=Summary.=--Anglo-Saxons _tuns_ and _vills_ were usually in a valley near a stream, with a meeting-place or green in the middle, and the houses built round it. At the back were small closes, and all was surrounded by a fence. Outside was the big common field, reaching up the slope, and beyond these the wide pasture-grounds. In many old villages and towns something of this arrangement can still be seen. CHAPTER IX TYTHINGS AND HUNDREDS--SHIRES 1. Though the Saxons, as they settled down in England, formed "tuns", which at first had very little to do with one another, that state of things probably did not last a very long time. In fighting the Britons they had had to act together; and, for the sake of protection and help, these separate communities had to combine. Somewhat in this way ten families in a district would form a =tything=; and the heads of the villages would, from time to time, meet together, to consult on various matters in which they were interested. 2. Then larger areas would need to be covered, as the country became more settled. Ten tythings would make a =hundred=; and, from time to time, men from all the places in the hundred would meet together and hold =hundred courts=. Most of the English counties are still divided into hundreds. In those days the hundreds were not all of the same size, because, owing to the nature of the soil, some tuns were far apart from one another, and a tything might cover a wide district, and a hundred a much larger area. If the hundred was small, that would show that the tuns were pretty close together, and that the district was populous. If, on the other hand, the tythings and hundreds were large, that would show that the district was thinly peopled. 3. We have seen that new settlements were formed by portions of the family leaving the old home, and making a new tun in the most suitable place they could find. It would happen, no doubt, in favourable districts, that new tuns would spring up not very far from the mother tun; and, in the course of time, there would be a good many more tuns in the tything than there were originally. The fact seems to be, that when once the boundaries had been roughly agreed upon, they were not often altered. From being a combination of families, or tuns, the tything got to be a =district=; and it kept its name of tything long after the number of tuns in it had increased. 4. It was much the same with the =hundreds=. In time they were represented by certain districts, whose borders were known to the people living in them. The hundreds all over the country have not altered their boundaries to any great extent until quite recently. In Hampshire to-day there are thirty-seven hundreds; in Hertfordshire there are only eight; and Middlesex has now the same six hundreds which it had twelve centuries ago when a good part of the county was forest land.