In message , at 14:57:01
on Wed, 30 Dec 2009, remarked:
As Wikipaedia puts it: "The boundaries of the counties were to be those
used for parliamentary purposes, adjusted to include urban sanitary
districts on county borders within a single county." The same article
mentions Newmarket as an urban sanitary district which lay in more than
one county and which was given to Suffolk (because it contained largest
part of the district's population at the 1881 census).

It doesn't mention Royston however. I suspect it hadn't developed
enough to be an urban sanitary district before then.

It seems that the former Royston USD may have been too big to fully
incorporate in either one county or the other, and half of it ended
up as the Melbourn District, within Cambridgshire. The other half
may have been lumped into Ashwell for a few years, before gaining
'independence'.

More likely they were rural sanitary districts. A number of rural
districts straddling county boundaries were divided between them.

Wikipedia again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourn_Rural_District

Although that begs the question of why the boundary was moved, because
that's orthogonal to splitting an existing RSD into two parts.
--
Roland Perry