This item is the only English prose text in Jesus 29. Dated 1086–1133, The Shires and Hundreds of England appears to be the oldest item in Jesus 29 (Hill-History, pp. 206–07; Hill-Part2, p. 274n45). Like the short Latin prose bit that follows it in the manuscript, Assisa panis Anglie (a legal statute on the pricing of bread), Shires seems included for general reference. First, it enumerates the thirty-two shires and fifteen bishoprics of England, providing a history of how several bishoprics were founded. Then it enumerates the shires beyond the fourteenth-century borders of “England”: Northumberland, Lothian, Westmorland, Cumberland, and Cornwall.

Next the author names the three jurisdictional laws — West Saxon law, Danelaw, and Mercian law — and itemizes the shires that fall under each. For some counties (and all the Mercian ones, which would be regional for the scribe), quantities of hides are specified. A hide is a variable measurement of land. Originally, the term denoted the amount required to support a family and its dependents (MED, hide (n.(2), sense 1)). A hundred hides constitute a “hundred,” that is, an administrative division of a county that maintained its own court system (MED, hundred (n.), sense 1), which would also reflect regional structures for taxation. The Shires and Hundreds of England thus profiles England as a nation with borders and with episcopal, legal, and economic jurisdictions. As the last item in the sequence of English poetry, it grounds the verse of Jesus 29 in an idea of Englishness that is both linguistic and geographical.

Little commentary on Shires exists, but see Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature, pp. 53, 68–70, who compares it to maps and to Brut (found in Cotton); and Cartlidge-Composition, p. 259, who notes how it is “at odds with the literary character” of Jesus 29. It is worth noticing, however, that Shires’s practical, taxonomic interest in legal domains shares a topical interest (the law in general) with the quasi-legal wranglings in The Owl and the Nightingale (art. 2).

[Fols. 194r–195r. Zacher, MWME, 7:2238, 2451 [1]. Quire: 5. Meter: Prose. Layout: Punctuated prose. The text opens with a large, ornate, colored E on Englelond. The second paragraph opens with a large colored S on Swo. Editions: Morris, pp. 145–46; Kluge, pp. 19–20. Other MSS: None.]