Normans, or on that of the exigencies of national defence. In these
cases he created, or suffered the continuance of, great palatine
jurisdictions; earldoms in which the earls were endowed with the
superiority of whole counties, so that all the land-owners held feudally
of them, in which they received the whole profits of the courts and
exercised all the "regalia" or royal rights, nominated the sheriffs,
held their own councils, and acted as independent princes except in the
owing of homage and fealty to the King. Two of these palatinates, the
earldom of Chester and the bishopric of Durham, retained much of their
character to our own days. A third, the palatinate of Bishop Odo in
Kent, if it were really a jurisdiction of the same sort, came to an end
when Odo forfeited the confidence of his brother and nephew. A fourth,
the earldom of Shropshire, which is not commonly counted among the
palatine jurisdictions, but which possessed under the Montgomery earls
all the characteristics of such a dignity, was confiscated after the
treason of Robert of Belesme by Henry I. These had been all founded
before the conspiracy of 1074; they were also, like the later lordships
of the marches, a part of the national defence; Chester and Shropshire
kept the Welsh marches in order, Kent was the frontier exposed to
attacks from Picardy, and Durham, the patrimony of St. Cuthbert, lay as
a sacred boundary between England and Scotland; Northumberland and
Cumberland were still a debatable ground between the two kingdoms.
Chester was held by its earls as freely by the sword as the King held
England by the crown; no lay vassal in the county held of the King, all
of the earl. In Shropshire there were only five lay tenants _in capite_
besides Roger Montgomery; in Kent, Bishop Odo held an enormous
proportion of the manors, but the nature of his jurisdiction is not very
clear, and its duration is too short to make it of much importance. If
William founded any earldoms at all after 1074 (which may be doubted),
he did it on a very different scale.

The hereditary sheriffdoms he did not guard against with equal care. The
Norman viscounties were hereditary, and there was some risk that the
English ones would become so too; and with the worst consequences, for
the English counties were much larger than the bailiwicks of the Norman
viscount, and the authority of the sheriff, when he was relieved from
the company of the ealdorman, and was soon to lose that o