Shires The early
Kingdom of Alba was subdivided into smaller territories under the control of various ranks of noble, including
mormaers,
earls, and
thanes. As Alba expanded and evolved into the
Kingdom of Scotland, it took in various other territories as it grew. There was no single collective term for these territories at the time, but modern historians now use the term
provinces, or
provincial lordships for the smaller ones.
Malcolm III (reigned 1058 to 1093) appears to have introduced sheriffs as part of a policy of imitating the administrative structures then being used in England by its
Norman rulers. The provinces formed part of the
feudal hierarchy of land ownership, but justice was administered by sheriffs, appointed to separately defined shires. The shires occasionally covered the same area as a province; for example, the shire of
Forfar covered the same area as the province of
Angus. More often though, the shires were groupings or subdivisions of the provinces. For example, the province of
Lothian was covered by the three shires of
Linlithgow,
Edinburgh and
Haddington. Conversely, the shire of
Ayr covered the three provinces of
Carrick,
Cunninghame and
Kyle. and in 1293 shires of
Lorn and
Kintyre were created, which were later merged into the shire of
Argyll.
Shires extant by 1305 In 1305
Edward I of England, who had deposed
John Balliol, issued an ordinance for the government of Scotland. The document listed the twenty-three shires then existing and either appointed new sheriffs or continued heritable sheriffs in office. •
1369: Kirkcudbright: formed when area between Rivers
Nith and
Cree granted to
Archibald the Grim. Archibald appointed a steward to administer the area, hence it became a "stewartry". •
: Bute: the islands formed part of Kintyre district of Argyll. A heritable sheriff was appointed to the shire in 1388. •
1402: Renfrew: separated from the Shire of Lanark by
Robert III. •
Tarbertshire: existed from before 1481, when it gained territory from Perthshire, until 1633, when it was annexed to Argyll. •
Orkney and
Shetland were absorbed into the Kingdom of Scotland in 1472. They initially kept their own legal systems which had operated when they were under
Norwegian rule, with Orkney being an earldom and Shetland a lordship. They were placed under a single
Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland in
1541, and the general laws of Scotland were applied in 1612. •
Ross eventually became a fully-fledged shire in
1661, after a couple of earlier abortive attempts. It was briefly a shire between 1504 and 1509, formed from part of Inverness-shire by an act of parliament during the reign of
James IV, the sheriff to sit at Tain or Dingwall. Another act in 1649 re-stated Ross's separation from Inverness-shire, but was only implemented for the purposes of appointing
commissioners (as members of the
Parliament of Scotland were called). A subsequent act in 1661 finally separated Ross from Inverness-shire for all other purposes. Sir
George Mackenzie's Ross-shire estates were transferred to Cromartyshire by a 1685 act of parliament (repealed 1686, re-enacted 1690). •
1633: Sutherland: separated from Inverness. •
Caithness, like Ross, was briefly removed from Inverness-shire to be its own shire between 1504 and 1509. The area of the shire was that of the
Diocese of Caithness and the sheriff was to sit at
Dornoch or
Wick.
Commissioners of Supply From the 17th century the shires started to be used for local administration apart from judicial functions. In 1667
Commissioners of Supply were appointed in each shire to collect the land tax. There were 33 shires at that time, which were each given their own commissioners of supply, with the exception of the sheriffdom of Orkney and Shetland, where separate bodies of commissioners were created for each group of islands. Orkney and Shetland having one sheriff but two sets of commissioners of supply led to ambiguity about their status. At a court case in 1829, the
Court of Session was asked to rule on whether Shetland and Orkney formed one shire or two. The court declined to give such a ruling in abstract terms, as the answer depended on the context; they were one shire for the purposes of the administration of justice,
lieutenancy, and
parliamentary constituencies, but formed two shires for local government functions. The commissioners were gradually given other local government functions. The commissioners did not exercise powers over any
royal burghs within their areas, which were self-governing.
1707 Act of Union and the ending of heritable jurisdictions : Built 1818 as courthouse for Nairnshire and meeting place for both the county's commissioners of supply and the town council of the burgh of
Nairn In 1707, the
Act of Union united Scotland with
England. England also had
shires, which had been mostly created in
Anglo-Saxon times, and had gradually also come to be known as counties. The word 'county' means an area controlled by a noble called a
count in
Norman French, or
earl in English. Following the
Norman Conquest, England's earldoms (which, like Scotland's provinces, had previously covered substantially different territories to the shires) were reorganised to generally correspond to individual shires, which therefore also became known as counties. Unlike in England, Scotland's shires remained quite distinct territories from its earldoms and other provinces in 1707. Whereas English earls by that time had little or no role in local administration, Scottish earls and other nobles continued to exercise significant authority in their provinces, having powers of
regality to hold courts which operated in parallel with those of the sheriffs. The office of sheriff or steward had become hereditary in certain families in the majority of sheriffdoms. At the accession of
George II in 1727, twenty-two sheriffs were hereditary, three were appointed for life and only eight held office at the pleasure of the monarch. Following the unsuccessful
Jacobite Rising of 1745 the government took the opportunity of overhauling county government. In 1748, under the
Heritable Jurisdictions (Scotland) Act 1746, hereditary sheriffs were abolished, with the right to appoint all sheriffs returning to the crown. The same act also abolished other hereditary jurisdictions including regality,
justiciary and others; these had formed the basis for the authority of the earls and other nobles in their provinces. Those office holders who were displaced were compensated. In 1794
Lord-Lieutenants were appointed to each county, and in 1797 county
militia regiments were raised, bringing Scotland into line with England, Wales and Ireland. In 1858 police forces were established in each shire under the
Police (Scotland) Act 1857. The counties lost their role as constituencies under the
Representation of the People (Scotland) Act 1868, generally being divided into smaller constituencies. The group of constituencies within each county was termed the 'parliamentary county'.
County councils , formerly the seat of Renfrew County Council Elected
county councils were introduced in 1890 under the
Local Government (Scotland) Act 1889, taking most of the functions of the commissioners of supply, which were eventually abolished in 1930. The 1889 Act also merged Ross-shire and Cromartyshire into a single county called
Ross and Cromarty, and resolved the ambiguity regarding Orkney and Shetland by declaring them to be two separate counties (using the then-prevalent spelling of 'Zetland' for Shetland), after which there were 33 counties. The act also triggered a review of parish and county boundaries to eliminate
exclaves and cases where parishes straddled county boundaries. Most of the resulting boundary changes took effect in 1891. The amended boundaries were not just used for the local government functions of the county councils, but were also applied for all other administrative functions, including justice, militia, school boards and other functions, with just three exceptions. Firstly, the boundary changes did not affect any parliamentary constituencies, which remained as they were when last reviewed under the
Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. This led to some divergence between the counties and the parliamentary counties, which was resolved when constituencies were next
reviewed in 1918. Secondly, valuation rolls continued to have effect over the area for which they had been originally compiled. Thirdly, any ecclesiastical rights or jurisdictions were unaffected by the changes to boundaries (a provision more relevant to the parish changes than the county ones).
Burghs were towns with certain rights of self-government. Prior to the introduction of county councils in 1890, there were two main types:
royal burghs and
police burghs. Some burghs were additionally classed as
parliamentary burghs, excluding them from the constituency of the wider county. Royal burghs were independent from the county's commissioners of supply, but police burghs were not. Both types of burgh were subject to the authority of the
sheriff court of the county, with the exception of the burgh of
Edinburgh, which from 1482 had appointed its own sheriff. Edinburgh was thereafter sometimes described as the "city and county of the city of Edinburgh" to distinguish it from the surrounding "county of Edinburgh" (Midlothian). When county councils were created in 1890, the 26 largest burghs were allowed to retain their independence, but smaller burghs were placed under the authority of the county councils. Following the example of Edinburgh, three of the burghs outside county council control were subsequently also made independent from their host county for other functions too, with the
provost of such burghs acting as lieutenant, being
Glasgow in 1893,
Dundee in 1894, and
Aberdeen in 1899. Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow were then each known as a
county of a city. The boundaries of the counties of cities were periodically expanded as their urban areas grew. With the exception of the four counties of cities, the other burghs which had been excluded from county council control in 1890 were all placed under the authority of the county councils in 1930.
Reforms and loss of functions In 1963 the Government published a
white paper which proposed a reduction in the number of counties from thirty-four to between ten and fifteen. A process of consultation between county councils and officials from the
Scottish Office was begun to effect the amalgamations. Following a change of government, it was announced in 1965 that a "more comprehensive and authoritative" review of local government areas would be undertaken. In 1966 a Royal Commission on Local Government in Scotland, chaired by
Lord Wheatley, was appointed. The
commission's report in 1969 recommended the replacement of the counties with larger regions. In 1970 another change in government control was followed by the publication of a white paper in 1971 implementing the commission's reforms in a modified form. The abolition of counties "for local government purposes" was enacted by the
Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973, with counties playing no part in local government after 16 May 1975, being replaced by regions and districts. The counties had already lost almost all their non-local government functions by this time; justice was administered by larger sheriffdoms and counties no longer served as constituencies. As part of the 1975 reforms, lord-lieutenants ceased to be appointed to counties, instead being appointed to new
lieutenancy areas based on groups of the new districts. The lieutenancy areas loosely corresponded to the pre-1975 counties, but with some notable differences. The administrative functions left operating on a county basis after 1975 were very few, principally relating to land registration, in which capacity they are known as
registration counties. Local government was reorganised again in 1996 under the
Local Government etc. (Scotland) Act 1994, with the regions and districts being replaced by 32 single-tier
council areas. Some of the council areas have the same names as historic counties, but may cover significantly different areas. For example, the
Aberdeenshire council area is much larger than the historic county of Aberdeenshire, also including most of the historic county of
Kincardineshire and part of
Banffshire, whereas the
Renfrewshire council area is much smaller than historic Renfrewshire, only covering the central part of the historic county. Conversely, Fife retained the same boundaries at both the 1975 and 1996 reforms. The historic counties of Scotland are included in the
Index of Place Names (IPN) published by the
Office for National Statistics. Each "place" included in the IPN is related to the historic county it lies within, as well as to a set of administrative areas. ==Names==