Counties of Scotland

The counties or shires of Scotland were historic subdivisions of Scotland.
The shires were originally established in the Middle Ages for judicial purposes, being territories over which a sheriff had jurisdiction. They were distinct from the various older mormaerdoms, earldoms and other territories into which Scotland was also divided, which are collectively termed the provinces of Scotland by modern historians. The provinces gradually lost their functions, whereas the shires gradually gained functions. From the 16th century, the shires served as constituencies, electing shire commissioners to the Parliament of Scotland. From 1667 each shire had commissioners of supply responsible for collecting local taxes; the commissioners of supply were subsequently given various local government functions as well. From 1797, the shires also served as areas for organising the militia, which was the responsibility of a lord-lieutenant.
Following the union of Scotland and England under the Acts of Union 1707, the term "county" came to be used interchangeably with the older term "shire". From 1748 onwards sheriffs ceased to be automatically appointed to a single shire, with progressively larger sheriffdoms created instead, grouping multiple shires under a single sheriff.
Elected county councils were created in 1890 under the Local Government Act 1889, taking most of the functions of the commissioners of supply. The county councils were abolished in 1975, when local government was reorganised. Following another reorganisation in 1996, Scotland is now divided into 32 council areas. Some of the council areas share names with the historic counties, but in most such cases they have notable differences in their boundaries. The historic counties are still used for certain limited functions, serving as registration counties. There are also lieutenancy areas which are based on the historic counties, but with some notable differences.

History

Shires

The early Kingdom of Alba was subdivided into smaller territories under the control of various ranks of noble, including mormaers, earls, and thanes. As Alba expanded and evolved into the Kingdom of Scotland, it took in various other territories as it grew. There was no single collective term for these territories at the time, but modern historians now use the term provinces, or provincial lordships for the smaller ones.
Malcolm III appears to have introduced sheriffs as part of a policy of imitating the administrative structures then being used in England by its Norman rulers. The provinces formed part of the feudal hierarchy of land ownership, but justice was administered by sheriffs, appointed to separately defined shires. More shires were created by Edgar, Alexander I, and in particular David I. David completed the division of the country into shires by the conversion of existing thanedoms.
The shires occasionally covered the same area as a province; for example, the shire of Forfar covered the same area as the province of Angus. More often though, the shires were groupings or subdivisions of the provinces. For example, the province of Lothian was covered by the three shires of Linlithgow, Edinburgh and Haddington. Conversely, the shire of Ayr covered the three provinces of Carrick, Cunninghame and Kyle. Shires were sometimes created which did not endure. For example, there was a Sheriff of Dingwall in the mid-13th century, and in 1293 shires of Lorn and Kintyre were created, which were later merged into the shire of Argyll.

Shires extant by 1305

In 1305 Edward I of England, who had deposed John Balliol, issued an ordinance for the government of Scotland. The document listed the twenty-three shires then existing and either appointed new sheriffs or continued heritable sheriffs in office.

Shires formed after 1305

The remaining shires were formed either by the territorial expansion of the Kingdom of Scotland, or by the subdivision of existing sheriffdoms. There were occasional changes to the shires; those of the Lowlands were relatively stable from the 14th century, but there were more pronounced changes to the shires of the Highlands and Islands into the 17th century, as the Scottish crown sought to consolidate its authority over the whole kingdom.

: Argyll : lordship subdued by Alexander II in 1222. Norwegian claims over the area finally ended in 1266. First record of appointment of sheriff dates from 1326.
1369: Kirkcudbright: formed when area between Rivers Nith and Cree granted to Archibald the Grim. Archibald appointed a steward to administer the area, hence it became a "stewartry".
: Bute: the islands formed part of Kintyre district of Argyll. A heritable sheriff was appointed to the shire in 1388.
1402: Renfrew: separated from the Shire of Lanark by Robert III.
Tarbertshire: existed from before 1481, when it gained territory from Perthshire, until 1633, when it was annexed to Argyll.
Orkney and Shetland were absorbed into the Kingdom of Scotland in 1472. They initially kept their own legal systems which had operated when they were under Norwegian rule, with Orkney being an earldom and Shetland a lordship. They were placed under a single Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland in 1541, and the general laws of Scotland were applied in 1612.
Ross eventually became a fully-fledged shire in 1661, after a couple of earlier abortive attempts. It was briefly a shire between 1504 and 1509, formed from part of Inverness-shire by an act of parliament during the reign of James IV, the sheriff to sit at Tain or Dingwall. Ross was restored to Inverness-shire in 1509. Another act in 1649 re-stated Ross's separation from Inverness-shire, but was only implemented for the purposes of appointing commissioners. A subsequent act in 1661 finally separated Ross from Inverness-shire for all other purposes. Sir George Mackenzie's Ross-shire estates were transferred to Cromartyshire by a 1685 act of parliament.
1633: Sutherland: separated from Inverness.
Caithness, like Ross, was briefly removed from Inverness-shire to be its own shire between 1504 and 1509. The area of the shire was that of the Diocese of Caithness and the sheriff was to sit at Dornoch or Wick. Caithness was restored to being a shire in 1641, but covering just the smaller area of the earldom of Caithness; other parts of the diocese had since been included in the shire of Sutherland created in 1633.
Commissioners of Supply

From the 17th century the shires started to be used for local administration apart from judicial functions. In 1667 Commissioners of Supply were appointed in each shire to collect the land tax. There were 33 shires at that time, which were each given their own commissioners of supply, with the exception of the sheriffdom of Orkney and Shetland, where separate bodies of commissioners were created for each group of islands.
Orkney and Shetland having one sheriff but two sets of commissioners of supply led to ambiguity about their status. At a court case in 1829, the Court of Session was asked to rule on whether Shetland and Orkney formed one shire or two. The court declined to give such a ruling in abstract terms, as the answer depended on the context; they were one shire for the purposes of the administration of justice, lieutenancy, and parliamentary constituencies, but formed two shires for local government functions.
The commissioners were gradually given other local government functions. The commissioners did not exercise powers over any royal burghs within their areas, which were self-governing.

1707 Act of Union and the ending of heritable jurisdictions

In 1707, the Act of Union united Scotland with England. England also had shires, which had been mostly created in Anglo-Saxon times, and had gradually also come to be known as counties. The word 'county' means an area controlled by a noble called a count in Norman French, or earl in English. Following the Norman Conquest, England's earldoms were reorganised to generally correspond to individual shires, which therefore also became known as counties.
Unlike in England, Scotland's shires remained quite distinct territories from its earldoms and other provinces in 1707. Whereas English earls by that time had little or no role in local administration, Scottish earls and other nobles continued to exercise significant authority in their provinces, having powers of regality to hold courts which operated in parallel with those of the sheriffs. Despite the shires of Scotland not being controlled by a count or earl as their English counterparts had once been, following the union of 1707, the term 'county' also came to be used for Scottish shires.
The office of sheriff or steward had become hereditary in certain families in the majority of sheriffdoms. At the accession of George II in 1727, twenty-two sheriffs were hereditary, three were appointed for life and only eight held office at the pleasure of the monarch.
Following the unsuccessful Jacobite Rising of 1745 the government took the opportunity of overhauling county government. In 1748, under the Heritable Jurisdictions Act 1746, hereditary sheriffs were abolished, with the right to appoint all sheriffs returning to the crown. The same act also abolished other hereditary jurisdictions including regality, justiciary and others; these had formed the basis for the authority of the earls and other nobles in their provinces. Those office holders who were displaced were compensated. The reforms of 1748 therefore saw the effective end of any meaningful function for the provinces, with the shires or counties thereafter being the main administrative divisions of Scotland.
Also in 1748, under the Sheriffs Act 1747, the office of sheriff principal was reduced to a largely ceremonial one, with a sheriff depute or sheriff substitute appointed to each 'county, shire or stewartry'. Twelve of the smallest counties were paired to form sheriffdoms, a process of amalgamation that was to continue until the twentieth century, and thus led to the sheriffdoms and the shires having different boundaries. Where multiple shires were grouped into a single sheriffdom after 1748, the grouped shires were nevertheless still considered separate shires, retaining separate commissioners of supply.
In 1794 Lord-Lieutenants were appointed to each county, and in 1797 county militia regiments were raised, bringing Scotland into line with England, Wales and Ireland.
In 1858 police forces were established in each shire under the Police Act 1857. The counties lost their role as constituencies under the Representation of the People Act 1868, generally being divided into smaller constituencies. The group of constituencies within each county was termed the 'parliamentary county'.