Page:Cornwall; Cambridge county geographies.djvu/18

 2 CORNWALL King Alfred is credited with having made them, but inaccurately, for some existed before his time, others not till long after his death, and their origin was as their names tell us of very diverse nature. Let us turn once more to our map of England. Col- lectively, we call all our divisions counties, but not every one of them is accurately thus described. Cornwall, as we shall see, is not. Some have names complete in themselves, such as Kent and Sussex, and we find these to be old English kingdoms with but little alteration either in their boundaries or their names. To others the terminal shire is appended, which tells us that they were shorn from a larger domain shares of Mercia or Northumbria or some other of the great English king- doms. The term county is of Norman introduction, the domain of a Comte or Count. Although we use the term county for Cornwall, we should not in accuracy do so, as just stated, for it is a Duchy, and has been such since March 17, 1337, when Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of King Edward III, was created Duke of Cornwall. Nor can it be called a shire, for Cornwall was a territory to itself. In 835 Athelstan drove the Britons across the Tamar and made that river the boundary between the Briton and the West Saxon of Devon. The ancient name of Cornwall and Devon was Totnes, i.e. Dod-ynys, " the projecting island," and the Celtic population was that of the Dumnonii. It was not till the tenth century that the name Cornweales appears, signifying the Welsh of the Horn of Britain. The