The argument that the ealdorman, or earl, of the days before the Conquest, received "a third part of the profits of jurisdiction" in the county, rests here, it will be seen, wholly on the evidence of Domesday. But in six of the eight passages on which Dr. Stubbs relies we are distinctly dealing, not with the county ("comitatus"), but with a single town ("burgus"). These are Dover, Lewes, Huntingdon, Stafford, Shrewsbury, and Lincoln. In these, therefore, the third penny could only be that of the _redditus burgi_, not of the _placita comitatus_.[853] Huntingdon is specially a case in point, for there the earl received a third of each of the items out of which the render ("redditus") of the town was composed. The only cases of those mentioned which could possibly concern the third penny "placitorum comitatus" are those of Yorkshire (298), Lincolnshire (336), and Nottinghamshire with Derbyshire (280). Even in these, however, "the third penny of the pleas" is only vaguely implied, the passages referring to a peculiar system which has, I believe, never obtained the attentive study it deserves. This system was confined to the Danish district, to which these counties all belonged. The main point, however, which we have to keep in view is that "the third penny" of the _revenues_ of the _town_ has nothing to do with "the third penny" of the _pleas_ of the _county_, and that the passages in Domesday concerning the former must not be quoted as evidence for the latter. I do not find that Ellis (_Introduction_, i. 167, 168) is responsible for so taking them, but Dr. Stubbs, as we have seen, clearly confused the two kinds of _tertius denarius_, and we find that Mr. Freeman does the same when he tells us that at Exeter "six pounds—that is, the earl's third penny—went to the Sheriff Baldwin."[854] We are reminded by this last instance that not only the earl, but the sheriff, was concerned with "the third penny" of the _revenues_ of the _town_. This—which (I would here again repeat) is not the earl's "third penny" to which historians allude—sometimes, as for instance at Shrewsbury and Exeter, fell to the sheriff's share. Dr. Stubbs mentions the case of Shrewsbury only, and takes it as evidence that "the sheriff as well as the ealdorman was entitled to a share of the profits of administration."[855]