We are taken back, by this provision, to the days before the Conquest. Mr. Freeman, in his erudite essay on _The Great Earldoms under Eadward_, has traced the shifting relations of the counties of Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, and Northumberland. The point, however, which concerns us here is that, "under William," Earl Waltheof, "besides his great Northumbrian government, was certainly Earl of Northamptonshire (_Ord. Vit._, 522 C.), and of Huntingdonshire (_Will. Gem._, viii. 37)."[593] His daughter Matilda married twice, and between the heirs of these two marriages the contest for her father's inheritance was obstinate and long. Restricting ourselves to his southern province, with which alone we have here to deal, its western half, the county of Northampton, had at this time passed to Simon of St. Liz as the heir of the first marriage, while Huntingdon had conferred an earldom on Henry, the heir of her marriage with the Scottish king. The house of St. Liz, however, claimed the whole inheritance, and as the Earl of Huntingdon, of course, sided with his cousin, the Empress, Earl Simon of Northampton was the steadfast supporter, even in their darkest hours, of Stephen and his queen. Now, the question that arises is this: Was not Earl Henry's province Huntingdonshire _with_ Cambridgeshire? Mr. Freeman writes of Huntingdonshire, that "in 1051 we find it, together with Cambridgeshire, a shire still so closely connected with it as to have a common sheriff, detached altogether from Mercia," etc.[594] It is true that when the former county became "an outlying portion of the earldom of Northumberland," it does not, he observes, "appear that Cambridgeshire followed it in this last migration;"[595] but when we compare this earlier connection with that in the Pipe-Roll of 1130,[596] and with the fact that under another David of Scotland, this earldom, some seventy years later, appears as that of Huntingdon and Cambridge,[597] we shall find in this charter a connecting link, which favours the view that the two counties had, for comital purposes, formed one throughout. We have a notable parallel in the adjacent counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, which still formed one, the East Anglian earldom. Dorset and Somerset, too, which were under one sheriff, may have been also intended to form one earldom, for the Lord of Dunster is found both as Earl of "Dorset" and of "Somerset." I suspect also that the Ferrers earldom was, in truth, that of the joint shrievalty of Derbyshire and Notts, and that this is why the latter county was never made a separate earldom till the days of Richard II.