not referred to as a county till the middle of the twelfth century. The name is never mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. As we find the "Lands between the Ribble and the Mersey" are surveyed with those of Cheshire, in the Domesday book, it seems highly probable that they formed a part of Leofric's earldom of Mercia, at the time of the Norman conquest. Consequently it is to the latter and not to the earlier portion of the Anglo-Saxon period that the Ribble formed the southern boundary of the _earldom_ of Northumbria, rather than of the earlier independent _kingdom_. Mr. J. R. Green ("Making of England,") says--"The first missionaries to the Englishmen, strangers in a heathen land, attached themselves necessarily to the courts of the kings, who were their earliest converts, and whose conversion was generally followed by that of their people. The English bishops were thus at first royal chaplains, and their diocese was naturally nothing but the kingdom. The kingdom of Kent became the diocese of Canterbury, and the kingdom of Northumbria became the diocese of York. So absolutely was this the case that the diocese grew or shrank with the growth or shrinking of the realm which it spiritually represented, and a bishop of Wessex or of Mercia found the limits of his see widened or cut short by the triumphs of Wolfhere or of Ine. In this way two realms, which are all but forgotten, are commemorated in the limits of existing sees. That of Rochester represented, till of late, an obscure kingdom of West Kent, and the frontier of the original kingdom of Mercia might be recovered by following the map of the ancient bishopric of Lichfield." After describing in detail some of the subdivisions made by Archbishop Theodore (A.D. 669-672), he adds--"The see of Lichfield thus returned to its original form of a see of the Mercians proper, though its bounds on the westward now embraced much of the upper Severn valley, with Cheshire and the lands northward to the Mersey."