave sons. Could I be born again, I'd pray to see the sun first from a ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan

... reforms of Alfred in the administration of justice and the resettlement of the country, the old divisions of shires were carefully readjusted, and divided into hundreds and tythings. The alderman of the shire still remained the chief officer, but the office was no longer hereditary. The king appointed the alderman, or eorl, who was president of the shire gemot, or council, and chief judge of the county court ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord

... nothing can be more vnsauourie and farre from all ciuilitie. I remember in the first yeare of Queenes Maries raigne a Knight of Yorkshire was chosen speaker of the Parliament, a good gentleman and wise, in the affaires of his shire, and not vnlearned in the lawes of the Realme, but as well for some lack of his teeth, as for want of language nothing well spoken, which at that time and businesse was most behooffull for him to haue bene: this man after he had made his Oration to the Queene; which ye know is of course to be ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham

... go into —shire to-morrow evening, to place Arthur with his tutor. But I'll return for the wedding, if you particularly wish it: only Mrs. Beaufort is a woman ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... a lot lately, and Miss Bertram asked me the other day if I'd like any other job for the winter as there's hardly enough work for me in the garden now. And yesterday I saw a chap in the village I used to know. He's a recruiting sergeant for the ——shire regiment, and he wants me to enlist straight away. I wouldn't have given it a thought only what you said about serving the Queen has stuck to me, and it does seem a chance, and somehow that song has been ...
— His Big Opportunity • Amy Le Feuvre

... the great? P. A knave's a knave, to me, in ev'ry state: Alike my scorn, if he succeed or fail, 360 Sporus at court, or Japhet in a jail A hireling scribbler, or a hireling peer, Knight of the post corrupt, or of the shire; If on a Pillory, or near a Throne, He gain his Prince's ear, or lose his own. 365 Yet soft by nature, more a dupe than wit, Sappho can tell you how this man was bit; This dreaded Sat'rist Dennis will confess Foe to his pride, but friend to his distress: ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope

... help nature's work, and go to school, To file and finish God Almighty's fool: Yet none Sir Fopling, him, or him, can call, He's Knight o'th' Shire, and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... her contemplation of one stranger was soon put to an end by exclamations and inquiries about the other; of whom, however, she could only tell her nieces what they already knew, that Mr. Denny had brought him from London, and that he was to have a lieutenant's commission in the ——shire. She had been watching him the last hour, she said, as he walked up and down the street, and had Mr. Wickham appeared, Kitty and Lydia would certainly have continued the occupation, but unluckily no one passed windows now except a few of the officers, who, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... say, that had there bin an offer made unto me before I took my journey to Venice, eyther that foure of the richest manors of Somerset-shire (wherein I was borne) should be gratis bestowed upon me if I never saw Venice, or neither of them if I should see it; although certainly these manors would do me much more good in respect of a state of livelyhood to live in the world than the sight of Venice, yet notwithstanding I will ever ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas

... side, all of varying birth, fortune, and connection, whether with king, earl, or ceorl. For in the different districts of the old Heptarchy, the qualification varied; high in East Anglia, low in Wessex; so that what was wealth in the one shire was poverty in the other. There sate, half a yeoman, the Saxon thegn of Berkshire or Dorset, proud of his five hydes of land; there, half an ealderman, the Danish thegn of Norfolk or Ely, discontented with his forty; some were there ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... frequently in the county histories occurs an account of some esquire whose family and antecedents the writer has been, unable to trace, but who was prominent in the county—sheriff perhaps or Knight of the Shire—as a result of the lands he held in right of his wife. An example of this is Helmyng Leget, who was member of Parliament for Essex in 7 and 9 Henry IV, and sheriff in 1401 and 1408. He had married Alice, daughter and coheir of Sir Thomas Mandeville and received the estates of Stapleford-Taney, ...
— Chaucer's Official Life • James Root Hulbert

... Normans, and in the first third of the twelfth century, devoted themselves with the inauspicious aid of Norman allies, to the introduction of Saxon settlers and the feudal system, first into the lowlands, and subsequently into Moray-shire. This innovation on their ancient system, and confiscation of their lands, was stoutly resisted by the Scottish Gael. In Somerled, lord of the Isles, and ancestor of the Macdonalds, they found a powerful leader, and Somerled found Irish allies always ready to assist him, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... Utopians have the secret. It hath fifty-four large and fair cities, all built in one fashion, and having like manners, institutions and laws. The chief and head is Amaurote, being the midmost. Every city hath an equal shire, with farms thereon; and of the husbandmen, half return each year to the city, their place being ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... at the intended trial of Mr. Price and other Protestants at Wicklow, who could not be tried for want of freeholders—yet, notwithstanding the paucity of these, they made a shift to return knights of the shire. The common way of election was thus:—The Earl of Tyrconnell, together with the writ for election, commonly sent a letter, recommending the persons he designed should be chosen; the sheriff or mayor being his creature, on receipt of this, called so many ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... his castle wall; The gate was burnt with fire; Roof and rafter were fallen down, The folk were strangers all in the town, And strangers all in the shire. ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley

... I flung my gown at the bar-keeper, and commenced gay man on my own account. In Edinburgh, I ran into all the expensive society which the place then afforded. When I went to my house in the shire of Lanark, I emulated to the utmost the expenses of men of large fortune, and had my hunters, my first-rate pointers, my game-cocks, and feeders. I can more easily forgive myself for these follies, than for others of a still ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... been thinking," said she, "that they are distant relations, for the great-grandfather of this Sir Harry, who was knight of the shire in the reign of Charles I., married a daughter of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... is superimposed upon the Gault and Upper Greensand beds, which are confined to the western portion of the county. Its upper layer passes into a sandy limestone, known as Totternhoe stone, which has furnished materials for many churches in the shire. Ashwell, Pirton and Tring may be named as neighbourhoods where ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins

... which concludes "The River Duddon" series, is usually entitled "After-Thought". The series was written at intervals, and was finally published in 1820. "The Duddon rises on Wrynose Fell, near to 'Three Shire Stone,' where Westmoreland, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... to a blacker pit, for whom Grimy nakedness, dragging his trucks And laying his trams, in a poisoned gloom Wrought, till he crept from a gutted mine Master of half a servile shire, And left his coal all turned into gold To a grandson, first of his ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens

... and then that showed how much she cared, she was conscious all the time, that she was listening for the sound of a movement overhead, or for her sister's footstep on the stair. By and by, as Charlie went on, in answer to Mr Snow's questions, to tell about the state of agriculture in his native shire, her attention wandered altogether, and she listened only for ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson

... being 1,230 men. Bruce's death is generally ascribed to John Mapas, one of the Drogheda contingent. The Ulster Journal states:—'There can be little doubt that the ancient Anglo-Irish family of "Mape," of Maperath, in the shire of Meath, was descended from this distinguished slayer of Edward Bruce.' The heiress of John Mapas, Esq., of Rochestown, county of Dublin, was married to the late Richard Wogan Talbot, Esq., of Malahide. After the defeat ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... little he made contributions to human knowledge, drew maps, and made notes and collections. He came to districts he already knew, where black women were carried off by crocodiles on the bank of the Shire River, where he had lost his wife, and where all the missionaries sent out on his ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... In fact, we went to the top and bottom of everything, from the dome of St. Paul to the tunnel under the Thames, just then in the process of excavation. We drove through the parks, sailed up and down the Thames, and then visited every shire but four in England, in all of which we had large meetings, Mr. Birney and Mr. Stanton being the chief speakers. As we were generally invited to stay with Friends, it gave us a good opportunity to see the leading families, such as the Ashursts, the Alexanders, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... his father, who had been brought up to farm-work, and possessed considerable practical knowledge of agriculture, was offered the charge of a farm at Moy in Ross-shire, belonging to Lord Seaforth of Brahan Castle. The farm was of about 300 acres, situated on the banks of the river Conan, some five miles from the town of Dingwall. The family travelled thither in a covered cart, a distance of 200 miles, through a very wild and hilly country, arriving ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... the son of a minister well esteemed for his piety and diligence, was born September 7, 1700, at Ednam, in the shire of Roxburgh, of which his father was pastor. His mother, whose name was Hume, inherited as co-heiress a portion of a small estate. The revenue of a parish in Scotland is seldom large; and it was probably in commiseration of the difficulty ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson

... beast. And in the kingdom I have truly scanned, There's many worser parts, are better manned, For in the time that thieving was in ure, The gentles fled to places more secure. And left the poorer sort, to abide the pain, Whilst they could ne'er find time to turn again. The shire of gentlemen is scarce and dainty, Yet there's relief in great abundance plenty, Twixt it and England, little odds I see, They eat, and live, and strong and able be, So much in verse, and now I'll change my style, And seriously I'll write ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor

... unlooked-for danger was near—a danger, too, which had followed her all the way from Warren's Grove. Lydia Purcell had always been very particular whom she engaged to work on Mrs. Bell's farm, generally confining herself to men from the same shire. But shortly before the old lady's death, being rather short of hands to finish the late harvest, a tramp from some distant part of the country had offered his services. Lydia, driven to despair to get a certain job finished before the weather finally broke, ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade

... well remembered, by shooting the animal through and through in the region of the heart. On this proof they unanimously decided on a prosecution; and accordingly Phillips and Mark Elwood set off the next day for Lancaster, the shire-town on the Connecticut, for legal advice, warrants, and a sheriff to serve them. On reaching the place, they were told by the attorney they consulted that they could not make out larceny or theft against Gurley for taking ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson

... 1295, the King laid the foundation of borough representation, by directing the sheriffs of the various counties to send to Parliament, along with the knights of the shire, two deputies from each borough, who were to be elected by the townsmen, and empowered to consent, in the name of their constituents, to the decrees of the King and his Council. "It is a most equitable rule," added the ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt

... women of Leicestershire, Anne Baker, Joan Willimot, and Ellen Greene, who in their confessions implicated the Flowers (they belonged to parishes neighbor to that of Belvoir, which lies on the shire border) and whose testimony against them figured in their trials, were at the same time (Feb.-March, 1618/19) under examination in that county. Whether these women were authors or victims of the Belvoir suspicions we do not know. As we have their damning ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein

... more, and very sad it was, though still we had cause for joy. When Montrose's little troop was defeated and broken up at the Pass of Invercharron my brother had fled with the Marquis, and had shared his wanderings in Ross-shire for some days; but, as might only too surely have been expected, the exposure brought back his former illness, and he was obliged to take shelter in the cabin of a poor old Scotchwoman. She—blessings be on her head!—was faithful ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Hester Thornton had been one of the happiest, brightest and merriest of little girls in ——shire; but the mother who was her guardian angel, who had kept the frank and spirited child in check without appearing to do so, who had guided her by the magical power of love and not in the least by that of fear, ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade

... the time came that the monasterias were destined to be dissolved, and their books torn and scattered to the winds, no attention was paid to Bale's advice for the formation of "one solemne library in every shire of England." ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 2, November 10 1849 • Various

... signals had been despatched fast and far through England, to warn each town and village that the enemy had come at last. In every seaport there was instant making ready by land and by sea; in every shire and every city there was instant mustering of horse and man. But England's best defence then, as ever, was in her fleet; and, after warping laboriously out of Plymouth harbor against the wind, the lord admiral stood westward under easy sail, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... apparently, was dark and deep-set. Oddly enough, the chin, to the length of which he had himself referred in the Champion, does not appear abnormal. [Footnote: In the bust of Fielding which Miss Margaret Thomas has been commissioned by Mr. R. A. Kinglake to execute for the Somerset Valhalla, the Shire-Hall at Taunton, these points have been carefully considered; and the sculptor has succeeded in producing a work which, while it suggests the mingling of humour and dignity that is Fielding's chief characteristic, is also generally faithful to Hogarth's indications. From ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... machinery and powers. From the point of view of subsequent institutional history the most important features of the Anglo-Saxon governmental system were kingship, the witenagemot, and the units of local administration—shire, hundred, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... sweet shire of Cardigan, Not far from pleasant Ivor-hall, An old man dwells, a little man, I've heard he once was tall. Of years he has upon his back, No doubt, a burthen weighty; He says he is three score and ten, But ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge

... in the preparation of the calendar and the assignments of the royal exchequer. In England, for example, when the hide developed from the normal holding of a household into the unit of taxation, the calculation of the geldage in each shire required a sum in division; as we know from the fact that one of the Abacists proposes the sum: "If 200 marks are levied on the county of Essex, which contains according to Hugh of Bocland 2500 hides, how much does each hide pay?"[3*] Exchequer methods up to the sixteenth century were founded on ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous

... pack, and take a train, And get me to England once again! For England's the one land, I know, Where men with Splendid Hearts may go; And Cambridgeshire, of all England, The shire for Men who Understand; And of 'that' district I prefer The lovely hamlet Grantchester. For Cambridge people rarely smile, Being urban, squat, and packed with guile; And Royston men in the far South Are black and fierce and strange ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... published by a zealous antiquarian, enumerating with much detail all the families of England of a certain consequence who still occupied either the same estate or estates contiguous to those upon which they were living in the Fifteenth Century. The shire of which Shrewsbury is the capital very easily headed the list in this honorable competition and thereby justified the title of 'proud Salopians,' which the more consequential of its people submit to with much complacency, even though it be not always applied ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy

... and voluble, and informed the boy that the gentleman riding before him was my lord's chaplain, Father Holt—that he was now to be called Master Harry Esmond—that my Lord Viscount Castlewood was his parrain—that he was to live at the great house of Castlewood, in the province of ——shire, where he would see madame the viscountess, who was a grand lady. And so, seated on a cloth before Blaise's saddle, Harry Esmond was brought to London, and to a fine square called Covent Garden, near to which his ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... the ruler of a large district, such as a shire or kingdom. When Mercia became subject to Wessex it was ruled ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... feet three to three feet eight inches in thickness, furnished, says Sir Roderick Murchison, between the years 1814 and 1826, no less than seventy thousand tons of coal. Such is its extent, too, that nearly thirty miles from the pit's mouth (in Ross-shire under the Northern Sutor) I have found it still existing, though in diminished proportions, as a decided coal seam, which it must have taken no small amount of vegetable matter to form. And almost on the other side of the world, nearly ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... the Quillimane river, we found that the Portuguese were at war with a half-caste named Mariano alias Matakenya, from whom they had generally fled, and who, having built a stockade near the mouth of the Shire, owned all the country between that river and Mazaro. Mariano was best known by his native name Matakenya, which in their tongue means "trembling," or quivering as trees do in a storm. He was a keen slave- hunter, and kept a large number of men, well armed with muskets. It is an entire mistake to ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... the county is going to the dogs! Our sentiments are not represented in parliament or out of it. The 'County Mercury' has ratted, and be hanged to it! and now we have not one newspaper in the whole shire to express the sentiments of the respectable part ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... well known that she, as the only child of the late Lord of the Isles, was the great heiress of the day. It is true that the hereditary possession of Skye, Staffa, Mull, Arran, and Bute went, with the title, to the Marquis of Auldreekie, together with the counties of Caithness and Ross-shire. But the property in Fife, Aberdeen, Perth, and Kincardineshire, comprising the greater part of those counties, and the coal-mines in Lanark, as well as the enormous estate within the city of Glasgow, were unentailed, and went to the Lady Glencora. She was a fair girl, with bright ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope

... Charles beheaded, and the Fifth Monarchy men creating chaos in their noisy efforts to establish the Kingdom of God on earth, he lapsed into an obscurity that endured until the Restoration. Then he reemerged, not as a veteran living at ease on laurels well won, but as a wandering beggar, roving from shire to shire in quest of alms, which he implored to the accompaniment of fearsome ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... Fifeshire the last handful of corn, known as the Maiden, is cut by a young girl and made into the rude figure of a doll, tied with ribbons, by which it is hung on the wall of the farm-kitchen till the next spring. The custom of cutting the Maiden at harvest was also observed in Inverness-shire and Sutherlandshire. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... Club, of mystic origin and enigmatic name, with all its loyalty to Hanover and all its memories of bright toasts, of Steele, Addison, and Godfrey Kneller, had passed away in 1709, and met no more in Shire Lane, off Fleet Street, or at the "Upper Flask" Inn at Hampstead. It had not lived in vain, according to Walpole, who declared that its patriots had saved the country. Within its rooms the evil-omened Lord Mohun had broken the gilded emblem of the crown off his chair. Jacob Tonson, ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... The certain shire was but a small county, and the principal town in it contained only about four thousand inhabitants; so in saying that Mr. Wilkins was the principal lawyer in Hamley, I say very little, unless I add that he ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell

... memory to every honest bibliographer: "Never (says he) had we been offended for the loss of our LIBRARIES, being so many in number, and in so desolate places for the more part, if the chief monuments and most notable works of our excellent writers had been reserved. If there had been in every shire of England, but one SOLEMPNE LIBRARY, to the preservation of those noble works, and preferment of good learning in our posterity, it had been yet somewhat. But to destroy all without consideration, is, and will be, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... his maxim that "he that works hard can afford to play." He is, therefore, an attendant at all the country fairs and wakes, and has signalized himself by feats of strength and prowess on every village green in the shire. He often makes his appearance at horse-races, and sports his half guinea, and even his guinea at a time; keeps a good horse for his own riding, and to this day is fond of following the hounds, and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... knew his sister, and she prophesied his greatness. At school he carried all before him, and he is as good as he is clever, and as merry as he is good. He won a scholarship at Oxford, but that was not enough. My father is the vicar of Stourley, in D—shire, and has such a small stipend that he could not afford to help him as much as was needed. Then I wrote to Miss Bruce, and asked her if she could give me an opening. She is an old family friend, and knew that I had done well in examinations ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... Hertfordshire, that county of gentle hills and tangled lanes, of ancient oaks and wide wild heaths, of historic houses, and dark woods, and green fields innumerable—a Wordsworthian shire, steeped in the deepest peace of England. As Orth drove towards his own gates he had the typical English sunset to gaze upon, a red streak with a church spire against it. His woods were silent. In the fields, the cows stood as if conscious of their part. The ivy on his old gray ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton

... shore> (cut, separate): (1 and 2 combined) shear, sheer, shred, share, shard, scar, score, (sea)shore, shorn, shroud, shire, sheriff. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... exhorted, and, in time of need, was a surgeon, as well to the wounds of the body as of the soul. Now, it fell, towards the end of the war, that a party of malignants had seized on a strong house in the shire of Shrewsbury, situated on a small island advanced into a lake, and accessible only by a small and narrow causeway. From thence they made excursions, and vexed the country; and high time it was to suppress them, so that ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... should premise, however, that there are some fine glimpses of rude mountain scenery in the course of the ascent. The immediate vicinage of Culloden House is well wooded; the Frith spreads finely in front; the Ross-shire hills assume a more varied and commanding aspect; and Ben Wyvis towers proudly over his compeers, with a bold pronounced character. Ships were passing and re-passing before us in the Frith, the birds were singing blithely overhead, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... after all, the old Court of Common Pleas was the place where the greater part of the law business of the county was transacted. There were at first four civil terms in the year, and, after Fitchburg became a half shire, there were two more terms held there. The Common Pleas had jurisdiction of all crimes ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... classical scholar. Greek and Latin, Hebrew and the Mathematics, were at his fingers' ends. Not long after leaving college, he obtained the place of a preceptor to the children of a farmer in Angus-shire. The situation of schoolmaster of Dunino, a parish situated foury miles south of St. Andrews, in Fifeshire, and six miles north of Anstruther, the school taught by Tennant, the orientalist, professor of Hebrew and other oriental languages in St. Mary's College, ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... lovely maiden down in Hertford's lovely shire; Before her on a reading-desk, lay many a well-filled quire: The lamp of genius lit her eyes; her years were twenty-two; Her brow was high, her cheek was pale, her bearing somewhat blue: She pondered ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling

... country was kept in a state of constant turmoil by a host of feudal chiefs and lords many of whom were almost or quite as powerful as the king himself, William took care that in the distribution no feudatory should receive an entire shire, save in two or three exceptional cases. To the great lord to whom he must needs give a large fief, he granted, not a continuous tract of land, but several estates, or manors, scattered in different parts of the country, in order that there might be no dangerous concentration of property or power ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... the left, and the deeply eroded and canyoned mountains of the older, or west, end of the island on our right. Toward the latter our guide took us. It was a pleasant spin along the good roads, in the fresh morning air, near the beach, to Wailuku, the shire town of the island, two or three miles distant. Here we were most hospitably entertained in the home of Mr. Penhallow, the director of ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... structure survive. The tower divides the E. from the W. church. The aisleless choir serves as parish church. The old parish church is a ruinous structure, about one mile N.W. from the abbey; plain oblong; in 1633 the abbey became the parish church. Beauly Priory (Valliscaulian), Inverness-shire, was founded in 1230 and endowed by Sir John Bisset of Lovat. The ruined church survives, but has been sadly abused. Monastic buildings have nearly disappeared. First Pointed was later here than elsewhere. Newbattle or Newbotle Abbey (Cistercian), Mid-Lothian, ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... Charters Towers over a paragraph in the Northern Miner, as follows:—"The Dalrymple Shire Council's well on Victoria Downs road, at the head of the 10-mile creek, on the spot picked by Mr. George O'Sullivan, was sunk to a depth of 38 feet, and at that depth water became so heavy that sinking conditions had to be discontinued. The water rises to within 18 feet ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield

... Samuel Johnson in some of my memorandums of the principal planters and favourers of the enclosures, under a name which I took the liberty to invent from the Greek, Papadendrion. Lord Auchinleck and some few more are of the list. I am told that one gentleman in the shire of Aberdeen, viz. Sir Archibald Grant, has planted above fifty millions of trees on a piece of very wild ground at Monimusk: I must enquire if he has fenced them well, before he enters my list; for, that is the soul of enclosing. I began myself to plant a little, our ground being too valuable for ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... had been a very glorious year. To talk of Stackallan was, indeed, a thing of beauty. But in that year Mr. Hittaway had made himself very useful in London. Since that they had been at delicious shooting lodges in Ross and Inverness-shire, had visited a millionaire at his palace amidst the Argyle mountains, had been feted in a western island, had been bored by a Dundee dowager, and put up with a Lothian laird. But the thing had been almost always done, and the Hittaways ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... as much. I was sure the wretch was going wrong, and if I hadn't insisted on pulling him up and asking a respectable-looking body where the house was I believe we should have been wandering about the next shire at this moment. I've ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour

... Giles was the earliest foundation of its kind in London, if we except St. James's Hospital. Stow sums it up thus: "St. Giles-in-the-Fields was an hospital for leprous people out of the City of London and shire of Middlesex, founded by Matilde the Queen, wife to Henry I., and suppressed by King Henry VIII." The date of foundation is given by Leland and Malcolm as 1101, though Stow and others give 1117, which was the year before the foundress died. Before this time this part of London had ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... Just beyond the loftiest hummock of this range a fertile valley lies concealed; and near its centre, upon the smooth summit of a gently swelling ridge, which, extending north and south for miles, divides the valley lengthwise, stands Belfield, the shire town of the rural county of Hillsdale. Its fourscore white dwellings, scattered unevenly along the shady margins of a straight and ample street, are mostly large, substantial granges, each with its little suburb of dependencies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... expedition Livingstone set out on March 10, 1858. While successful in many ways, it led to not a little disappointment. Livingstone explored the Zambesi, the Shire, and the Rovuma; discovered Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, and came to a decided conclusion that Lake Nyassa and its neighborhood was the best field for both commercial and missionary operations. His disappointments arose from the grievous ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... shoulders, as they do a Knight of the Shire, and away we went like the wind, over houses and fields, over cities and kingdoms, over seas and mountains, but I was unable to notice particularly anything, because of the rapidity with which ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen

... Farintosh was the proprietor of a landed estate, the acreage which bore, unfortunately, a most disproportional relation to its value, for it formed the bleakest and most barren tract of land in the whole of a bleak and barren shire. As a bachelor, however, his expenses had been small, and he had contrived from the rents of his scattered cottages, and the sale of the Galloway nags, which he bred upon the moors, not only to live as a laird should, but to put by a ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of them. Manie of the Englishmen also that came with them to the field, were saued by the enimies, to the end they might gaine somewhat by their ransomes, [Sidenote: Simon Dun.] as William Mallet shirife of the shire, with his wife, and two of their children, Gilbert de Gaunt, and diuers other. This slaughter chanced on a saturdaie, being the nineteenth day of September; a ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (1 of 12) - William the Conqueror • Raphael Holinshed

... what they brought with them. And that, by continued alarms, the enemy should find no rest day or night. But they should not try any battle until divers captains were met together with their companies. That one captain might be named in every shire ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... by his gracious gaiety and plucky endurance of hardships. In the beginning of August his hopes had again turned to Poole Ewe, but learning for a second time that no French ship could land on the closely guarded coast, he and his friends determined to remain in the northern straths of Inverness-shire till the Government troops should withdraw from the Great Glen—the chain of lakes which now forms the Caledonian Canal—and thus leave the way clear into Badenoch, where Lochiel and ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang

... measurements would be produced on a stick with a notch denoting each score yards or paces. This primitive method is particularly interesting, the numeral a score being derived from the Anglo-Saxon sciran, to divide. Similar words are plough share, shire, shears, and shard. He could keep the daily labour record when I was away from home; but though I could always decipher his writing, he found it difficult to read himself. A letter was a sore trial, and he often told me that he ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... of an ancient family, of which the chief has been knight of the shire these hundred years," says the chaplain. "I have heard Sir Miles hath a daughter of ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... at once, and earnestly, to the establishment of law and order in the conquered territories of the Irish princes. He sent justices of assize throughout Munster and Connaught, reducing the 'countries or regions' into shire-ground, abolishing cuttings, cosheries, spendings, and other customary exactions of the chiefs, by which a complete revolution was effected. He issued a proclamation, by the king's order, commanding ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... means, which she had at her command for carrying her decrees into execution, for resisting foreign enemies, and for crushing domestic treason. There was not a ward in the city, there was not a hundred in any shire in England, which could not have overpowered the handful of armed men who composed her household. If a hostile sovereign threatened invasion, if an ambitious noble raised the standard of revolt, she could have recourse ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... deep the Spaniards saw Along each southern shire, Cape after cape in endless range, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale



Words linked to "Shire" :   UK, county town, administrative division, shire town, territorial division, administrative district, U.K., dray horse, United Kingdom, Britain, draught horse, Great Britain



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