Sabine Baring-gould

Cornwall Sabine Baring-gould

Publisher Marketing: If we take a map of England and contrast it with a map of the United States, perhaps one of the first things we shall notice is the dissimilarity of the arbitrary divisions of land of which the countries are composed. In America the rigidly straight boundaries and rectangular shape of the majority of the States strike the eye at once; in England our wonder is rather how the boundaries have come to be so tortuous and complicated-to such a degree, indeed, that until recently many counties had outlying islands, as it were, within their neighbours' territory. We may guess at once that the conditions under which the divisions arose cannot have been the same, and that while in America these formal square blocks of land, like vast allotment gardens, were probably the creation of a central authority, and portioned off much about the same time; the divisions we find in England own no such simple origin. Our guess would not have been wrong, for such, in fact, is more or less the case. The formation of the English counties in many instances was (and is-for they have altered up to to-day) an affair of slow growth. King Alfred is credited with having made them, but inaccurately, for some existed before his time, others not till long after his death, and their origin was-as their names tell us-of very diverse nature. Contributor Bio:  Baring-Gould, Sabine Roy A. Sites is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of The University of South Florida. He received the King-O'Neal Medal in 1984, the University's highest award for academic excellence, for his work in the Honor's Program in Psychology. He subsequently earned his Master of Liberal Arts degree through the Department of Humanities and taught at the University of South Florida for 5 years. Mr. Sites has a long standing interest in ancient, classical and medieval literature. His personal library of over 1000 volumes spans the years 3,000 B. C. to the present, with a heavy emphasis on ancient Greek & Roman literature, Medieval European and Arabic works, Early Church writings and contemporary Christian theology.