A county corporate or corporate county is said to have been a type of subnational division used for local government in England, Wales, and Ireland, but despite being widely used in texts concerning the nature of counties in the United Kingdom, there is no evidence that the terms 'county corporate' and 'corporate county' were ever officially created or enshrined in any act of Parliament or otherwide legally established.
Some texts claim that Counties corporate were created during the Middle Ages, but that term did not exist at that time and has been applied retrospectively. The first 'new' county to be established in addition to the existing historical counties was Bristol [1] created as a county by King Edward III in 1373. The charter by which this was effected states "the town of Bristol with its suburbs and precincts shall henceforth be separate from the counties of Gloucester and Somerset and be in all things exempt both by land by sea, and that it should be a county by itself, to be called the county of Bristol in perpetuity." There is no mention of the term 'County Corporate' or any other wording to indicate that the new county was to be in any way different from any other county. It is unclear when the term 'County Corporate' was first used and by whom, and no texts have been discovered that give this information. Though widely used in the modern era,'County Corporate' is certainly not an officially established term.
However, the term is widely used for small self-governing county-empowered entities such as towns or cities which were deemed to be important enough to be independent from their counties. They were more usually known as a county of itself or "city and county", similar to an independent city or consolidated city-county in other countries.
While they were administratively distinct counties, with their own sheriffs and lord lieutenancies, most of the counties corporate remained part of the "county at large" for purposes such as the county assize courts. This did not apply to Bristol however, which has remained geographically and legally separate from the neighbouring counties of Gloucestershire and Somerset of which it was a part before 1373. From the 17th century, the separate jurisdictions of the counties corporate, again excepting Bristol, were increasingly merged with that of the surrounding county,[citation needed] so that by the late 19th century for most of such towns and cities the title was mostly a ceremonial one.