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England in 1086 showing hundreds, wapentakes and wards. Before the Conquest, the largest and most important unit of local government was the shire. [61] The shire system covered all of England except the far north. A shire was governed by the sheriff and the shire court.
The Norman Conquest (or the Conquest) was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army made up of thousands of Norman, French, Flemish, and Breton troops, all led by the Duke of Normandy, later styled William the Conqueror.
Following the Norman Conquest of England, the hidage assessments were recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, and there was a tendency for land producing £1 of income per year to be assessed at 1 hide. The Norman kings continued to use the unit for their tax assessments until the end of the 12th century.
The Norman French term for an earl was a comte or count; whilst in England the title count was not used for the person, the territory they controlled nevertheless became known as a 'county'. As the shires and counties were generally the same areas from the 12th century onwards, the terms shire and county came to be used interchangeably.
The enserfment of the population by the Norman system diminished the importance of hundreds as self-regulating social units since law was not imposed from above, and since the population was immobilised. Instead the basic social unit became the parish, manor or township. The counties remained important as the basis for the legal system.
Map of England in 878 showing the extent of the Danelaw. Between the 8th and 11th centuries, raiders and colonists from Scandinavia, mainly Danish and Norwegian, plundered western Europe, including the British Isles. [90] These raiders came to be known as the Vikings; the name is believed to derive from Scandinavia, where the Vikings originated.
Some Norman lords used England as a launching point for attacks into South and North Wales, spreading up the valleys to create new Marcher territories. [24] By the time of William's death in 1087, England formed the largest part of an Anglo-Norman empire, ruled over by a network of nobles with landholdings across England, Normandy, and Wales. [25]
In England (and the British Empire), English units were replaced by Imperial units in 1824 (effective as of 1 January 1826) by a Weights and Measures Act, which retained many though not all of the unit names and redefined (standardised) many of the definitions. In the US, being independent from the British Empire decades before the 1824 reforms ...