Some of the modern shire-divisions of England in all probability have remained unchanged from the earliest times; so that here and there a now existent Shire may be identical in territory with an ancient Gá. But it may be doubted whether this observation can be very extensively applied: obscure as is the record of our old divisions, what little we know, favours the supposition that the original Gás were not only more numerous than our Shires, but that these were not always identical in their boundaries with those Gás whose locality can be determined. The policy or pedantry of Norman chroniclers has led them to pass over in silence the names of the ancient divisions, which nevertheless were known to them[129]. Wherever they have occasion to refer to our Shires, they do so by the names they still bear; thus Florence of Worcester and William of Malmesbury name, to the south of the Humber, Kent, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Dorset, Sussex, Southampton, Surrey, Somerset, Devonshire, Cornwall, Gloucester, Worcester, Warwick, Cheshire, Derby, Stafford, Shropshire, Hereford, Oxford, Buckingham, Hertford, Huntingdon, Bedford, Northampton, Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, comprising with Middlesex thirty-two of the shires, out of forty into which England is now distributed. ----- Footnote 129: “Et ne longum faciam, sigillatim enumeratis provinciis quas vastaverunt, hoc sit ad summam complecti, quod, cum numerentur in Anglia triginta duo pagi, illi iam sedecim invaserant, quorum nomina propter barbariem linguae scribere refugio.” Will. Malm., Gest. Reg. lib. ii. § 165. ----- Yet even these names and divisions are of great antiquity: Asser, in his life of Ælfred, mentions by name, Berkshire, Essex, Kent, Surrey, Somerset, Sussex, Lincoln, Dorset, Devon, Wiltshire and Southampton, being a third of the whole number: unfortunately, from his work being composed in Latin and his consequent use of _paga_, we cannot tell how many of these divisions were considered by him as Scír.