But now let us leave our record evidence and turn to geography and to common sense. What must have always been the salient feature which distinguished Middlesex internally from every other county? Obviously, that the shire was abnormally small, and its chief town abnormally large. Nor was it a mere matter of size, but, still more, of comparative wealth. This is illustrated by the taxation recorded in the Pipe-Roll of 1130. Unlike the _firma_, the taxes were raised, as elsewhere, from the town and the shire respectively, the town contributing an _auxilium_, and the shire, without the walls, a Danegeld. We thus learn that London paid a sum about half as large again as that raised from the rest of the shire.[1021] The normal relation of the "shire" to the "port" was accordingly here reversed, and so would be also, in consequence, that of the shire-reeve to the portreeve. Where, as usual, the "port" formed but a small item in the _corpus comitatus_, it was possible to sever it from the rest of the county, to place it _extra firmam_, and to give it a reeve who should stand towards it in the same relation as the shire-reeve to the shire, and would therefore be termed the "portreeve." But to have done this in the case of Middlesex would have been to reverse the nature of things, to place a mere "portreeve" in a position greater than that of the "shire-reeve" himself. This is why that change which, in the provinces, was the aim of every rising town, never took place in the case of London, though the greatest town of all. I say that it "never took place," for, as we have seen, the city of London was never severed from the rest of the shire. As far back as we can trace them, they are found one and indivisible. What, then, was the alternative? Simply this. The "reeve," who, in the case of a normal county, took his title from the "shire" and not from the "port," took it, in the abnormal case of Middlesex, from the "port" and not from the "shire." In each case both "port" and "shire" were alike within his jurisdiction; in each case he took his style from the most important part of that jurisdiction. Such is the original solution I offer for this most interesting problem, and I claim that its acceptance will explain everything, will harmonize with all existing _data_, and will dispose of difficulties which, hitherto, it has been impossible to surmount.