Great idea! Except I don't know the counties. I was just going with the compass directions.
They also have nothing to do with subdivisions of the same whole.
Do you mean fjördung (quarter)?
Yes, it translates at farthing,
Marches are regions where fighting is expected to happen (repeatedly), and/or locations where large bodies of fighting troops are raised, maintained and kept under arms (hence "marches" for the literal marching of infantry).
I vastly prefer this approach to whatever @mike wightman has been going on about.
How many hexes from the marches should the heartland be? Or better put, how many jumps for the opposing tech?
That is better, but it will vary by factors that increase or decrease the area in uncertain or disputed control. If the empire has a firm hold of the border region, neighbours are not very aggressive or effective and movement is difficult, there might not be much of a march or any distance at all (consider a strong fortress closing the outward end of a narrow corridor, securing all that sits behind it). If the empire doesn't deploy enough defenders, enemies raid often and freely or even push back imperial forces and the terrain allows wide and free movement, the marches might be broad and shifting.
The etymological origin of “march” (as in marching) goes through Middle English marchen → Middle French marcher → Old French marchier → Frankish *markōn→ Proto-Germanic *markōną, while the etymological origin of “march” (as in border region) goes through Middle English marche → Old French marche → Frankish *marku → Proto-Germanic *markō. The border region “march” is more closely related to “mark” (through Middle English to Old English mearc — think of Tolkien’s Mark of Rohan), and thus to “Mercia”, than to the marching “march”. The meaning of the marching “march” comes primarily from its Frankish ancestor — “to mark, mark out, to press with the foot”; the foot-pressing meaning is entirely absent from the ancestors of the border region “march”.
Sure, a bailiff is an official appointed by a higher noble or by the monarch. Their area of operation varies but one or several hundreds might be right (the bailiwick of the Chiltern Hundreds in England currently includes three hundreds and were previously five or six, if I recall rightly).
