Anglo-Saxon Institutions. 449-1066 27
more and more shires and hence could not attend well
to shire business and the meetings of the shire court. In
the late Anglo-Saxon period, they were becoming a great
landed nobility, and in the eleventh century, now known
as earls,* they practically destroyed the country's unity
and prepared the way for the Norman Conquest.
This change in the ealdorman undoubtedly accounts
for the rapid development in the tenth century of a lower,
single-shire official—the sheriff. We hear of divers kinds
of reeves from early times, among them, king's reeves,
who seem mainly to have had charge of the king's landed
interests; but the use of shire-reeves, that is, sheriffs, by
the king was not at all general until this time. The sheriff
was appointed by the king, and had very limited grants
of land. Although there appeared in the office of sheriff
the same non-official tendencies that affected the ealdor-
man, and though he strove to enter into the ealdorman's
dignity and power, yet, during the Anglo-Saxon period,
these tendencies did not have an opportunity to develop
far, and the sheriff remained substantially a royal official.2
The maintenance of such officials was the first effective
reaching out by the central government to touch and in-
fluence the local government. It was a hint, in Anglo-
Saxon times, of the long process that did much to shape
the government after the Norman Conquest. Ordinarily
there was one sheriff for each shire; he convened the shire
court, accounted for the king's share of the fines in the
shire and hundred courts, assembled the militia at the
king's command, and had general oversight of royal
property in his shire. He was a link between the centre
and the localities.
In estimating the extent to which the king was able to
make himself felt locally in the later Anglo-Saxon period,
mention must be made of the king's peace, one of the most
important of Anglo-Saxon beginnings. Persons or things
1 Owing to Danish influence, the word earl (from the Danish jarl) was
substituted for ealdorman. It should not be confused with the earlier
Anglo-Saxon eorl, which was a general word for the man of noble birth.
3 In a few cases the office of sheriff later became hereditary.