ii. 357 b: 'Hi poterant dare et vendere terram, set saca et

soca et commendatio remanebant Sancto [Eadmundo].'

[148] For example, D. B. i. 201: 'Homines Abbatis de Ely fuerunt et 4 terram suam _vendere potuerunt_, soca vero remansit Abbati, et quartus 1 virgam et dimidiam habuit et _recedere non potuit_.' See the important evidence produced by Round, Feudal England, 24, as to the equivalence of these phrases.

[149] One of the commonest terms is _recedere_--'potuit recedere'--'non potuit recedere'; i. 41, 'non potuit cum terra _recedere ad alium dominum_'; i. 56 b, '10 liberi homines T. R. E. tenebant 12 hidas et dimidiam de terra eiusdem manerii sed _inde recedere_ non poterant'; ii. 19 b, 'non poterant _recedere a terra_ sine licentia Abbatis'; ii. 57 b, 'non poterant recedere _ab illo manerio_'; ii. 66, 'non poterant _removere_ ab illo manerio'; ii. 41, 'non poterant _recedere a soca_ Wisgari'; ii. 41 b, 'nec poterant _abire_ sine iussu domini'; i. 66 b, 'qui tenuit T. R. E. non poterat ab aecclesia diverti [separari]'; ii. 116, 'unus [burgensis] erat ita dominicus ut non posset _recedere nec homagium facere_ sine licentia [Stigandi]'; ii. 119, 'de istis hominibus erant 36 ita dominice Regis Edwardi ut non possent _esse homines cuiuslibet_ sed semper tamen consuetudo regis remanebat preter herigete.' A remarkable form is, ii. 57 b, 'non potuit istam terram mittere in aliquo loco nisi in abbatia.' Then 'potuit ire quo voluit,' 'non potuit ire quolibet' are common enough.

[150] Ine, c. 39: He who leaves his lord without permission pays sixty shillings to his lord.

[151] For example, D. B. i. 41: 'Tres taini tenuerunt de episcopo et non potuerunt ire quolibet.'

[152] D. B. i. 35 b, Tornecrosta.

[153] D. B. i. 212 b, Stanford.

[154] D. B. i. 249 b: 'Tres taini tenuerunt et liberi homines fuerunt'; 256, 'Ipsi taini liberi erant'; 259 b, 'Quatuor taini tenuerunt ante eum et liberi fuerunt.'

[155] Chron. Abingd. i. 490: 'Nam quidam dives, Turkillus nomine, sub Haroldi comitis testimonio et consultu, de se cum sua terra quae Kingestun dicitur, ecclesiae Abbendonensi et abbati Ordrico homagium fecit; licitum quippe libero cuique, illo in tempore, sic agere erat.'

[156] D. B. i. 180 b: 'et poterant ire cum terra quo volebant, et habebant sub se 4 milites, ita liberos ut ipsi erant.'

[157] D. B. ii. 59.

[158] D. B. i. 172: 'si ita liber homo est ut habeat socam suam et sacam et cum terra sua possit ire quo voluerit.'

[159] D. B. i. 84 b.

[160] D. B. ii. 213: 'Hanc terram calumpniatur esse liberam Vlchitel homo Hermeri, quocunque modo iudicetur, vel bello vel iudicio, et alius est praesto probare eo modo quod iacuit ad ecclesiam [S. Adeldredae] die quo rex Edwardus obiit. Set totus hundretus testatur eam fuisse T. R. E. ad S. Adeldredam.'

[161] See in particular the survey of Gloucestershire; D. B. i. 165 b: 'Hoc manerium quietum est a geldo et ab omni forensi servitio praeter aecclesiae'; Ibid. 'Haec terra libera fuit et quieta ab omni geldo et regali servitio'; 170, 'Una hida et dimidia libera a geldo.' When after reading these passages we come upon the following (167 b), 'Isdem W. tenet Tatinton: Ulgar tenuit de rege Edwardo: haec terra libera est,' and when we observe that the land is not hidated, we shall probably infer that 'This land is free' means 'This land is exempt from geld, and (perhaps) from all other royal service.'

[162] Dialogus, i. c. 11; ii. c. 14.

[163] Dialogus, i. c. 10.

[164] Will. Conq. I. 30, 31: 'Si les seignurages ne facent altri gainurs venir a lour terre, la justise le facet.' The Latin version is ridiculous: 'Si domini terrarum non procurent _idoneos_ cultores ad terras suas colendas, iustitiarii hoc faciant.' The translator seems to have been puzzled by the word _altri_ or _autrui_.

[165] Ibid. 29.

[166] Schmid, App. v.; vii., 2, §§ 9-11; Pseudoleges Canuti, 60-1 (Schmid, p. 431).

[167] D. B. iv. 497.

[168] D. B. i. 44 b: 'Istam terram calumpniatur Willelmus de Chernet, dicens pertinere ad manerium de Cerneford feudum Hugonis de Port per hereditatem sui antecessoris et de hoc suum testimonium adduxit de melioribus et antiquis hominibus totius comitatus et hundredi; et Picot contraduxit suum testimonium de villanis et vili plebe et de prepositis, qui volunt defendere per sacramentum vel dei iudicium, quod ille qui tenuit terram liber homo fuit et potuit ire cum terra sua quo voluit. Sed testes Willelmi nolunt accipere legem nisi regis Edwardi usque dum diffiniatur per regem.' It seems possible that William's witnesses wished to insist on the ancient rule that the oath of one thegn would countervail the oaths of six ceorls. This was the old English law (_lex Edwardi_) on which they relied.

[169] D. B. ii. 393: 'et 5 villani de eodem manerio testantur ei et offerunt legem qualem quis iudicaverit; set dimidium hundret de Gepeswiz testantur quod hoc iacebat ad ecclesiam T. R. E. et Wisgarus tenebat et offert derationari.'

[170] Schmid, App. vi.; Leg. Hen. 61 § 2: 'thaini iusiurandum contravalet iusiurandum sex villanorum.'

[171] Leg. Hen. 29, § 1.

[172] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 344.

[173] Dialogus, i. c. 11.

[174] D. B. i. 67 b: 'De terra villanorum dedit abbatissa uni militi 3 hidas et dimidiam.' Ibid. 89: 'tenet Johannes de episcopo 2 hidas de terra villanorum.' Ibid. i. 169: 'unus francigena tenet terram unius villani.' Ibid. 164: 'In Sauerna 11 piscariae in dominio et 42 piscariae villanorum.' Ibid. 230: 'Silva dominica 1 leu. long. et dim. leu. lat. Silva villanorum 4 quarent. long. et 3 quarent. lat.' Ibid. 7 b: '5 molini villanorum.' We have not seen _dominicum_ used as a substantive; but in the Exon. D. B. iv. 75 we have _dominicatus Regis_, for the king's demesne. There is already a slight ambiguity about the term _dominium_. We may say that a church has a manor _in dominio_, meaning thereby that the manor as a whole is held by the church itself and is not held of it by any tenant; and then we may go on to say that only one half of the land comprised in this manor is held by the church _in dominio_. Cf. Hist. Eng. Law, ii. 126.

[175] For example, D. B. i. 159: 'Nunc in dominio 3 carucae et 6 servi, et 26 villani cum 3 bordariis et 15 liberi homines habent 30 carucas.' Ibid. 165: 'In dominio 2 carucae et 9 villani et 6 bordarii et presbyter et unus rachenistre cum 10 carucis.' Ibid. 258 b: 'et 3 villani et 2 bordarii et 2 francigenae cum 2 carucis.' But such entries are common enough.

[176] Round, Domesday Studies, i. 97.

[177] D. B. i. 28: 'Ipse Willelmus de Braiose tenet Wasingetune.... De hac terra tenet Gislebertus dim. hidam, Radulfus 1 hidam, Willelmus 3 virgas, Leuuinus dim. hidam qui potuit recedere cum terra sua et dedit geldum domino suo et dominus suus nichil dedit.'

[178] D. B. i. 163, 163 b.

[179] D. B. i. 121: 'Omnes superius descriptas terras tenebant T. R. E. S. Petrocus; huius sancti terrae nunquam reddiderunt geldum nisi ipsi aecclesiae.' D. B. iv. 187: 'Terrae S. Petrochi nunquam reddiderunt gildum nisi sancto.'

[180] D. B. ii. 372: 'Et quando in hundreto solvitur ad geldum 1 libra tunc inde exeunt 60 denarii ad victum monachorum.'

[181] Cnut, II. 79: 'And se þe land gewerod hæbbe be scire gewitnisse....' The A.-S. _werian_ is just the Latin _defendere_.

[182] Heming, Cartulary, i. 278; Round, Domesday Studies, i. 89. Compare the story in D. B. i. 216 b: Osbern or Osbert the fisherman claims certain land as having belonged to his 'antecessor'; 'sed postquam rex Willelmus in Angliam venit, ille gablum de hac terra dare noluit et Radulfus Taillgebosc gablum dedit et pro forisfacto ipsam terram sumpsit et cuidam suo militi tribuit.'

[183] D. B. iv. 245, Cruca.

[184] See above p. 54, note 175.

[185] D. B. i. 163: 'Ibi erant villani 21 et 9 rachenistres habentes 26 carucas et 5 coliberti et unus bordarius cum 5 carucis. Hi rachenistres arabant et herciabant ad curiam domini.' Ibid. 'Ibi 19 liberi homines rachenistres habentes 48 carucas cum suis hominibus.' Ibid. 166: 'De terra huius manerii tenebant radchenistres, id est liberi homines, T. R. E., qui tamen omnes ad opus domini arabant et herciabant et falcabant et metebant.'

[186] D. B. i. 186, Ewias.

[187] D. B. i. 180.

[188] D. B. i. 179 b.

[189] D. B. i. 179 b.

[190] D. B. i. 174 b.

[191] D. B. i. 246 b. So the burgesses of Steyning (i. 17) 'ad curiam operabantur sicut villani T. R. E.'

[192] D. B. i. 219.

[193] D. B. i. 174 b: 'Ipsi radmans secabant una die in anno et omne servitium quod eis iubebatur faciebant.' The position of these tenants will be discussed hereafter in connexion with St. Oswald's charters.

[194] D. B. i. 16 b: 'De herbagio, unus porcus de unoquoque villano qui habet septem porcos.' In the margin stands 'Similiter per totum Sussex.'

[195] D. B. i. 12 b: 'Ibi tantum silvae unde exeunt de pasnagio 40 porci aut 54 denarii et unus obolus.' Ibid. 191 b: 'De presentacione piscium 12 solidi et 9 denarii.' Ibid. 117 b: 'aut unum bovem aut 30 denarios.'

[196] See above p. 56.

[197] D. B. i. 12 b.

[198] D. B. i. 11 b, Hamestede.

[199] D. B. i. 117 b, Colun.

[200] D. B. i. 127, Stibenhede.

[201] D. B. i. 179 b, Lene.

[202] D. B. i. 12 b, Norborne.

[203] D. B. i. 127 b: 'Wellesdone tenent canonici S. Pauli.... Hoc manerium tenent villani ad firmam canonicorum. In dominio nil habetur.'

[204] See above p. 36.

[205] This matter will be discussed when we deal with St. Oswald's charters.

[205] Schmid, p. 263 (note). This document is Dr Liebermann's Instituta Cnuti (Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc. vii. 77).

[207] Schmid, App. II. 57-9.

[208] For the rest, the word _túnesman_ appears in Edgar IV. 8, 13, in connexion with provisions against the theft of cattle.

[209] D. B. i. 259, 259 b.

[210] Leg. Will. I. 29.

[211] D. B. ii. 360 b: 'Hanc terram habet Abbas in vadimonio pro duabus marcis auri concessu Engelrici quando redimebant Anglici terras suas.' Sometimes the Englishman gets back his land as a bedesman: i. 218, 'Hanc terram tenuit pater huius hominis et vendere poterit T. R. E. Hanc rex Willelmus in elemosina eidem concessit'; i. 211, 'Hanc terram tenuit Avigi et potuit dare cui voluit T. R. E. Hanc ei postea rex Willelmus concessit et per breve R. Tallebosc commendavit ut eum servaret'; i. 218 b, a similar case.

[212] Dialogus, i. c. 10; Bracton, f. 7. On both passages see Vinogradoff, Villainage, p. 121.

[213] D. B. ii. 1: 'In hoc manerio erat tunc temporis quidam liber homo ... qui modo effectus est unus de villanis.'

[214] D. B. i. 148 b: 'In Merse tenet Ailric de Willelmo 4 hidas pro uno manerio.... Istemet tenuit T. R. E. sed modo tenet ad firmam de Willelmo graviter et miserabiliter.'

[215] D. B. i. 141: 'Hanc terram sumpsit Petrus vicecomes de isto sochemanno Regis Willelmi in manu eiusdem Regis pro forisfactura de gildo Regis se non reddidisse ut homines sui dicunt. Sed homines de scira non portant vicecomiti testimonium, quia semper fuit quieta de gildo et de aliis erga Regem quamdiu tenuit, testante hundret.'

[216] D. B. i. 30: 'Ricardus de Tonebrige tenet de hoc manerio unam virgatam cum silva unde abstulit rusticum qui ibi manebat.'

[217] D. B. ii. 282 b: 'et istam consuetudinem constituit illis Aluricus prepositus in tempore R. Bigot.'

[218] D. B. ii. 284 b.

[219] D. B. ii. 84 b.

[220] D. B. ii. 353 b: 'omnes fuerunt confusi.'

[221] D. B. ii. 440 b: 'sed homines inde fuerunt confusi.'

[222] D. B. i. 65, Aldeborne.

[223] D. B. ii. 18, Berdringas.

[224] D. B. ii. 88 b, Tachesteda.

[225] Ellis, Introduction, ii. 428. We give Ellis's figures, but think that he has exaggerated the number of sokemen who were to be found in 1086.

[226] We make considerably more than 900 by counting only those who are expressly described as sokemen and excluding the many persons who are simply described as _homines_ capable of selling their land.

[227] Hamilton, Inquisitio, 65.

[228] Hamilton, Inquisitio, 77.

[229] Thus e.g. D. B. ii. 87 b: 'Hidingham tenet Garengerus de Rogero pro 25 acris quas tenuerunt 15 liberi homines T. R. E.'

[230] D. B. i. 31.

[231] D. B. i. 31 b: 'Et 10 hidas tenebant alodiarii villae.'

[232] D. B. i. 10 b.

[233] D. B. i. 13, Essella.

[234] D. B. i. 24.

[235] D. B. 83, 83 b.

[236] Vinogradoff, Villainage, 89 ff.; Hist. Engl. Law, i. 366 ff.

[237] D. B. i. 189 b.

§ 4. _The Sokemen._

[The _sochemanni_ and _liberi homines_.]

Now of a large part of England we may say that all the occupiers of land who are not holding 'manors[238]' will belong to some of those classes of which we have already spoken. They will be villeins, bordiers, cottiers, 'boors' or serfs. Here and there we may find a few persons who are described as _liberi homines_. In some of the western counties, Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Shropshire, there are _rachenistres_ or _radmans_; between the Ribble and the Mersey we may find a party of _drengs_. Still it is generally true that two of those five classes that seem to have been mentioned in King William's writ[239], the _sochemanni_ and the _liberi homines_, are largely represented only in certain counties. They are to be seen in Essex, yet more thickly in Suffolk and Norfolk. In Lincolnshire nearly half of the rural population consists of sokemen, though there is no class of persons described as _liberi homines_. There are some sokemen in Yorkshire, but they are not very numerous and there are hardly any _liberi homines_. We have seen how in Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire the sokemen have fared ill; but still some are left there. Traces of them may be found in Hertford and Buckingham; they are thick in Leicester, Nottingham and Northampton; there are some in Derbyshire. There have been sokemen in Middlesex[240] and in Surrey[241]; but they have been suppressed; a few remain in Kent[242]; so we should be rash were we to find anything characteristically Scandinavian in the sokemen. Even in Suffolk they are suffering ill at the hands of their new masters[243], while in Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire they have been suppressed or displaced.

[Lord and man.]

We have now to enter on a difficult task, a discussion of the relation which exists between these _sochemanni_ and _liberi homines_ on the one hand and their lord upon the other. The character of this relation varies from case to case. We may distinguish three different bonds by which a man may be bound to a lord, a personal bond, a tenurial bond, a jurisdictional or justiciary bond. But the language of Domesday Book is not very patient of this analysis. However in the second volume we very frequently come upon two ideas which are sharply contrasted with each other; the one is expressed by the term _commendatio_, the other by the term _soca_[244]. To these we must add the great vague term _consuetudo_, and we shall also have to consider the phrases which describe the various degrees of that freedom of 'withdrawing himself with his land' that a man may enjoy.

[Bonds between lord and man.]

In order that we may become familiar with the use made of these terms and phrases we will transcribe a few typical entries:

Two free men, of whom Ælfwin had not even the commendation[245].

Of these men Harold had not even the commendation[246].

Thus commendation seems put before us as the slightest bond that there can be between lord and man. Very often we are told that the lord had the commendation and nothing more[247]. Thus it is contrasted with the soke:--

His predecessor had only the commendation of this, and Harold had the soke[248].

Of these six free men St Benet had the soke, and of one of them the commendation[249].

And the commendation is contrasted with the 'custom,' the _consuetudo_, perhaps we might say the 'service':--

Of the said sokeman Ralph Peverel had a custom of 3 shillings a year, but in the Confessor's time his ancestor had only the commendation[250].

R. Malet claims 18 free men, 3 of them by commendation, and the rest for all custom[251].

And the soke is contrasted with the _consuetudo_:--

To this manor belong 4 men for all custom, and other 4 for soke only[252].

In a given case all these bonds may be united:--

There are 7 sokemen who are the Saint's men with sake and soke and all custom[253].

Over this man the Saint has sake and soke and commendation with all custom[254].

Then if the man 'withdraws,' or gives or sells his land, we often read of the soke 'remaining'; we sometimes read of the commendation, the custom, the service 'remaining.'

These free men could sell or give their land, but the commendation and the soke and sake would remain to St Edmund[255].

These men could sell their land, but the soke would remain to the Saint and the service (_servitium_), whoever might be the buyer[256].

They could give and sell their land, but the soke and the commendation and the service would remain to the Saint[257].

But after all, these distinctions are not maintained with rigour, for the soke is sometimes spoken of as though it were a species of _consuetudo_. We have a tangled skein in our hands.

[Commendation.]

The thread that looks as if it would be the easiest to unravel, is that which is styled 'mere commendation.' The same idea is expressed by other phrases--'he committed himself to Bishop Herman for his defence[258]'--'they submitted themselves with their land to the abbey for defence[259]'--'he became the man of Goisfrid of his own free will[260]'--'she put herself with her land in the hand of the queen[261].' 'Homage' is not a common term in Domesday Book, but if, when speaking of the old time, it says, as it constantly does, that one person was the man of another, no doubt it is telling us of a relationship which had its origin in an oath and a symbolic ceremony[262]. 'She put herself into the hands of the queen'--we should take these words to mean just what they say. An Anglo-Saxon oath of fealty (_hyldáð_) has been preserved[263]. The swearer promises to be faithful and true to his lord, to love all that his lord loves and eschew all that his lord eschews. He makes no distinct reference to any land, but he refers to some compact which exists between him and his lord:--He will be faithful and true on condition that his lord treats him according to his deserts and according to the covenant that has been established between them.

[Commendation and protection.]

To all seeming there need not be any land in the case; and, if the man has land, the act of commendation will not give the lord as a matter of course any rights in that land. Certainly Domesday Book seems to assume that in general every owner or holder of land must have had a lord. This assumption is very worthy of notice. A law of Æthelstan[264] had said that lordless men 'of whom no right could be had' were to have lords, but this command seems aimed at the landless folk, not at those whose land is a sufficient surety for their good behaviour. The law had not directly commanded the landed men to commend themselves, but it had supplied them with motives for so doing[265]. What did a man gain by this act of submission? Of advantages that might be called 'extra-legal' we will say nothing, though in the wild days of Æthelred the Unready, and even during the Confessor's reign, there was lawlessness enough to make the small proprietor wish that he had a mightier friend than the law could be. But there were distinct legal advantages to be had by commendation. In the first place, the life of the great man's man was protected not only by a _wer-gild_, but by a _man-bót_:--a _man-bót_ due to one who had the power to exact it; and if, as one of our authorities assures us, the amount of the _man-bót_ varied with the rank of the lord[266], this would help to account for a remarkable fact disclosed by Domesday Book, namely, that the chosen lord was usually a person of the very highest rank, an earl, an archbishop, the king. Then, again, if the man got into a scrape, his lord might be of service to him. Suppose the man accused of theft: in certain cases he might escape with a single, instead of a triple ordeal, if he had a lord who would swear to his good character[267]. In yet other cases his lord would come forward as his compurgator; perhaps he was morally bound to do so; and, being a man of high rank, would swear a crushing oath. And within certain limits that we can not well define the lord might warrant the doings of his man, might take upon himself the task of defending an action to which his man was subjected[268]. What the man has sought by his submission is _defensio_, _tuitio_; the lord is his _defensor_, _tutor_, _protector_, _advocatus_, in a word, his warrantor[269].

[Commendation and warranty.]

Of warranty we are accustomed to think chiefly in connexion with the title to land:--the feoffor warrants the feoffee in his enjoyment of the tenement. But to all appearance in the eleventh century it is rather as lord than as giver, seller or lender, that the vouchee comes to the defence of his man. If the land is conceived as having once been the warrantor's land, this may be but a fiction:--the man has given up his land and then taken it again merely in order that he may be able to say with some truth that he has it by his lord's gift. But we can not be sure that as yet any such fiction is necessary. 'I will defend any action that is brought against you for this land':--as yet men see no reason why such a promise as this, if made with due ceremony, should not be enforced. A certain amount of 'maintenance' is desirable in their eyes and laudable.

[Commendation and tenure.]

Though we began with the statement that where there is commendation there may yet be no land in the case, we have none the less been already led to the supposition that often enough land does get involved in this nexus between man and lord. No doubt a landless man may commend himself and get no land in return for his homage; but with such an one Domesday Book is not concerned. The cases in which it takes an interest are those in which a landholder has commended himself. Now we dare not say that a landholder can never commend himself without commending his land also[270]. Howbeit, the usual practice certainly is that a man who submits or commits himself for 'defence' or 'protection' shall take his land with him; he 'goes with his land' to a lord. Very curious are some of the instances which show how large a liberty men have enjoyed of taking land wherever they please. 'Tostig bought this land from the church of Malmesbury for three lives':--in this there is nothing strange; leases for three lives granted by churches to thegns have been common. But of course we should assume that during the lease the land could have no other lord than the church of Malmesbury. Not so, however, for during his lease Tostig 'could go with that land to whatever lord he pleased[271].' In Essex there was before the Conquest a man who held land; that land in some sort belonged to the Abbey of Barking, and could not be separated from the abbey; but the holder of it was the man ('merely the man' say the jurors) of one Leofhild the predecessor of Geoffrey de Mandeville[272]. In this last case we may satisfy ourselves by saying that a purely personal relation is distinguished from a tenurial relation; the man of Leofhild is the tenant of the abbey. But what of Tostig's case? Land that he holds of the church of Malmesbury, and that too by no perpetual tenure, he can commend to another lord. From the man's point of view, protection, defence, warranty, is the essence of commendation, and the warranty that he chiefly needs is the warranty of his possession, of the title by which he holds his land. It can not but be therefore that the lord to whom he commends himself and his land, should be in some sort his landlord.

[The lord's interest in commendation.]

Not that he need pay rent, or perform other services in return for the land. The land is his land; he has not obtained it from his lord; on the contrary he has carried it to his lord. Mere commendation is therefore distinguished by a score of entries from a relation that involves the payment of _consuetudines_. Doubtless however the lord obtains 'a valuable consideration' for all that he gives. Part of this will probably lie without the legal sphere. He has a sworn retainer who will fight whenever he is told to fight. But even the law allows the man to go great lengths in his lord's defence[273]. In a rough age happy is the lord who has many sworn to defend him. When at a later time we see that the claimant of land must offer proof 'by the body of a certain free man of his,' we are taught that the lords have relied upon the testimony and the strong right arms of their vassals. That in all cases the lord got more than this we can not say, though perhaps commendation carried with it the right to the heriot, the horse and armour of the dead man[274]. The relation is often put before us as temporary. Numerous are the persons who 'can seek lords where they choose' or who can 'go with their land wherever they please.' How large a liberty these phrases accord to lord and man it were hard to tell. We can not believe that either party to the contract could dissolve it just at the moment when the other had some need to enforce it; but still at other times the man might dissolve it, and we may suppose that the lord could do so too. But the connexion might be of a more permanent kind. Perhaps in most cases in which we are told that a man can not withdraw his land from his lord the bond between them is regarded as something other than commendation--there is commendation and something more. But this is no universal truth. You might be the lord's man 'merely by commendation' and yet be unable to sell your land without the lord's leave[275]. At any rate, in one way and another 'the commendation' is considered as capable of binding the land. The commended man will be spoken of as holding the land under (_sub_) his lord, if not of (_de_) his lord[276]. In many cases if he sells the land 'the commendation will remain to his lord'--by which is meant, not that the vendor will continue to be the man of that lord (for the purposes of the Domesday Inquest this would be a matter of indifference) but that the lord's rights over the land are not destroyed. The purchaser comes to the land and finds the commendation inhering in it[277].

[The seignory over the commended.]

And so, again, the lord's rights under the commendation seem to constitute an alienable and heritable seignory. It is thus that we may best explain the case, very common in East Anglia, in which a man is commended half to one and half to another lord[278]. Thus we read of a case in which a free man was commended, as to one-third to Wulfsige, and as to the residue to Wulfsige's two brothers[279]. In this instance it seems clear that the commendation has descended to three co-heirs. In other cases a lord may have made over his rights to two religious houses; thus we hear of a man who is common to the Abbots of Ely and St. Edmund's[280]. In some cases a man may, in others he may not, be able to prevent himself being transferred from lord to lord, or from ancestor to heir. What passes by alienation or inheritance may be regarded rather as a right to his commendation than as the commendation itself[281]. Of course there is nothing to hinder one from being the man of several different lords. Ælfric Black held lands of the Abbot of Westminster which he could not separate from the church, but for other lands he was the man of Archbishop Stigand[282]. Already a lofty edifice is being constructed; _B_, to whom _C_ is commended, is himself commended to _A_; and in this case a certain relation exists between _C_ and _A_; _C_ is 'sub-commended' to _A_[283].

[Commendation and service.]

In a given case the somewhat vague obligation of the commended man may be rendered definite by a bargain which imposes upon him the payment of rent or the performance of some specified services. When this is so, we shall often find that the land is moving, if we may so speak, not from the man but from the lord. The man is taking land from the lord to hold during good behaviour[284], or for life[285], or for lives. A form of lease or loan (_lǽn_) which gives the land to the lessee and to two or three successive heirs of his, has from of old been commonly used by some of the great churches[286]. Also we see landowners giving up their land to the churches and taking it back again as mere life tenants. During their lives the church is to have some 'service,' or at least some 'recognition' of its lordship, while after their deaths the church will have the land in demesne[287]. This is something different from mere commendation. We see here the _feuda oblata_ or _beneficia oblata_ which foreign jurists have contrasted with _feuda_ or _beneficia data_. The land is brought into the bargain by the man, not by the lord. But often the land comes from the lord, and the tenancy is no merely temporary tenancy; it is heritable. The king has provided his thegns with lands; the earls, the churches have provided their thegns with lands, and these thegns have heritable estates, and already they are conceived as holding them of (_de_) the churches, the earls, the king. But we must not as yet be led away into any discussion about the architecture of the very highest storeys of the feudal or vassalic edifice. It must at present suffice that in humbler quarters there has been much letting and hiring of land. The leases, if we choose to call them so, the gifts, if we choose to call them so, have created heritable rights and perdurable relationships.

[Land-loans and services.]

There is no kind of service that can not be purchased by a grant or lease of land. Godric's wife had land from the king because she fed his dogs[288]. Ælfgyfu the maiden had land from Godric the sheriff that she might teach his daughter orfrey work[289]. The monks of Pershore stipulate that their dominion shall be recognized by 'a day's farm' in every year, that is, that the lessee shall once a year furnish the convent with a day's victual[290]. The king's thegns between the Ribble and the Mersey have 'like villeins' to make lodges for the king, and fisheries and deer-hays, and must send their reapers to cut the king's crops at harvest time[291]. The radmen and radknights of the west must ride on their lord's errands and make themselves generally useful; they plough and harrow and mow, and do whatever is commanded them[292].

[The man's _consuetudines_.]

But we would here speak chiefly of the lowly 'free men' and sokemen of the eastern counties. Besides having their commendation and their soke, the lord very often has what is known as their _consuetudo_ or their _consuetudines_. Often they are the lord's men _de omni consuetudine_. In all probability the word when thus employed, when contrasted with commendation on the one hand and with soke on the other, points to payments and renders to be made in money and in kind and to services of an agricultural character. Of such services only one stands out prominently; it is very frequently mentioned in the survey of East Anglia; it is fold-soke, _soca faldae_. The man must not have a fold of his own; his sheep must lie in the lord's fold. It is manure that the lord wants; the demand for manure has played a large part in the history of the human race. Often enough this is the one _consuetudo_, the one definite service, that the lord gets out of his free men[293]. And then a man who is _consuetus ad faldam_, tied to his lord's fold, is hardly to be considered as being in all respects a 'free' man. Those who are not 'fold-worthy' are to be classed with those who are not 'moot-worthy' or 'fyrd-worthy.' We are tempted to say that a man's _caput_ is diminished by his having to seek his lord's fold, just as it would be diminished if he were excluded from the communal courts or the national host[294]. From the nature of this one _consuetudo_ and from the prominence that is given to it, we may guess the character of the other _consuetudines_. Suit to the lord's mill would be analogous to suit to his fold[295]. Of 'mill-soke' we read nothing, but often enough a surprisingly large part of the total value of a manor is ascribed to its mill, and we may argue that the lord has not invested capital in a costly undertaking without making sure of a return. We may well suppose that like the radmen of the west the free men and sokemen of the east give their lord some help in his husbandry at harvest time. From a document which comes to us from the abbey of Ely, and which is slightly older than the Domesday Inquest, we learn that certain of St. Etheldreda's sokemen in Suffolk had nothing to do but to plough and thresh whenever the abbot required this of them; others had to plough and weed and reap, to carry the victual of the monks to the minster and furnish horses whenever called upon to do so[296]. This seems to point rather to 'boon-days' than to continuous 'week-work,' and we observe that the sokemen of the east like the radmen of the west have horses. Occasionally we learn that a sokeman has to pay an annual sum of money to his lord; sometimes this looks like a substantial rent, sometimes like a mere 'recognition'; but the words that most nearly translate our 'rent,' _redditus_, _census_, _gablum_ are seldom used in this context. All is _consuetudo_.

[Nature of _consuetudines_.]

It is an interesting word. We perhaps are eager to urge the dilemma that in these cases the land must have been brought into the bargain either by the lord or by the tenant:--either the lord is conceived as having let land to the tenant, or the theory is that the tenant has commended land to the lord. But the dilemma is not perfect. It may well be that this relationship is thought of as having existed from all time; it may well be that this relationship, though under slowly varying forms, has really existed for several centuries, and has had its beginning in no contract, in no bargain. In origin the rights of the lord may be the rights of kings and ealdormen, rights over subjects rather than rights over tenants. The word _consuetudo_ covers taxes as well as rents, and, if the sokeman has to do work for his lord, very often, especially in Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire, he has to do work for the king or for the sheriff also. If he has to do carrying service for the lord, he has to do carrying service (_avera_) for the sheriff also or in lieu thereof to pay a small sum of money[297]. And another aspect of this word _consuetudo_ is interesting to us. Land that is burdened with customs is customary land (_terra consuetudinaria_)[298]. As yet this term does not imply that the tenure, though protected by custom, is not protected by law; there is no opposition between law and custom; the customary tenant of Domesday Book is the tenant who renders customs, and the more customs he renders the more customary he is[299].

[Justiciary _consuetudines_.]

This word _consuetudo_ is the widest of words. Perhaps we find the best equivalent for _consuetudines_ in our own vague 'dues[300].' It covers what we should call rents; it covers what we should call rates and taxes; but further it covers what we should call the proceeds and profits of justice. Let us construe a few entries. At Romney there are burgesses who in return for the service that they do on the sea are quit of all customs except three, namely, larceny, peace-breach and ambush[301]. In Berkshire King Edward gave to one of his foresters half a hide of land free from all custom, except the king's forfeiture, such as larceny, homicide, hám-fare and peace-breach[302]. In what sense can a crime be a custom? In a fiscal sense. A crime is a source of revenue. In what sense should we wish to have our land free of crimes, free even, if this be possible, of larceny and homicide? In this sense:--we should wish that no money whatever should go out of our land, neither by way of rent, nor by way of tax, rate, toll, nor yet again by way of _forisfactura_, of payment for crime committed. We should wish also that our land with the tenants on it should be quit or quiet (_quieta_) from the incursions of royal and national officers, whether they be in search of taxes or in search of criminals and the fines due from criminals, and we should also like to put those fines in our own pockets. Justice therefore takes its place among the _consuetudines_: 'larceny' is a source of income. A lord who has 'his customs,' is a lord who has among other sources of revenue, justice or the profits of justice[303]. 'Justice or the profits of justice,' we say, for our record does not care to distinguish between them. It is thinking of money while we are engaged in questioning it about the constitution and competence of tribunals. It gives us but crooked answers. However, we must make the best that can be made of them, and in particular must form some opinion about the _consuetudines_ known as _sake_ and _soke_.

FOOTNOTES:

[238] We shall see hereafter that some of these so-called 'manors' are but small plots and their holders small folk.

[239] See above p. 24.

[240] D. B. i. 128 b, 129, 129 b.

[241] D. B. i. 34, 35 b.

[242] D. B. i. 13.

[243] D. B. ii. 287. There are free men, apparently 120 in number, of whom it is written: 'Hii liberi homines qui tempore regis Eduardi pertinebant in soca de Bercolt, unusquisque gratis dabat preposito per annum 4 tantum denarios, et reddebat socam sicut lex ferebat, et quando Rogerius Bigot prius habuit vicecomitatum statuerunt ministri sui quod redderent 15 libras per annum, quod non faciebant T. R. E. Et quando Robertus Malet habuit vicecomitatum sui ministri creverunt illos ad 20 libras. Et quando Rogerius Bigot eos rehabuit dederunt similiter 20 libras. Et modo tenet eos Aluricus Wanz tali consuetudine qua erant T. R. E.' This is a rare instance of a reestablishment of the _status quo ante conquestum_.

[244] Compare Round, Feudal England, 33.

[245] D. B. ii. 187 b: 'Ex his non habuit Ailwinus suus antecessor etiam commendationem.'

[246] D. B. ii. 287: 'De his hominibus ... non habuit Haroldus etiam commendationem.'

[247] D. B. ii. 153 b: 'Unde suus antecessor habuit commendationem tantum.' Ibid. 154: 'Alstan liber homo Edrici commend[atione] tantum.'

[248] D. B. ii. 161 b.

[249] D. B. ii. 244.

[250] D. B. ii. 6: 'De predicto sochemano habuit Rad. Piperellus consuetudinem in unoquoque anno per 3 solidos, set in T. R. E. non habuit eius antecessor nisi tantum modo commendationem.'

[251] D. B. ii. 171 b: 'Calumpniatur R. Malet 18 liberos homines, 3 commendatione et alios de omni consuetudine.'

[252] D. B. ii. 250 b: 'Huic manerio adiacent semper 4 homines de omni consuetudine et alii 4 ad socham tantum.'

[253] D. B. ii. 356 b.

[254] D. B. ii. 357.

[255] D. B. ii. 353 b.

[256] D. B. ii. 362: 'set soca remaneret sancto et servitium quicunque terram emeret.'

[257] D. B. ii. 358.

[258] D. B. i. 58: 'Pater Tori tenuit T. R. E. et potuit ire quo voluit sed pro sua defensione se commisit Hermanno episcopo et Tori Osmundo episcopo similiter.'

[259] D. B. i. 32 b: 'set pro defensione se cum terra abbatiae summiserunt.'

[260] D. B. ii. 62 b: 'et T. R. W. effectus est homo Goisfridi sponte sua.'

[261] D. B. i. 36 b: 'T. R. W. femina quae hanc terram tenebat misit se cum ea in manu reginae.' Ibid. 36: 'Quidam liber homo hanc terram tenens et quo vellet abire valens commisit se in defensione Walterii pro defensione sua.'

[262] D. B. ii. 172: 'Hos calumpniatur Drogo de Befrerere pro homagio tantum.' This seems equivalent to the common 'commendatione tantum.' D. B. i. 225 b: 'fuerunt homines Burred et iccirco G. episcopus clamat hominationem eorum.'

[263] Schmid, App. x.

[264] Æthelst. II. 2.

[265] Also it had declared that every man must have a pledge, and probably the easiest way of fulfilling this command was to place oneself under a lord who would put one into a tithing.

[266] Leg. Edw. Conf. 12, § 5; but this is contradicted by Leg. Henr. 87, § 4.

[267] Æthelr. I. 1, § 2; compare Æthelr. III. 3, § 4.

[268] Leg. Hen. 82, § 6; 85, § 2.

[269] D. B. ii. 18 b: 'inde vocat dominum suum ad tutorem.' Ibid. 103: 'vocavit Ilbodonem ad tutorem et postea non adduxit tutorem.' Ibid. 31 b: 'revocat eam ad defensorem.' D. B. i. 141 b: 142: 'sed Harduinus reclamat Petrum vicecomitem ad protectorem.' Ibid. 227 b: 'et dicit regem suum advocatum esse.'

[270] D. B. ii. 71 b: 'Phenge tenet idem Serlo de R[anulfo Piperello] quod tenuit liber homo ... qui T. R. W. effectus est homo antecessoris Ranulfi Piperelli, set terram suam sibi non dedit.' This however is not quite to the point.

[271] D. B. i. 72: 'Toti emit eam T. R. E. de aecclesia Malmesburiensi ad etatem trium hominum et infra hunc terminum poterat ire cum ea ad quem vellet dominum.'

[272] D. B. ii. 57 b: 'Et haec terra quam modo tenet G. fuit in abbatia de Berchingis sicuti hundret testatur; set ille qui tenuit hanc terram fuit tantum modo homo [Leuild] antecessoris Goisfridi et non potuit istam terram mittere in aliquo loco nisi in abbatia.'

[273] Leg. Hen. 82, § 3.

[274] D. B. ii. 118 b: 'In burgo [de Tetfort] autem erant 943 burgenses T. R. E. De his habuit Rex omnem consuetudinem. De istis hominibus erant 36 ita dominice Regis E. ut non possent esse homines alicuius sine licentia Regis. Alii omnes poterant esse homines cuiuslibet set semper tamen consuetudeo Regis remanebat _preter herigete_.' Compare D. B. i. 336 b, Stamford: 'In his custodiis sunt 72 mansi sochemanorum, qui habent terras suas in dominio, et qui petunt dominos ubi volunt, super quos Rex nichil aliud habet nisi emendationem forisfacturae eorum et heriete et theloneum.' In this case commendation would not carry the heriot with it.

[275] D. B. ii. 201: 'Liber homo de 80 acris terrae Almari episcopi et Alwoldi abbatis commend[atione] tantum, et hic homo erat ita in monasterio quod non potuit dare terram suam nec vendere.' See another entry of the same kind on the same page.

[276] D. B. i. 50 b: 'Hic Alwinus tenuit hanc terram T. R. E. sub Wigoto pro tuitione; modo tenet eam sub Milone.'

[277] For example, D. B. ii. 353 b: 'Hii poterant dare et vendere terram suam T. R. E. set commend[atio] et soca et saca remanebat S. Edmundo.'

[278] D. B. ii. 182 b: 'Ulchetel habuit dimidiam commendationem de illo T. R. E. et de uxore ipsius totam commendationem.' Ibid. 249 b: 'Medietas istius hominis fuit antecessoris Baingnardi commendatione tantum et alia medietas S. Edmundi cum dimidia terra.' The contrast between _dimidii homines_ and _integri homines_ is common enough. See D. B. ii. 309: one man has a sixth and another five-sixths of a commendation.

[279] D. B. ii. 333 b.

[280] D. B. ii. 125 b.

[281] D. B. i. 58. Tori 'committed himself for defence' to Bp. Herman; Tori's son has done the same to Osmund, the successor of Herman.

[282] D. B. i. 133: 'sed pro aliis terris homo archiepiscopi Stigandi fuit.'

[283] On the whole this seems to be the meaning of 'sub-commendation.' We read a good deal of men who were sub-commended to the _antecessor_ of Robert Malet. This seems to be explained by such an entry as the following (ii. 313 b): 'Eadric holds two free men who were commended to Eadric, who himself was commended to (another) Eadric, the _antecessor_ of Robert Malet.'

[284] D. B. i. 45 b: 'Quidam frater Edrici tenuit tali conventione, quod quamdiu bene se haberet erga eum [Edricum] tamdiu terram de eo teneret, et si vendere vellet, non alicui nisi ei de quo tenebat vendere vel dare liceret.'

[285] Cases of life tenancies will be found in D. B. i. 47, Stantune; 67 b, Newetone; 80, Catesclive; 177 b, Witune; ii. 373, 444 b.

[286] D. B. i. 46 b, 66 b, 72, 175. We shall return to this when in the next essay we speak of _loanland_.

[287] D. B. i. 67 b: 'Hanc terram reddidit sponte sua aecclesiae Hardingus qui in vita sua per convent[ionem] debebat tenere.' See also the case in i. 177 b. Again, ii. 431: 'terram quam cepit cum uxore sua ... misit in ecclesia concedente muliere tali conventione quod non potuit vendere nec dare de aecclesia.' For a 'recognitio' see i. 175, Persore.

[288] D. B. i. 57 b.

[289] D. B. i. 149: 'De his tenuit Aluuid puella 2 hidas ... et de dominica firma Regis Edwardi habuit ipsa dimidiam hidam quam Godricus vicecomes ei concessit quamdiu vicecomes esset, ut illa doceret filiam ejus aurifrisium operari.'

[290] D. B. i. 175: 'Hanc emit quidam Godricus teinus regis Edwardi vita trium haeredum et dabat in anno monachis unam firmam pro recognitione.'

[291] D. B. i. 269 b.

[292] See above p. 56. Their tenure will be discussed hereafter in connexion with St. Oswald's land-loans.

[293] D. B. ii. 187 b: 'In Carletuna 27 liberi homines et dimidius sub Olfo commendatione tantum et soca falde ... 15 liberi homines sub Olfo soca falde et commendatione tantum.'

[294] D. B. ii. 203 b: 'In eadem villa 12 homines 6 quorum erant in soca falde et alii 6 erant liberi.' Ibid. 361 b: '70 liberi ... super hos homines habet et semper habuit sacam et socam et omnem consuetudinem et ad faldam pertinent omnes preter 4.' Ibid. ii. 207: '17 liberi homines consueti ad faldam et commendati.' The term 'fold-worthy' occurs in a writ of Edward the Confessor; he gives to St. Benet of Ramsey soke over such of the men of a certain district as are moot-worthy, fyrd-worthy, and fold-worthy: Earle, Land Charters, p. 343; Kemble, iv. p. 208.

[295] In later extents of East Anglian manors the fold-soke plays an important part. Cart. Rams. iii. 267: 'R. tenuit unam carucatam terrae cum falda sua pro octo solidis. A. dabat pro terra sua quadraginta denarios et oves eius erant in falda Abbatis.... H. triginta acras pro quatuor solidis et oves eius sunt in manu domini....'

[296] See the document printed by Hamilton at the end of the Inquisitio Com. Cantabr. p. 192. 'Isti solummodo arabunt et contererent messes eiusdem loci quotienscunque abbas preceperit....' 'Ita proprie sunt abbati ut quotienscunque ipse preceperit in anno arabunt suam terram, purgabunt et colligent segetes, portabunt victum monachorum ad monasterium, equos eorum in suis necessitatibus semper habebit.' For more of this matter see Round, Feudal England, 30.

[297] D. B. i. 141: there are four sokemen who are men of Æthelmær and who can not sell their land without his consent; but they are under the king's sake and soke and jointly provide the sheriff with one _avera_ every year or four pence.

[298] D. B. i. 249: 'Haec terra fuit consuetudinaria solummodo de theloneo regis sed aliam socam habebat.'

[299] D. B. ii. 273 b: 'In eadem 8 consuetudinarii ad faldam sui antecessoris.' Ibid. 215: '8 homines consuetudinarios ad hoc manerium.'

[300] D. B. i. 280: 'Duae partes Regis et tercia comitis de censu et theloneo et forisfactura et de omni consuetudine.' Ibid. 42: 'Unam aecclesiam et 6 capellas cum omni consuetudine vivorum et mortuorum.'

[301] D. B. i. 10 b: 'et sunt quieti pro servitio maris ab omni consuetudine preter tribus, latrocinio, pace infracta, et forestel.'

[302] D. B. i. 61 b: 'solutam ab omni consuetudine propter forestam custodiendam excepta forisfactura Regis, sicut est latrocinium, et homicidium, et heinfara, et fracta pax.'

[303] D. B. i. 52: 'Hi infrascripti habent in Hantone consuetud[ines] domorum suarum.' Ibid. 249: 'Haec terra fuit consuetudinaria solummodo de theloneo Regis sed socam aliam habebat.'

§ 5. _Sake and soke._

[Sake and soke.]

We may best begin our investigation by recalling the law of later times. In the thirteenth century seignorial justice, that is, justice in private hands, has two roots. A certain civil jurisdiction belongs to the lord as such; if he has tenants enough to form a court, he is at liberty to hold a court of and for his tenants. This kind of seignorial justice we call specifically feudal justice. But very often a lord has other and greater powers than the feudal principle would give him; in particular he has the view of frankpledge and the police justice that the view of frankpledge implies. All such powers must in theory have their origin in grants made by the king; they are franchises. With feudal justice therefore we contrast 'franchisal' justice[304].

[Private jurisdiction in the Leges.]

Now if we go back to the Norman period we shall begin to doubt whether the feudal principle--the principle which as a matter of course gives the lord justiciary powers over his tenants--is of very ancient origin[305]. The state of things that then existed should be revealed to us by the Leges Henrici; for, if that book has any plan at all, it is a treatise on the law of jurisdiction, a treatise on 'soke.' To this topic the writer constantly returns after many digressions, and the leading theme of his work is found in the following sentence:--'As to the soke of pleas, there is that which belongs properly and exclusively to the royal fiscus; there is that which it participates with others; there is that which belongs to the sheriffs and royal bailiffs as comprised in their ferms; there is that which belongs to the barons who have soke and sake[306].' But, when all has been said, the picture that is left on our minds is that of a confused conflict between inconsistent and indefinite principles, and very possibly the compiler in giving us such a picture is fulfilling the duty of a faithful portrayer of facts, though he does not satisfy our demand for a rational theory.

[Soke in the _Leges Henrici_.]

On the one hand, it seems plain that there is a seignorial justice which is not 'franchisal.' Certain persons have a certain 'soke' apart from any regalities which may have been expressly conceded to them by the king. But it is not clear that the legal basis of this soke is the simple feudal principle stated above, namely, that jurisdiction springs from the mere fact of tenure. An element of which we hear little in later days, is prominent in the Leges, the element of rank or personal status. 'The archbishops, bishops, earls and other 'powers' (_potestates_) have sake and soke, toll, team and infangenethef in their own lands[307].' Here the principle seems to be that men of a certain rank have certain jurisdictional powers, and the vague term _potestates_ may include in this class all the king's barons. But then the freeholding _vavassores_ have a certain jurisdiction, they have the pleas which concern _wer_ and _wíte_ (that is to say 'emendable' pleas) over their own men and their own property, and sometimes over another man's men who have been arrested or attached in the act of trespass[308]. Whatever else we may think of these _vavassores_, they are not barons and probably they are not immediate tenants of the king[309]. It is clear, however, that there may be a 'lord' with 'men' who yet has no sake or soke over them[310]. We are told indeed that every lord may summon his man to stand to right in his court, and that if the man be resident in the remotest manor of the honour of which he holds, he still must go to the plea[311]. Here for a moment we seem to have a fairly clear announcement of what we call the simple feudal principle, unadulterated by any element of personal rank; still our text supposes that the lord in question is a great man, he has no mere manor but an honour or several honours. On the whole, our law seems for the time to be taking the shape that French law took. If we leave out of sight the definitely granted franchisal powers, then we may say that a baron or the holder of a grand fief has 'high justice,' or if that term be too technical, a higher justice, while the vavassor has 'low justice' or a lower justice. But in this province, as in other provinces, of English law personal rank becomes of less and less importance. The rules which would determine it and its consequences are never allowed to become definite, and in the end a great generalization surmounts all difficulties:--every lord has a certain civil justice over his tenants; whatsoever powers go beyond this, are franchises.

[Kinds of soke in the _Leges_.]

As to the sort of jurisdiction that a lord of our Leges has, we can make no statement in general terms. Such categories as 'civil' and 'criminal' are too modern for use. We must of course except the pleas of the crown, of which a long and ungeneralized list is set before us[312]. We must except the pleas of the church. We must except certain pleas which belong in part to the king and in part to the church[313]. Then we observe that the justice of an archbishop, bishop or earl, probably the justice of a baron also, extends as high as _infangenethef_, while that of a vavassor goes no higher than such offences as are emendable. The whole matter however is complicated by royal grants. The king may grant away a demesne manor and retain not only 'the exclusive soke' (i.e. the soke over the pleas of the crown), but also 'the common soke' in his hand[314], and a great man may by purchase acquire soke (for example, we may suppose, the hundredal soke) over lands that are not his own[315]. Then again, we may suspect that what is said of 'soke' in general does not apply to any jurisdiction that a lord may exercise over his _servi_ and _villani_. As to the _servi_, very possibly the lord's right over them is still conceived as proprietary rather than jurisdictional, while for his _villani_ (_serf_ and _villein_ are not yet convertible terms) the lord, whatever his rank may be, will probably hold a 'hallmoot[316]' and exercise that 'common soke' which does not infringe the royal preserves. On the whole, the law of the thirteenth century seems to evolve itself somewhat easily out of the law of these Leges, the process of development being threefold: (1) the lord's rank as bishop, abbot, earl, baron, becomes unimportant; (2) the element of tenure becomes all-important; the mere fact that the man holds land of the lord makes him the lord's justiciable; thus a generalization becomes possible which permits even so lowly a person as a burgess of Dunstable to hold a court for his tenants[317]; (3) the obsolescence of the old law of _wíte_ and _wer_, the growth of the new law of felony, the emergence in Glanvill's book of the distinction between criminal and civil pleas as a grand primary distinction, the introduction of the specially royal processes of presentment and inquest, bring about a new apportionment of the field of justice and a rational demarcation of feudal from franchisal powers. Still when we see the lords, especially the prelates of the church, relying upon prescription for their choicest franchises[318], we may learn (if such a lesson be needed) that new theories could not master all the ancient facts.

[The Norman kings and private jurisdiction.]

Whether the Conqueror or either of his sons would have admitted that any justice could be done in England that was not his justice, we may fairly doubt. They issued numerous charters which had no other object than that of giving or confirming to the donees 'their sake and soke,' and, so far as we can see, there is no jurisdiction, at least none over free men, that is not accounted to be 'sake and soke.' Occasionally it is said that the donees are to have 'their court.' However far the feudalization of justice had gone either in Normandy or in England before the Conquest, the Conquest itself was likely to conceal from view the question whether or no all seignorial jurisdiction is delegated from above; for thenceforward every lay tenant in chief, as no mere matter of theory, but as a plain matter of fact, held his land by a title derived newly and immediately from the king. Thus it would be easy for the king to maintain that, if the lords exercised jurisdictional powers, they did so by virtue of his grant, an expressed grant or an implied grant. Gradually the process of subinfeudation would make the theoretical question prominent and pressing, for certainly the Norman nobles conceived that, even if their justice was delegated to them by the king, no rule of law prevented them from appointing sub-delegates. If they claimed to give away land, they claimed also to give away justice, and no earnest effort can have been made to prevent their doing this[319].

[Sake and soke in Domesday Book.]

Returning from this brief digression, we must consider _sake_ and _soke_ as they are in Domesday Book. For a moment we will attend to the words themselves[320]. Of the two _soke_ is by far the commoner; indeed we hardly ever find _sake_ except in connexion with _soke_, and when we do, it seems just an equivalent for _soke_. We have but an alliterative jingle like 'judgment and justice[321].' Apparently it matters little or nothing whether we say of a lord that he has _soke_, or that he has _sake_, or that he has _soke_ and _sake_. But not only is _soke_ the commoner, it is also the wider word; we can not substitute _sake_ for it in all contexts. Thus, for example, we say that a man renders _soke_ to his lord or to his lord's manor; also we say that a piece of land is a _soke_ of such and such a manor; no similar use is made of _sake_.

[Meaning of _sake_.]

Now as a matter of etymology _sake_ seems the easier of the two words. It is the Anglo-Saxon _sacu_, the German _Sache_, a thing, a matter, and hence a 'matter' or 'cause' in the lawyer's sense of these terms, a 'matter' in dispute between litigants, a 'cause' before the court. It is still in use among us, for though we do not speak of a sake between two persons, we do speak of a man acting for another's sake, or for God's sake, or for the sake of money[322]. In Latin therefore _sake_ may be rendered by _placitum_:--'Roger has sake over them' will become 'Rogerius habet placita super eos[323]'; Roger has the right to hold plea over them. Thus easily enough _sake_ becomes the right to have a court and to do justice.

[Meaning of _soke_.]

As to _soke_, this has a very similar signification, but the route by which it attains that signification is somewhat doubtful. We must start with this that _soke_, _socna_, _soca_, is the Anglo-Saxon _sócn_ and has for its primary meaning a _seeking_. It may become connected with justice or jurisdiction by one or by both of two ways. One of these is explained by a passage in the Leges Henrici which says that the king has certain causes or pleas 'in socna i.e. quaestione sua.' The king has certain pleas within his investigation, or his right to investigate. A later phrase may help us:--the king is entitled to 'inquire of, hear and determine' these matters[324]. But the word might journey along another path which would lead to much the same end. It means seeking, following, suing, making suit, _sequi_, _sectam facere_. The duty known as _soca faldae_ is the duty of seeking the lord's fold. Thus _soca_ may be the duty of seeking or suing at the lord's court and the correlative right of the lord to keep a court and exact suit. Without denying that the word has traversed the first of the two routes, the route by way of 'investigation'--in the face of the Leges Henrici we can hardly deny this--we may confidently assert that it has traversed the second, the route by way of 'suit.' There are several passages which assure us that _soke_ is a genus of which _fold-soke_ is a species. Thus:--'Of these men Peter's predecessor had fold-soke and commendation and Stigand had the other soke[325].' In a document which is very closely connected with the great survey we find what seems to be a Latin translation of our word. The churches of Worcester and Evesham were quarrelling about certain lands at Hamton. Under the eye of the king's commissioners they came to a compromise, which declared that the fifteen hides at Hamton belonged to the bishop of Worcester's hundred of Oswaldslaw and ought to pay the king's geld and perform the king's services along with the bishop and ought 'to seek the said hundred for pleading':--_requirere ad placitandum_, this is the main kind of 'seeking' that _soke_ implies[326]. If we look back far enough in the Anglo-Saxon dooms, there is indeed much to make us think that the act of seeking a lord and placing oneself under his protection, and the consequences of that act, the relation between man and lord, the fealty promised by the one, the warranty due from the other, have been known as _sócn_[327]. If so, then there may have been a time when commendation and soke were all one. But this time must be already ancient, for although we do not know what English word was represented by _commendatio_, still there is no distinction more emphatically drawn by Domesday Book than that between _commendatio_ and _soca_.

[Soke as jurisdiction.]

Now when we meet with _soca_ in the Leges Henrici we naturally construe it by some such terms as 'jurisdiction,' 'justice,' 'the right to hold a court.' We have seen that the author of that treatise renders it by the Latin _quaestio_. We also meet the following phrases which seem clear enough:--'Every cause shall be determined in the hundred, or in the county, or in the hallmoot of those who have soke, or in the courts of the lords[328]'; '... according to the soke of pleas, which some have in their own land over their own men, some over their own men and strangers, either in all causes or in some causes[329]': ... 'grithbrice or hámsócn or any of those matters which exceed their soke and sake[330]': 'in capital causes the soke is the king's[331].' So again our author explains that though a baron has soke this will not give him a right to justice over himself; no one, he says, can have his own forfeiture; no one has a soke of impunity:--'nullus enim socnam habet impune peccandi[332].' The use that Domesday Book makes of the word may not be quite so clear. Sometimes we are inclined to render it by _suit_, in particular when fold-soke is contrasted with 'other soke.' But very generally we must construe it by _justice_ or by _justiciary rights_, though we must be careful not to introduce the seignorial court where it does not exist, and to remember that a lord may be entitled to receive the wites or fines incurred by his criminous men without holding a court for them. Those men may be tried and condemned in a hundred court, but the wite will be paid to their lord. Then the word is applied to tracts of land. A tract over which a lord has justiciary power, or a wite-exacting power, is his _soke_, and very often his _soke_ is contrasted with those other lands over which he has rights of a more definitely proprietary kind. But we must turn from words to law.

[Seignorial justice before the Conquest.]

Already before the Conquest there was plenty of seignorial justice in England. The greatest of the Anglo-Saxon lords had enjoyed wide and high justiciary rights. Naturally it is of the rights of the churches that we hear most, for the rights that they had under King Edward they still claim under King William. Foremost among them we may notice the church of Canterbury. On the great day at Penenden Heath, Lanfranc proved that throughout the lands of his church in Kent the king had but three rights; all other justice was in the hands of the archbishop[333]. In Warwickshire the Archbishop of York has soke and sake, toll and team, church-scot and all other 'forfeitures' save those four which the king has throughout the whole realm[334]. These four forfeitures are probably the four reserved pleas of the crown that are mentioned in the laws of Cnut--_mundbryce_, _hámsócn_, _forsteal_ and _fyrdwíte_[335]. But even these rights though usually reserved to the king may have been made over to the lord. In Yorkshire neither king nor earl has any 'custom' within the lands of St. Peter of York, St. John of Beverley, St. Wilfrid of Ripon, St. Cuthbert of Durham and the Holy Trinity. We are asked specially to note that in this region there are four royal highways, three by land and one by water where the king claims all forfeitures even when they run through the land of the archbishop or of the earl[336]. Within his immense manor of Taunton the Bishop of Winchester has pleas of the highest class, and three times a year without any summons his men must meet to hold them[337]. In Worcestershire seven of the twelve hundreds into which the county is divided are in the heads of four great churches; Worcester has three, Westminster two, Evesham one, Pershore one. Westminster holds its lands as freely as the king held them in his demesne; Pershore enjoys all the pleas of the free men; no sheriff can claim anything within the territory of St. Mary of Worcester, neither in any plea, nor in any other matter[338]. In East Anglia we frequently hear of the reserved pleas of the crown. In this Danish district they are accounted to be six in number; probably they are _griðbrice_, _hámsócn_, _fihtwíte_ and _fyrdwíte_, outlaw's-work and the receipt of outlaws[339]. Often we read how over the men of some lord the king and the earl have 'the six forfeitures,' or how 'the soke of the six forfeitures' lies in some royal manor[340]. But then there is a large tract in which these six forfeitures belong to St. Edmund; some other lord may have sake and soke in a given parcel of that tract, but the six forfeitures belong to St. Edmund; they are indeed 'the six forfeitures of St. Edmund[341].' Other arrangements were possible. We hear of men over whom St. Benet had three forfeitures[342]. The lawmen of Stamford had sake and soke within their houses and over their men, save geld, heriot, larceny and forfeitures exceeding 40 ores of silver[343]. Certain burgesses of Romney serve the king on the sea, and therefore they have their own forfeitures, save larceny, peace-breach and forsteal, and these belong, not to the king, but to the archbishop[344]. Sometimes King William will be careful to limit his confirmation of a lord's sake and soke to the 'emendable forfeitures,' the offences which can be paid for with money[345].

[Soke as a regality.]

That in the Confessor's day justiciary rights could only be claimed by virtue of royal grants, that they did not arise out of the mere relation between lord and man, lord and tenant, or lord and villein, seems to us fairly certain. In the first place, as already said, soke is frequently contrasted with commendation. In the second place, as we turn over the pages of our record, we shall see it remarked of some man, who held a manor in the days before the Conquest, that he had it with sake and soke, and the remark is made in such a context that thereby he is singled out from among his fellows[346]. Thus it is said of a little group of villeins and sokemen in Essex that 'their lord had sake and soke[347].' Not that we can argue that a lord has no soke unless it is expressly ascribed to him. The surveyors have no great interest in this matter. Sometimes such a phrase as 'he held it freely' seems to serve as an equivalent for 'he held it with sake and soke[348].' It is said of the Countess Judith, a lady of exalted rank, that she had a manse in Lincoln without sake and soke[348]. Then we are told that throughout the city of Canterbury the king had sake and soke except in the lands of the Holy Trinity (Christ Church), St. Augustin, Queen Edith, and three other lords[350]. We have a list of fifteen persons who had sake and soke in the two lathes of Sutton and Aylesford[351], a list of thirty-five persons who had sake and soke, toll and team in Lincolnshire (it includes the queen, a bishop, three abbots and two earls[352]), and a list of nineteen persons who had similar rights in the shires of Derby and Nottingham[353]. Such lists would have been pointless had any generalization been possible. Then in East Anglia it is common enough to find that the men who are reckoned to be the _liberi homines_ of some lord are under the soke of another lord or render their soke to the king and the earl, that is to say, to the hundred court. Often enough it is said somewhat pointedly that the men over whom the king and the earl have soke are _liberi homines_, and this may for a moment suggest that the lord as a matter of course has soke over such of his men as are not ranked as 'free men'; possibly it may suggest that freedom in this context implies subjection to a national as opposed to a seignorial tribunal[354]. But on the one hand a lord often enough has soke over those who are distinctively 'free men[355],' while on the other hand, as will be explained below, he has not the soke over his sokeman[356].

[Soke over villeins.]

But we must go further and say that the lord has not always the soke over his villeins. This is a matter of much importance. An entry relating to a manor in Suffolk seems to put it beyond doubt:--In the hundred and a half of Sanford Auti a thegn held Wenham in King Edward's time for a manor and three carucates of land; there were then nine _villani_, four _bordarii_ and one _servus_ and there were two teams on the demesne; Auti had the soke over his demesne and the soke of the villeins was in Bercolt[357]. Now Bercolt, the modern Bergholt, was a royal manor, the seat of a great court, which had soke over many men in the neighbouring villages. To all seeming it was the court for the hundred, or 'hundred-and-a-half,' of Sanford[358]. Here then we seem to have villeins who are not under the soke of their lord but are the justiciables of the hundred court. In another case, also from Suffolk, it is said of the lord of a manor that he had soke 'only over the demesne of his hall,' and this seems to exclude from the scope of his justiciary rights the land held by thirty-two villeins and eight bordiers[359]. We may find the line drawn at various places. Not very unfrequently in East Anglia a lord has the soke over those men who are bound to his sheep-fold, while those who are 'fold-worthy' attend the hundred court[360]. In one case a curious and instructive distinction is taken:--'In Farwell lay in King Edward's day the sake and soke of all who had less than thirty acres, but of all who had thirty acres the soke and sake lay in the hundred[361].' In this case the line seems to be drawn just below the virgater, no matter the legal class to which the virgater belongs. To our thinking it is plain enough that many a _manerium_ of the Confessor's day had no court of its own. As we shall see hereafter, the manors are often far too small to allow of our endowing each of them with a court. When of a Cheshire manor we hear that 'this manor has its pleas in its lord's hall' we are being told of something that is exceptional[362]. In the thirteenth century no one would have made such a remark. In the eleventh the _halimote_ or _hall-moot_ looks like a novelty.

[Private soke and hundredal soke.]

Seignorial justice is as yet very closely connected with the general scheme of national justice. Frequently the lord who has justice has a hundred. We remember how seven of the twelve hundreds of Worcestershire are in the hands of four great churches[363]. St. Etheldreda of Ely has the soke of five and a half hundreds in Suffolk[364]. In Essex Swain had the half-hundred of Clavering, and the pleas thereof brought him in 25_s._ a year[365]. In Nottinghamshire the Bishop of Lincoln had all the customs of the king and the earl throughout the wapentake of Newark[366]. The monks of Battle Abbey claimed that the sake and soke of twenty-two hundreds and a half and all royal 'forfeitures' were annexed to their manor of Wye[367]. But further--and this deserves attention--when the hundredal jurisdiction was not in the hands of some other lord, it was conceived as belonging to the king. The sake and soke of a hundred or of several hundreds is described as 'lying in,' or being annexed to, some royal manor and it is farmed by the farmer of that manor. Oxfordshire gives us the best example of this. The soke of four and a half hundreds belongs to the royal manor of Bensington, that of two hundreds to Headington, that of two and a half to Kirtlington, that of three to Upton, that of three to Shipton, that of two to Bampton, that of two to Bloxham and Adderbury[368]. What we see here we may see elsewhere also[369]. If then King William gives the royal manor of Wye to his newly founded church of St. Martin in the Place of Battle, the monks will contend that they have obtained as an appurtenance the hundredal soke over a large part of the county of Kent[370].

[Hundredal and manorial soke.]

The law seems as yet, if we may so speak, unconscious of the fact that underneath or beside the hundredal soke a new soke is growing up. It seems to treat _the_ soke over a man or over a piece of land as an indivisible thing that must 'lie' somewhere and can not be in two places at once. It has indeed to admit that while one lord has the soke, the king or another lord may have certain reserved and exalted 'forfeitures,' the three forfeitures or the four or the six, as the case may be[371]; but it has no classification of courts. The lord's court, if it be not the court of an ancient hundred, is conceived as the court of a half-hundred, or of a quarter of a hundred[372], or as the court of a district that has been carved out from a hundred[373]. Thus Stigand had the soke of the half-hundred of Hersham, save Thorpe which belonged to St. Edmund, and Pulham which belonged to St. Etheldreda[374]; thus also the king had the soke of the half-hundred of Diss, except the land of St. Edmund, where he shared the soke with the saint, and except the lands of Wulfgæt and of Stigand[375]. But it is impossible to maintain this theory. The hundred is becoming full of manors, within each of which a lord is exercising or endeavouring to exercise a soke over all, or certain classes, of his men. It is possible that in Lincolnshire we see the beginnings of a differentiating process; we meet with the word _frisoca_, _frigsoca_, _frigesoca_. Whether this stands for 'free soken,' or, as seems more likely, for 'frið soken,' soke in matters relating to the peace, it seems to mark off one kind of soke from other kinds[376]. We have to remember that in later days the relation of the manorial to the hundredal courts is curious. In no accurate sense can we say that the court of the manor is below the court of the hundred. No appeal, no complaint of false judgment, lies from the one to the other; and yet, unless the manor enjoys some exceptional privilege, it is not extra-hundredal and its jurisdiction in personal causes is over-lapped by the jurisdiction of the hundred court: the two courts arise from different principles[377]. In Domesday Book the feudal or tenurial principle seems still struggling for recognition. Already the Norman lords are assuming a soke which their _antecessores_ did not enjoy[378]. As will be seen below, they are enlarging and consolidating their manors and thereby rendering a manorial justice possible and profitable. Whether we ought to hold that the mere shock and jar of conquest and dispossession was sufficient to set up the process which covered our land with small courts, or whether we ought to hold that an element of foreign law worked the change, is a question that will never be answered unless the Norman archives have yet many secrets to tell. The great 'honorial' courts of later days may be French; still it is hardly in this region that we should look for much foreign law. It is in English words that the French baron of the Conqueror's day must speak when he claims justiciary rights. But that the process was far from being complete in 1086 seems evident.

[The seignorial court.]

Many questions about the distribution and the constitution of the courts we must leave unsolved. Not only does our record tell us nothing of courts in unambiguous words, but it hardly has a word that will answer to our 'court.' The term _curia_ is in use, but it seems always to signify a physical object, the lord's house or the court-yard around it, never an institution, a tribunal[379]. Almost all that we are told is conveyed to us under the cover of such words as _sake_, _soke_, _placita_, _forisfacturae_. We know that the Bishop of Winchester has a court at Taunton, for his tenants are bound to come together thrice a year to hold his pleas without being summoned[380]. This phrase--'to hold his pleas'--seems to tell us distinctly enough that the suitors are the doomsmen of the court. Then, again, we have the well-known story of what happened at Orwell in Cambridgeshire. In that village Count Roger had a small estate; he had land for a team and a half. This land had belonged to six sokemen. He had borrowed three of them from Picot the sheriff in order that they might hold his pleas, and having got them he refused to return them[381]. That the court that he wished to hold was a court merely for his land at Orwell is highly improbable, but he had other lands scattered about in the various villages of the Wetherly hundred, though in all his tenants amounted to but 14 villeins, 42 bordiers, 15 cottiers, and 4 serfs. We can not draw the inference that men of the class known as sokemen were necessary for the constitution of a court, for at the date of the survey there was no sokeman left in all Roger's land in Cambridgeshire; the three that he borrowed from Picot had disappeared or were reckoned as villeins or worse. Still he held a court and that court had doomsmen. But we can not argue that every lord who had soke, or sake and soke, had a court of his own. It may be that in some cases he was satisfied with claiming the 'forfeitures' which his men incurred in the hundred courts. This is suggested to us by what we read of the earl's third penny.

[Soke and the earl's third penny.]

In the county court and in every hundred court that has not passed into private hands, the king is entitled to but two-thirds of the proceeds of justice and the earl gets the other third, except perhaps in certain exceptional cases in which the king has the whole profit of some specially royal plea. The soke in the hundred courts belongs to the king and the earl. And just as the king's rights as the lord of a hundredal court become bound up with, and are let to farm with, some royal manor, so the earl's third penny will be annexed to some comital manor. Thus the third penny of Dorsetshire was annexed to Earl Harold's manor of Pireton[382], and the third penny of Warwickshire to Earl Edwin's manor of Cote[383]. Harold had a manor in Herefordshire to which belonged the third penny of three hundreds[384]; Godwin had a manor in Hampshire to which belonged the third penny of six hundreds[385]; the third penny of three Devonian hundreds belonged to the manor of Blackpool[386]. Now, at least in some cases, the king could not by his grants deprive the earl of his right; the grantee of soke had to take it subject to the earl's third penny. Thus for the shires of Derby and Nottingham we have a list of nineteen persons who were entitled to the king's two-pence, but only three of them were entitled to the earl's penny[387]. The monks of Battle declared that throughout many hundreds in Kent they were entitled to 'the king's two-pence'; the earl's third penny belonged to Odo of Bayeux[388]. And so of certain 'free men' in Norfolk it is said that 'their soke is in the hundred for the third penny[389].' A man commits an offence; he incurs a _wíte_; two-thirds of it should go to his lord; one-third to the earl: in what court should he be tried? The answer that Domesday Book suggests by its silence is that this is a matter of indifference; it does not care to distinguish between the right to hold a court and the right to take the profits of justice. Just once the veil is raised for a moment. In Suffolk lies the hundred of Blything; its head is the vill of Blythburgh where there is a royal manor[390]. Within that hundred lies the considerable town of Dunwich, which Edric holds as a manor. Now in Dunwich the king has this custom that two or three men shall go to the hundred court if they be duly summoned, and if they make default they shall pay a fine of two ores, and if a thief be caught there he shall be judged there and corporeal justice shall be done in Blythburgh and the lord of Dunwich shall have the thief's chattels. Apparently in this case the lord of Dunwich will see to the trying but not to the hanging of the thief; but, at any rate, a rare effort is here made to define how justice shall be done[391]. The rarity of such efforts is very significant. Of course Domesday Book is not a treatise on jurisdiction; still if there were other terms in use, we should not be for ever put off with the vague, undifferentiated _soke_. On the whole, we take it that the lord who enjoyed soke had a right to keep a court if he chose to do so, and that generally he did this, though he would be far from keeping a separate court for each of his little manors; but if his possessions were small he may have contented himself with attending the hundred court and claiming the fines incurred by his men. Sometimes a lord seems to have soke only over his own demesne lands[392]; in this case the wites that will come to him will be few. We may in later times see some curious compromises. If a thief is caught on the land of the Prior of Canterbury at Brook in Kent, the borhs-elder and frank-pledges of Brook are to take him to the court of the hundred of Wye, which belongs to the Abbot of Battle. Then, if he is not one of the Prior's men, he will be judged by the hundred. But if he is the Prior's man, then the bailiff of Brook will 'crave the Prior's court.' The Prior's folk will then go apart and judge the accused, a few of the hundredors going with them to act as assessors. If the tribunal thus constituted cannot agree, then once more the accused will be brought back into the hundred and will there be judged by the hundredors in common. In this instance we see that even in Henry II.'s day the Prior has not thoroughly extricated his court from the hundred moot[393].

[Soke and house-peace.]

It seems possible that a further hint as to the history of soke is given us by certain entries relating to the boroughs. It will already have become apparent that if there is soke over men, there is also soke over land: if men 'render soke' so also acres 'render soke.' We can see that a very elaborate web of rules is thus woven. One man strikes another. Before we can tell what the striker ought to pay and to whom he ought to pay it, we ought to know who had soke over the striker, over the stricken, over the spot where the blow was given, over the spot where the offender was attached or arrested or accused. 'The men of Southwark testify that in King Edward's time no one took toll on the strand or in the water-street save the king, and if any one in the act of committing an offence was there challenged, he paid the amends to the king, but if without being challenged he escaped under a man who had sake and soke, that man had the amends[394].' Then we read how at Wallingford certain owners of houses enjoyed 'the gafol of their houses, and blood, if blood was shed there and the man was received inside before he was challenged by the king's reeve, except on Saturday, for then the king had the forfeiture on account of the market; and for adultery and larceny they had the forfeiture in their houses, but the other forfeitures were the king's[395].' We can not hope to recover the intricate rules which governed these affairs, rules which must have been as intricate as those of our 'private international law.' But the description of Wallingford tells us of householders who enjoy the 'forfeitures' which arise from crimes committed in their own houses, and a suspicion may cross our minds that the right to these forfeitures is not in its origin a purely jurisdictional or justiciary right. However, these householders are great people (the Bishop of Salisbury, the Abbot of St Albans are among them), their town houses are considered as appurtenant to their rural manors and the soke over the manor comprehends the town house. And so when we read how the twelve lawmen of Stamford had sake and soke within their houses and over their own men 'save geld, and heriot, and corporeal forfeitures to the amount of 40 ores of silver and larceny' we may be reading of rights which can properly be described as justiciary[396].

[Soke in houses.]

But a much more difficult case comes before us at Warwick[397]. We first hear of the town houses that are held by great men as parts of their manors, and then we hear that 'besides these houses there are in the borough nineteen burgesses who have nineteen houses with sake and soke and all customs.' Now we can not easily believe that the burgess's house is a jurisdictional area, or that in exacting a mulct from one who commits a crime in that house the burgess will be playing the magistrate or exercising a right to do justice or take the profits of justice by virtue of a grant made to him by the king. Rather we are likely to see here a relic of the ancient 'house-peace[398].' If you commit an act of violence in a man's house, whatever you may have to pay to the person whom you strike and to the king, you will also have to make amends to the owner of the house, even though he be but a ceorl or a boor, for you have broken his peace[399]. The right of the burgess to exact a mulct from one who has shed blood or committed adultery within his walls may in truth be a right of this kind, and yet, like other rights to other mulcts, it is now conceived as an emanation of sake and soke. If in the eleventh century we hear but little of this householder's right, may this not be because the householder has surrendered it to his lord, or the lord has usurped it from the householder, and thus it has gone to swell the mass of the lord's jurisdictional rights? At Broughton in Huntingdonshire the Abbot of Ramsey has a manor with some sokemen upon it 'and these sokemen say that they used to have legerwite (fornication-fine), bloodwite and larceny up to fourpence, and above fourpence the Abbot had the forfeiture of larceny[400].' Various interpretations may be set upon this difficult passage. We may fashion for ourselves a village court (though there are but ten sokemen) and suppose that the commune of sokemen enjoyed the smaller fines incurred by any of its members. But we are inclined to connect this entry with those relating to Wallingford and to Warwick and to believe that each sokeman has enjoyed a right to exact a sum of money for the breach of his peace. The law does not clearly mark off the right of the injured housefather from the right of the offended magistrate. How could it do so? If you commit an act of violence you must pay a wite to the king. Why so? Because you have wronged the king by breaking his peace and he requires 'amends' from you. With this thought in our minds we may now approach an obscure problem.

[Vendible soke.]

We have said that seignorial justice is regarded as having its origin in royal grants, and in the main this seems true. We hardly state an exception to this rule if we say that grantees of justice become in their turn grantors. Not merely could the earl who had soke grant this to one of his thegns, but that thegn would be said to hold the soke 'under' or 'of' the earl. Justice, we may say, was already being subinfeudated[401]. But now and again we meet with much more startling statements. Usually if a man over whom his lord has soke 'withdraws himself with his land,' or 'goes elsewhere with his land,' the lord's soke over that land 'remains': he still has jurisdictional rights over that land though it is commended to a new lord. We may be surprised at being very frequently told that this is the case, for we can hardly imagine a man having power to take his land out of one sphere of justice and to put it into another. But that some men, and they not men of high rank, enjoyed this power seems probable. Of a Hertfordshire manor we read: 'In this manor there were six sokemen, men of Archbishop Stigand, and each had one hide, and they could sell, saving the soke, and one of them could even sell his soke with the land[402].' This case may be exceptional; there may have been a very unusual compact between the archbishop and this egregiously free sokeman; but the frequency with which we are told that on a sale the soke 'remains' does not favour this supposition.

[Soke and mund.]

We seem driven to the conclusion that in some parts of the country the practice of commendation had been allowed to interfere even with jurisdictional relationships: that there were men who could 'go with their land to what lord they chose' and carry with them not merely their homage, but also their suit of court and their 'forfeitures.' This may seem to us intolerable. If it be true, it tells us that the state has been very weak; it tells us that the national scheme of justice has been torn to shreds by free contract, that men have had the utmost difficulty in distinguishing between property and political power, between personal relationships and the magistracy to which land is subject. But unless we are mistaken, the house-peace in its decay has helped to produce this confusion. In a certain sense a mere ceorl has had what is now called a soke,--it used to be called a _mund_ or _grið_--over his house and over his loaf-eaters: that is to say, he has been entitled to have money paid to him if his house-peace were broken or his loaf-eaters beaten. This right he has been able to transfer to a lord. In one way or another it has now come into the lord's hand and become mixed up with other rights. In Henry I.'s day a lawyer will be explaining that if a villein receives money when blood is shed or fornication is committed in his house, this is because he has purchased these forfeitures from his lord[403]. This reverses the order of history.

[Soke and jurisdiction.]

Such is the best explanation that we can give of the men who sell their soke with their land. No doubt we are accusing Domesday Book of being very obscure, of using a single word to express some three or four different ideas. In some degree the obscurity may be due to the fact that French justiciars and French clerks have become the exponents of English law. But we may gravely doubt whether Englishmen would have produced a result more intelligible to us. One cause of difficulty we may perhaps remove. In accordance with common wont we have from time to time spoken of seignorial jurisdiction. But if the word _jurisdiction_ be strictly construed, then in all likelihood there never has been in this country any seignorial jurisdiction. It is not the part of the lord to declare the law (_ius dicere_); 'curia domini debet facere iudicia et non dominus[404].' From first to last this seems to be so, unless we take account of theories that come to us from a time when the lord's court was fast becoming an obsolete institution[405]. So it is in Domesday Book. In the hundred court the sheriff presides; it is he that appoints a day for the litigation, but the men of the hundred, the men who come together 'to give and receive right,' make the judgments[406]. The tenants of the Bishop of Winchester 'hold the bishops' pleas' at Taunton; Earl Roger borrows sokemen 'to hold his pleas[407].' Thus the erection of a new court is no very revolutionary proceeding; it passes unnoticed. If once it be granted that all the justiciary profits arising from a certain group of men or tract of land are to go to a certain lord, it is very much a matter of indifference to kings and sheriffs whether the lord holds a court of his own or exacts this money in the hundred court. Indeed, a sheriff may be inclined to say 'I am not going to do your justice for nothing; do it yourself.' So long as every lord will come to the hundred court himself or send his steward, the sheriff will have no lack of capable doomsmen. Then the men of the lord's precinct may well wish for a court at their doors; they will be spared the long journey to the hundred court; they will settle their own affairs and be a law unto themselves. Thus we ought not to say that the lax use of the word _soke_ covers a confusion between 'jurisdiction' and the profits of 'jurisdiction,' and if we say that the confusion is between justice and the profits of justice, we are pointing to a distinction which the men of the Confessor's time might regard as somewhat shadowy. In any case their lord is to have their wites; in any case they will get the judgment of their peers; what is left to dispute about is mere geography, the number of the courts, the demarcation of justiciary areas. We may say, if we will, that far-sighted men would not have argued in this manner, for seignorial justice was a force mighty for good and for ill; but it has not been proved to our satisfaction that the men who ruled England in the age before the Conquest were far-sighted. Their work ended in a stupendous failure.

[Soke and commendation.]

To the sake and soke of the old English law we shall have to return once more in our next essay. Our discussion of the sake and soke of Domesday Book was induced by a consideration of the various bonds which may bind a man to a lord. And now we ought to understand that in the eastern counties it is extremely common for a man to be bound to one lord by commendation and to another lord by soke. Very often indeed a man is commended to one lord, while the soke over him and over his land 'lies in' some hundred court which belongs to another lord or is still in the hands of the king and the earl. How to draw with any exactness the line between the rights given to the one lord by the commendation and to the other lord by the soke we can not tell. For instance, we find many men who can not sell their land without the consent of a lord. This we may usually regard as the result of some term in the bargain of commendation; but in some cases it may well be the outcome of soke. Thus at Sturston in Norfolk we see a free man of St Etheldreda of Ely; his sake and soke belong to Archbishop Stigand's manor of Earsham (Sturston and Earsham lie some five miles apart); now this man if he wishes to give or sell his land must obtain the licence both of St Etheldreda and of Stigand[408]. And so as regards the forfeiture of land. We are perhaps accustomed to think of the escheat _propter delictum tenentis_ as having its origin in the ideas of homage and tenure rather than in the justiciary rights of the lord. Howbeit there is much to make us think that the right to take the land of one who has forfeited that land by crime was closely connected with the right to other wites or _forisfacturae_. 'Of all the thegns who hold land in the Well wapentake of Lincolnshire, St Mary of Lincoln had two-thirds of every _forisfactura_ and the earl the other third; and so of their heriots; and so if they forfeited their land, two-thirds went to St Mary and the remainder to the earl[409].' St Mary has not enfeoffed these thegns; but by some royal grant she has two-thirds of the soke over them. In Suffolk one Brungar held a small manor with soke. He was a 'free man' commended to Robert Wimarc's son; but the sake and soke over him belonged to St Edmund. Unfortunately for Brungar, stolen horses were found in his house, and we fear that he came to a bad end. At any rate he drops out of the story. Then St Edmund's Abbot, who had the sake and soke, and Robert, who had the commendation, went to law, and right gladly would we have heard the plea; but they came to some compromise and to all seeming Robert got the land[410]. If we are puzzled by this labyrinthine web of legal relationships, we may console ourselves with the reflection that the Normans also were puzzled by it. They seem to have felt the necessity of attributing the lordship of land to one lord and one only (though of course that lord might have another lord above him), of consolidating soke with commendation, homage with justice, and in the end they brought out a simple and symmetrical result, albeit to the last the relation of seignorial to hundredal justice is not to be explained by any elegant theory of feudalism.

[Sokemen and free men.]

Yet another problem shall be stated, though we have little hope of solving it. The writ, or rather one of the writs, which defined the scope of the survey seems to have spoken of _liberi homines_ and _sochemanni_ as of two classes of men that were to be distinguished from each other. In Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk this distinction is often drawn. In one and the same manor we shall find both 'free men' and sokemen[411]; we may even hear of sokemen who formerly were 'free men[412].' But the import of this distinction evades us. Sometimes it is said of sokemen that they 'hold freely[413].' We read that four sokemen held this land of whom three were free, while the fourth had one hide but could not give or sell it[414]. This may suggest that the principle of the division is to be found in the power to alienate the land, to 'withdraw' with the land to another lord[415]. There may be truth in the suggestion, but we can not square it with all our cases[416]. Often enough the 'free man' can not sell without the consent of his lord[417]. We have just met with a 'free man' who had to obtain the consent both of the lord of his commendation and of the lord of his soke[418]. On the other hand, the sokeman who can sell without his lord's leave is no rare being[419], and it was of a sokeman that we read how he could sell, not only his land, but also his soke[420].

[Difference between 'free men' and sokemen.]

Again, we dare not say that while the 'free man' is the justiciable of a national court, the soke over the sokeman belongs to his lord. Neither side of this proposition is true. Very often the soke over the 'free man' belongs to a church or to some other lord[421], who may or may not be his lord by commendation[422]. Very often the lord has not the soke over his sokemen. This may seem a paradox, but it is true. We make it clearer by saying that you may have a man who is your man and who is a sokeman, but yet you have no soke over him; his soke 'lies' or 'is rendered' elsewhere. This is a common enough phenomenon, but it is apt to escape attention. When we are told that a certain English lord had a sokeman at a certain place, we must not jump to the conclusion that he had soke over that man of his. Thus in Hertfordshire Æthelmær held a manor and in it there were four sokemen; they were, we are told, his _homines_: but over two of them the king had sake and soke[423]. Unless we are greatly mistaken, the soke of many of the East Anglian sokemen, no matter whose men they were, lay in the hundred courts. This prevents our saying that a sokeman is one over whom his lord has soke, or one who renders soke to his lord. We may doubt whether the line between the sokemen and the 'free men' is drawn in accordance with any one principle. Not only is freedom a matter of degree, but freedom is measured along several different scales. At one time it is to the power of alienation or 'withdrawal' that attention is attracted, at another to the number or the kind of the services and 'customs' that the man must render to his lord. When we see that in Lincolnshire there is no class of 'free men' but that there are some eleven thousand sokemen, we shall probably be persuaded that the distinction drawn in East Anglia was of no very great importance to the surveyors or the king. It may have been a matter of pure personal rank. These _liberi homines_ may have enjoyed a wergild of more than 200 shillings, for in the Norman age we see traces of a usage which will not allow that any one is 'free' if he is not noble[424]. But perhaps when the Domesday of East Anglia has been fully explored, hundred by hundred and vill by vill, we shall come to the conclusion that the 'free men' of one district would have been called sokemen in another district[425].

[Holdings of the sokemen.]

Some of these sokemen and 'free men' had very small tenements. Let us look at a list of tenants in Norfolk. 'In Carleton were 2 free men with 7 acres. In Kicklington were 2 free men with 2 acres. In Forncett 1 free man with 2 acres. In Tanaton 4 free men with 4 acres. In Wacton 2 free men with 1-1/2 acres. In Stratton 1 free man with 4 acres. In Moulton 3 free men with 5 acres. In Tibenham 2 free men with 7 acres. In Aslacton 1 free man with 1 acre[426].' These eighteen free men had but sixteen oxen among them. We think it highly probable that in the survey of East Anglia one and the same free man is sometimes mentioned several times; he holds a little land under one lord, and a little under another lord; but in all he holds little. Then again, we see that these small freemen often have a few bordiers or even a few free men 'below them[427].' And then we observe that, while some of them are spoken of as having belonged to the manors of their lords, others are reported to have had manors of their own.

FOOTNOTES:

[304] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 558. The terms here used were adopted when the Introduction to the Selden Society's Select Pleas in Manorial Courts (1888) was being written. M. Esmein in his Cours d'histoire du droit français, ed. 2 (1895), p. 259, has insisted on the same distinction but has used other and perhaps apter terms. According to him 'la justice rendue par les seigneurs' (my seignorial justice) is either 'la justice seigneuriale' (my franchisal justice) or 'la justice féodale' (my feudal justice).

[305] See Liebermann, Leges Edwardi, p. 88.

[306] Leg. Hen. 9, § 9.

[307] Leg. Henr. 20 § 2.

[308] Leg. Henr. 27.

[309] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 532.

[310] Leg. Henr. 57 § 8. Cf. 59 § 19.

[311] Leg. Henr. 55.

[312] Leg. Henr. 10 § 1.

[313] Leg. Henr. 11 § 1. This explains the 'participatio' of 9 § 9.

[314] Leg. Henr. 19.

[315] Leg. Henr. 20 § 2.

[316] Leg. Henr. 9 § 4; 20 § 2; 57 § 8; 78 § 2.

[317] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 574.

[318] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 571.

[319] See e.g. Geoffrey Clinton for Kenilworth, Monast. vi. 221: 'Concedo ... ut habeant curiam suam ... ita libere ... sicut ego meam curiam ... ex concessu regis melius et firmius habeo.' Robert of Ouilly for Osney, ibid. p. 251: 'Volo ... quod habeant curiam ipsorum liberam de suis hominibus de omnimodis transgressionibus et defaltis, et quieti sint tam ipsi quam eorum tenentes de omnimodis curiae meae sectis.'

[320] See Liebermann, Leg. Edw. p. 91.

[321] Thus in D.B. ii. 409 we find two successive entries, the 'in _saca_ regis et comitis' of the one, being to all seeming an equivalent for the 'in _soca_ regis et comitis' of the other. D. B. ii. 416: 'de omnibus habuit antecessor Rannulfi commendationem et _sacam_ excepto uno qui est in _soca_ S. Edmundi.' Ibid. ii. 391 b: 'liberi homines Wisgari cum _saca_ ... liber homo ... sub Witgaro cum _soca_.' In the Inquisitio Eliensis (e.g. Hamilton, p. 109) _saca_ is sometimes used instead of _soca_ in the common formula 'sed soca remansit abbati.' In D. B. ii. 264 b, a scribe having written 'sed habet s_a_cam' has afterwards substituted an _o_ for the _a_; we have noted no other instance of such care.

[322] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 566.

[323] D. B. i. 184, Ewias.

[324] Leg. Henr. 20 § 1. The author of Leg. Edw. Conf., c. 22, also attempts to connect soke with seeking, but his words are exceedingly obscure: 'Soche est quod si aliquis quaerit aliquid in terra sua, etiam furtum, sua est iustitia, si inventum sit an non.' On the whole we take this nonsense to mean that my right of soke is my right to do justice in case any one seeks (by way of legal proceedings) anything in my land, even though the accusation that he brings be one of theft, and even though the stolen goods have not been found on the thief. Already the word is a prey to the etymologist.

[325] D. B. ii. 256.

[326] Heming Cart. i. 75-6: 'quod illae 15 hidae inste pertinent ad Osuualdeslaue hundredum episcopi et debent cum ipso episcopo censum regis solvere et omnia alia servitia ad regem pertinentia et inde idem requirere ad placitandum.' Another account of the same transaction, ibid. 77, says 'et [episcopus] deraciocinavit socam et sacam de Hamtona ad suum hundred Osuualdeslauue quod ibi debent placitare et geldum et expeditionem et cetera legis servitia de illis 15 hidis secum debent persolvere.'

[327] Schmid, Glossar. s. v. _sócen_. The word, it would seem, first makes its way into the vocabulary of the law as describing the act of seeking a sanctuary and the protection that a criminal gains by that act. A forged charter of Edgar for Thorney Abbey, Red Book of Thorney, Camb. Univ. Lib., f. 4, says that the word is a Danish word--'Regi vero pro consensu et eiusdem mercimonii licentia ac pro reatus emendatione quam Dani _socne_ nsitato nominant vocabulo, centum dedit splendidissimi auri mancusas.'

[328] Leg. Henr. 9 § 4.

[329] Ibid.

[330] Ibid. 22.

[331] Ibid. 20 § 3.

[332] Ibid. 24.

[333] Selden's Eadmer, p. 197; Bigelow, Placita Anglo-Norman. p. 7.

[334] D. B. i. 238 b, Alvestone.

[335] Cnut, II. 12. We may construe these terms by breach of the king's special peace, attacks on houses, ambush, neglect of the summons to the host. In Hereford, D. B. i. 179, the king is accounted to have three pleas, breach of his peace, hámfare, which is the same as hámsócn, and forsteal; and besides this he receives the penalty from a man who makes default in military service.

[336] D. B. i. 298 b.

[337] D. B. i. 87 b: 'Istae consuetudines pertinent ad Tantone, burgheristh, latrones, pacis infractio, hainfare, denarii de hundret, et denarii S. Petri; ter in anno teneri placita episcopi sine ammonitione; profectio in exercitum cum hominibus episcopi.' See also the English document, Kemble, Cod. Dipl. iv. p. 233. The odd word _burgheristh_ looks like a corrupt form of _burhgrið_ (the peace of the _burh_), or of _burhgerihta_ (burh-rights, borough-dues), which word occurs in the English document.

[338] D. B. i. 172, 175.

[339] Cnut II. 12, 13, 14. Perhaps when in other parts of England the pleas of the crown are reckoned to be but four, it is treated as self-evident that the outlaw falls into the king's hand, as also the man who harbours an outlaw. If _fihtwíte_ is the right word, we must suppose with Schmid (p. 586) that a _fihtwíte_ was only paid when there was homicide. A fine for mere fighting or drawing blood would not have been a reserved plea.

[340] D. B. ii. 179 b: 'Et iste Withri habebat sacham et socam super istam terram et rex et comes 6 forisfacturas.' Ibid. 223: 'In Cheiunchala soca de 6 forisfacturis.'

[341] D. B. ii. 413 b: 'socam et sacam praeter 6 forisfacturas S. Eadmundi.' Ibid. 373: 'S. Eadmundus 6 forisfacturas.' Ibid. 384 b: 'Tota hec terra iacebat in dominio Abbatiae [de Eli] T. R. E. cum omni consuetudine praeter sex forisfacturas S. Eadmundi.'

[342] D. B. ii. 244: 'sex liberi homines ... ex his habet S. Benedictus socam et de uno commendationem et de 24 tres forisfacturas.'

[343] D. B. i. 336 b: 'praeter geld et heriete et forisfacturam corporum suorum de 40 oris argenti et praeter latronem.' Such a phrase as 'geld, heriot and thief' is instructive.

[344] D. B. i. 4 b.

[345] William I. for Ely, Hamilton, Inquisitio, p. xviii.: 'omnes alias forisfacturas quae emendabiles sunt.'

[346] D. B. ii. 195: 'Super hos habuit T. R. E. Episcopus 6 forisfacturas sed hundret nec vidit breve nec sigillum nec concessum Regis.'

[347] D. B. ii. 34 b.

[348] See e.g. D. B. i. 220.

[349] D. B. i. 336: 'Rogerius de Busli habet unum mansum Sueni filii Suaue cum saca et soca. Judita comitissa habet unum mansum Stori sine saca et soca.'

[350] D. B. i. 2.

[351] D. B. i. 1 b.

[352] D. B. i. 337.

[353] D. B. i. 280 b.

[354] D. B. ii. 185: 'Super omnes liberos istius hundreti [de Northerpingeham] habet Rex sacam et socam.' Ibid. 188 b: 'Rex et comes de omnibus istis liberis hominibus socam.' Ibid. 203: 'Et de omnibus his liberis [Episcopi Osberni] soca in hundreto.'

[355] D. B. ii. 210: 'Super omnes istos liberos homines habuit Rex Eadwardus socam et sacam, et postea Guert accepit per vim, sed Rex Willelmus dedit [S. Eadmundo] cum manerio socam et sacam de omnibus liberis Guert sicut ipse tenebat; hoc reclamant monachi.'

[356] Below, p. 105.

[357] D. B. ii. 425 b.

[358] D. B. ii. 287, 287 b: 'Sanfort Hund. et dim.... Supradictum manerium scilicet Bercolt ... cum soca de hundreto et dimidio reddebat T. R. E. 24 lib.' On subsequent pages it is often said that the soke of certain persons or lands is in Bergholt.

[359] D. B. ii. 408 b: 'Hagala tenuit Gutmundus sub Rege Edwardo pro manerio 8 car[ucatarum] terrae cum soca et saca super dominium hallae tantum. Tunc 32 villani ... 8 bordarii ... 10 servi. Semper 4 carucae in dominio. Tunc et post 24 carucae hominum.... Sex sochemanni eiusdem Gutmundi de quibus soca est in hundreto.'

[360] D. B. ii. 216: 'De Redeham habebat Abbas socam super hos qui sequebantur faldam, et de aliis soca in hundreto.' Ibid. 129 b: 'Super omnes istos qui faldam Comitis requirebant habebat Comes socam et sacam, super alios omnes Rex et Comes.' Ibid. 194 b: 'In Begetuna tenuit Episcopus Almarus per emptionem T. R. E. cum soca et saca de Comite Algaro de bor[dariis] et sequentibus faldam 3 carucatas terrae.' Ibid. 350 b: 'habebat socam et sacam super hallam et bordarios.'

[361] D. B. ii. 130 b.

[362] D. B. i. 265 b: 'Hoc manerium habet suum placitum in aula domini sui.'

[363] Above, p. 88.

[364] D. B. ii. 385 b.

[365] D. B. ii. 46 b.

[366] D. B. i. 283 b.

[367] D. B. i. 11 b.; Chron. de Bello (Anglia Christiana Soc.) p. 28; Battle Custumals (Camd. Soc.), p. 126.

[368] D. B. i. 154 b.

[369] D. B. 39 b, Hants: 'Huic manerio pertinet soca duorum hundredorum.' Ibid. 64 b, Wilts: 'In hac firma erant placita hundretorum de Cicementone et Sutelesberg quae regi pertinebant.' Ibid. ii. 185: 'Super omnes liberos istius hundreti habet rex sacam et socam.' Ibid. ii. 113 b.: 'Soca et sacha de Grenehou hundreto pertinet ad Wistune manerium Regis, quicunque ibi teneat, et habent Rex et Comes.'

[370] See above, note 367.

[371] Above, p. 88.

[372] D. B. ii. 379: 'Super ferting de Almeham habet W. Episcopus socam et sacam.'

[373] D. B. i. 184: 'Haec terra non pertinet ... ad hundredum. De hac terra habet Rogerius 15 sextarios mellis et 15 porcos quando homines sunt ibi et placita super eos.'

[374] D. B. ii. 139 b.

[375] D. B. ii. 114.

[376] D. B. i. 340, 346, 357 b, 366, 368 b (ter). See also on f. 344, 344 b, the symbol fð in the margin. The word friðsócn occurs in Æthelr. VIII. 1 and Cnut I. 2 § 3, where it seems to stand for a sanctuary, an asylum.

[377] If one of _A_'s tenants is sued in a personal action in the hundred court he will have to answer there unless _A_ appears and 'claims his court.' This comes out plainly in certain rolls of the court of Wisbeach Hundred, which by the kind permission of the Bishop of Ely, I have examined. On a roll of 33 Edw. I. we find Stephen Hamond sued for a debt; 'et super hoc venit Prior Elyensis et petit curiam suam; et Thomas Doreward petit curiam suam de dicto Stephano residente suo et tenente suo.' The prior's petition is refused on the ground that Stephen is not his tenant, and Doreward's petition is refused on the ground that it is unprecedented.

[378] D. B. ii. 291: 'Et fuit in soca Regis. Postquam Briennus habuit, nullam consuetudinem reddidit in hundreto.' Ibid. 240: 'Hoc totum tenuit Lisius pro uno manerio; modo tenet Eudo successor illius et in T. R. E. soca et saca fuit in hundreto; set modo tenet Eudo.'--Ibid. 240 b: 'Soca istius terre T. R. E. iacuit in Folsa Regis; modo habet Walterius [Giffardus].'--Ibid. 285 b: the hundred testified that in truth the King and Earl had the soke and sake in the Confessor's day, but the men of the vill say that Burchard likewise (_similiter_) had the soke of his free men as well as of his villeins.

[379] D. B. i. 35 b: 'Duo fratres tenuerunt T. R. E.; unusquisque habuit domum suam et tamen manserunt in una curia.' Ibid. 103 b: 'Ibi molendinum serviens curiae.' Ibid. 103: 'arabant et herciabant ad curiam domini.'

[380] D. B. i. 87 b. Kemble, Cod. Dip., iv. p. 233: 'and þriwa secan gemot on 12 monðum.'

[381] D. B. i. 193 b; Hamilton, Inquisitio, 77-8.

[382] D. B. i. 75.

[383] D. B. i. 238.

[384] D. B. i. 186.

[385] D. B. i. 38 b.

[386] D. B. i. 101.

[387] D. B. i. 280 b: 'Hic notantur qui habuerunt socam et sacam et thol et thaim et consuetudinem Regis 2 denariorum.... Horum omnium nemo habere potuit tercium denarium comitis nisi eius concessu et hoc quamdiu viveret, preter Archiepiscopum et Ulf Ferisc et Godeue Comitissam.'

[388] See above, p. 92, note 367.

[389] D. B. ii. 123 b: 'De istis est soca in hundreto ad tercium denarium.'

[390] D. B. ii. 282.

[391] D. B. ii. 312: 'Rex habet in Duneuuic consuetudinem hanc quod duo vel tres ibunt ad hundret si recte moniti fuerint, et si hoc non faciunt, forisfacti sunt de 2 oris, et si latro _ibi_ fuerit captus _ibi_ judicabitur, et corporalis iusticia in Blieburc capietur, et sua pecunia remanebit dominio de Duneuuic.' It seems to us that the first _ibi_ must refer to Dunwich and therefore that the second does so likewise. Still the passage is ambiguous enough.

[392] See above, p. 91.

[393] Battle Custumals (Camden Soc.) 136. This is an interesting example, for it suggests an explanation of the common claim to hold a court 'outside' the hundred court (_petit curiam suam extra hundredum_). The claimant's men will go apart and hold a little court by themselves outside 'the four benches' of the hundred.

[394] D. B. i. 32: 'et si quis forisfaciens ibi calumpniatus fuisset, Regi emendabat; si vero non calumpniatus abisset sub eo qui sacam et socam habuisset, ille emendam de reo haberet.' Compare with this the account of Guildford, Ibid. 30.

[395] D. B. i. 56 b.

[396] D. B. i. 336 b.

[397] D. B. i. 238.

[398] The passages from the dooms are collected by Schmid s. v. _Hausfriede_, _Feohtan_.

[399] Ine, 6 § 3: 'If he fight in the house of a gavel-payer or boor, let him give 30 shillings by way of wite and 6 shillings to the boor.'

[400] D. B. i. 204.

[401] D. B. ii. 419 b: 'Cercesfort tenuit Scapius teinnus Haroldi.... Scapius habuit socam sub Haroldo.'--Ibid. 313: 'Heroldus socam habuit et Stanuuinus de eo.... Idem Stanuuinus socam habuit de Heroldo.'

[402] D. B. i. 142 b: 'et vendere potuerunt praeter socam; unus autem eorum etiam socam suam cum terra vendere poterat.' Comp. D. B. ii. 230: 'Huic manerio iacent 5 liberi homines ad socam tantum commend[ati] et 2 de omni consuetudine.'--Ibid. ii. 59: 'In Cingeham tenuit Sauinus presbyter 15 acras ... in eadem villa tenuit Etsinus 15 acras.... Isti supradicti fuerunt liberi ita quod ipsi possent vendere terram cum soca et saca ut hundretus testatur.'--Ibid. ii. 40 b: 'et iste fuit ita liber quod posset ire quo vellet cum soca et sacha set tantum fuit homo Wisgari.'

[403] Leg. Henr. 81 § 3: 'Quidam, villani qui sunt, eiusmodi leierwitam et blodwitam et huiusmodi minora forisfacta emerunt a dominis suis, vel quomodo meruerunt, de suis et in suos, quorum flet-gefoth vel overseunessa est 30 den.; cothseti 15 den.; servi 6 (_al._ 5) den.' The _flet-gefoth_ seems to be the sum due for fighting in a man's _flet_ or house.

[404] Munimenta Gildhallae, i. 66.

[405] Hist. Eng. Law, i. 580-2.

[406] D. B. ii. 424: 'Et dicunt etiam quod istam terram R[anulfus] calumpniavit supra Radulfum, et vicecomes Rogerius denominavit illis constitutum tempus m[odo] ut ambo adfuissent; Ranulfo adveniente defuit Radulfus et iccirco diiudicaverunt homines hundreti Rannulfum esse saisitum.'--Ibid. i. 165 b: 'Modo iacet in Bernitone hundredo iudicio hominum eiusdem hundredi.'--Ibid. i. 58 b: 'unde iudicium non dixerunt, sed ante Regem ut iudicet dimiserunt.'--Ibid. 182 b: 'In isto hundredo ad placita conveniunt qui ibi manent ut rectum faciant et accipiant.'

[407] Above, p. 95.

[408] D. B. ii. 186: 'In Sterestuna tenuit 1 liber homo S. Aldrede T. R. E. et Stigandi erat soca et saco in Hersam, set nec dare nec vendere poterat terram suam sine licentia S. Aldrede et Stigandi.'

[409] D. B. ii. 376.

[410] D. B. ii. 401 b: 'Eodem tempore fuerunt furati equi inventi in domo istius Brungari, ita quod Abbas cuius fuit soca et saca et Rodbertus qui habuit commendationem super istum venerunt de hoc furto ad placitum, et sicut hundret testatur discesserunt amicabiliter sine iudicio quod vidissed (_sic_) hundret.'

[411] E.g. D. B. ii. 35 b: 'quas tenuerunt 2 sochemanni et 1 liber homo.'

[412] D. B. ii. 28 b: 'Huic manerio iacent 5 sochemanni quorum 2 occupavit Ingelricus tempore Regis Willelmi qui tune erant liberi homines.'

[413] D. B. ii. 83: '3 sochemanni tenentes libere.'--Ibid. 88 b: 'tunc fuit 1 sochemannus qui libere tenuit 1 virgatam.'--Ibid. 58: 'in hac terra sunt 13 sochemanni qui libere tenent.'

[414] D. B. i. 212 b, Bedf.: 'Hanc terram tenuerunt 4 sochemanni quorum 3 liberi fuerunt, quartus vero unam hidam habuit, sed nec dare nec vendere potuit.'

[415] D. B. i. 35 b, 'Isti liberi homines ita liberi fuerunt quod poterant ire quo volebant.'--Ibid. ii. 187: '5 homines ... ex istis erant 4 liberi ut non possent recedere nisi dando 2 solidos.'

[416] Round, Feudal England, 34.

[417] D. B. ii. 59 b, Essex: 'quod tenuerunt 2 liberi homines ... set non poterant recedere sine licentia illius Algari.'--Ibid. 216 b, Norf.: 'Ibi sunt 5 liberi homines S. Benedicti commendatione tantum ... et ita est in monasterio quod nec vendere nec forisfacere pot[uerunt] extra ecclesia set soca est in hundredo.'--Ibid. i. 137 b, Herts: 'duo teigni ... vendere non potuerunt.'--Ibid. i. 30 b, Hants: 'Duo liberi homines tenuerunt de episcopo T. R. E. sed recedere cum terra non potuerunt.'

[418] Above, p. 103, note 417.

[419] E.g. D. B. i. 129 b: 'In hac terra fuerunt 5 sochemanni de 6 hidis quas potuerunt dare vel vendere sine licentia dominorum suorum.'

[420] Above, p. 100, note 402.

[421] E.g. D. B. ii. 358: '7 liberos homines ... hi poterant dare vel vendere terram set saca et soca et commendatio et servitium remanebant Sancto [Edmundo].'

[422] D. B. ii. 186: 'In Sterestuna tenuit unus liber homo S. Aldredae T. R. E. et Stigandi erat soca et saco in Hersam.'--Ibid. 139 b: 'habuit socam et sacam ... de commendatis suis.'

[423] D. B. i. 141.

[424] Liebermann, Leges Edwardi, p. 72. The most important passage is Leg. Edw. 12 § 4: 'Manbote in Danelaga de villano et de socheman 12 oras [= 20 sol.]: de liberis hominibus 3 marcas [= 40 sol.].'

[425] A study of the Hundred Rolls might prepare us for this result. One jury will call _servi_ those whom another jury would have called _villani_. See e.g. R. H. ii. 688 ff.

[426] D. B. ii. 189 b, 190.

[427] D. B. ii. 318: 'In Suttona tenet idem W. [de Cadomo] de R. Malet 2 liberos homines commendatos Edrico 61 acr[arum] et sub 1 ex ipsis 5 liberi [_sic_] homines.'--Ibid. 321 b: 'In Caldecota 6 liberi homines commendati Leuuino de Bachetuna 74 acr. et 7 liberi homines sub eis commend[ati] de 6 acr. et dim.'

§ 6. _The Manor._

[What is a manor?]

This brings us face to face with a question that we have hitherto evaded. What is a manor? The word _manerium_ appears on page after page of Domesday Book, but to define its meaning will task our patience. Perhaps we may have to say that sometimes the term is loosely used, that it has now a wider, now a narrower compass, but we can not say that it is not a technical term. Indeed the one statement that we can safely make about it is that, at all events in certain passages and certain contexts, it is a technical term.

['Manor' a technical term.]

We may be led to this opinion by observing that in the description of certain counties--Middlesex, Buckingham, Bedford, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, York--the symbol _M_ which represents a manor, is often carried out into the margin, and is sometimes contrasted with the _S_ which represents a soke and the _B_ which represents a berewick. This no doubt has been done--though it may not have been very consistently done--for the purpose of guiding the eye of officials who will turn over the pages in search of manors. But much clearer evidence is forthcoming. Throughout the survey of Essex it is common to find entries which take such a form as this: 'Thurkil held it for two hides and for one manor'; 'Brithmær held it for five hides and for one manor'; 'Two free men who were brothers held it for two hides and for two manors'; 'Three free men held it for three manors and for four hides and twenty-seven acres[428].' In Sussex again the statement '_X_ tenuit pro uno manerio[429]' frequently occurs. Such phrases as 'Four brothers held it for two manors, Hugh received it for one manor[430],'--'These four manors are now for one manor[431],'--'Then there were two halls, now it is in one manor[432],'--'A certain thegn held four hides and it was a manor[433],'--are by no means unusual[434]. A clerk writes 'Elmer tenuit' and then is at pains to add by way of interlineation 'pro manerio[435].' 'Eight thegns held this manor, one of them, Alwin, held two hides for a manor; another, Ulf, two hides for a manor; another, Algar, one hide and a half for a manor; Elsi one hide, Turkill one hide, Lodi one hide, Osulf one hide, Elric a half-hide[436]'--when we read this we feel sure that the scribe is using his terms carefully and that he is telling us that the holdings of the five thegns last mentioned were not manors. And then Hugh de Port holds Wallop in Hampshire 'for half a manor[437].' But let us say at once that at least one rule of law, or of local custom, demands a definition of a _manerium_. In the shires of Nottingham and Derby a thegn who has more than six manors pays a relief of £8 to the king, but if he has only six manors or less, then a relief of 3 marks to the sheriff[438]. It seems clear therefore that not only did the Norman rulers treat the term _manerium_ as an accurate term charged with legal meaning, but they thought that it, or rather some English equivalent for it, had been in the Confessor's day an accurate term charged with legal meaning.

[The word _manerium_.]

The term _manerium_ seems to have come in with the Conqueror[439], though other derivatives from the Latin verb _manere_, in particular _mansa_, _mansio_, _mansiuncula_ had been freely employed by the scribes of the land-books. But these had as a rule been used as representatives of the English _hide_, and just for this reason they were incapable of expressing the notion that the Normans desired to express by the word _manerium_. In its origin that word is but one more name for a house. Throughout the Exeter Domesday the word _mansio_ is used instead of the _manerium_ of the Exchequer record, and even in the Exchequer record we may find these two terms used interchangeably:--'Three free men belonged to this _manerium_; one of them had half a hide and could withdraw himself without the licence of the lord of the _mansio_[440].' If we look for the vernacular term that was rendered by _manerium_, we are likely to find it in the English _heal_. Though this is not connected with the Latin _aula_, still these two words bearing a similar meaning meet and are fused in the _aula_, _haula_, _halla_ of Domesday Book.

[Manor and hall.]

Now this term stands in the first instance for a house and can be exchanged with _curia_. You may say that there is meadow enough for the horses of the _curia_[441], and that there are three horses in the _aula_[442]; you may speak indifferently of a mill that serves the hall[443], or of the mill that grinds the corn of the court[444]. But further, you may say that in Stonham there are 50 acres of the demesne land of the hall in Creeting, or that in Thorney there are 24 acres which belong to the hall in Stonham[445], or that Roger de Rames has lands which once were in the hall of St Edmund[446], or that in the hall of Grantham there are three carucates of land[447], or that Guthmund's sake and soke extended only over the demesne of his hall[448]. We feel that to such phrases as these we should do no great violence were we to substitute 'manor' for 'hall.' Other phrases serve to bring these two words very closely together. One and the same page tells us, first, that Hugh de Port holds as one manor what four brothers held as two manors, and then, that on another estate there is one hall though of old there were two halls[449]:--these two stories seem to have the same point. 'Four brothers held this; there was only one hall there[450].' 'Two brothers held it and each had his hall; now it is as one manor[451].' 'In these two lands there is but one hall[452].' 'Then there were two halls; now it is in one manor[453].' 'Ten manors; ten thegns, each had his hall[454].' 'Ingelric set these men to his hall.... Ingelric added these men to his manor[455].'

[Difference between manor and hall.]

We do not contend that _manerium_ and _halla_ are precisely equivalent. Now and again we shall be told of a _manerium sine halla_[456] as of some exceptional phenomenon. The term _manerium_ has contracted a shade of technical meaning; it refers, so we think, to a system of taxation, and thus it is being differentiated from the term _hall_. Suppose, for example, that a hall or manor has meant a house from which taxes are collected, and that some one removes that house, houses being very portable things[457]: 'by construction of law,' as we now say, there still may be a hall or manor on the old site; or we may take advantage of the new wealth of words and say that, though the hall has gone, the manor remains: to do this is neater than to say that there is a 'constructive' hall where no hall can be seen. Then again, _manerium_ is proving itself to be the more elastic of the two terms. We may indeed speak of a considerable stretch of land as belonging to or even as 'being in' a certain hall, and this stretch may include not only land that the owner of the hall occupies and cultivates by himself or his servants, but also land and houses that are occupied by his villeins[458]: still we could hardly talk of the hall being a league long and a league wide or containing a square league. Of _manerium_, however, we may use even such phrases as those just mentioned[459]. For all this, we can think of no English word for which _manerium_ can stand, save _hall_; _tún_, it is clear enough, was translated by _villa_, not by _manerium_.

[Size of the _maneria_.]

If now we turn from words to look at the things which those words signify, we shall soon be convinced that to describe a typical _manerium_ is an impossible feat, for on the one hand there are enormous _maneria_ and on the other hand there are many holdings called _maneria_ which are so small that we, with our reminiscences of the law of later days, can hardly bring ourselves to speak of them as manors. If we look in the world of sense for the essence of the _manerium_ we shall find nothing that is common to all _maneria_ save a piece of ground--very large it may be, or very small--held (in some sense or another) by a single person or by a group of co-tenants, for even upon a house we shall not be able to insist very strictly. After weary arithmetical labours we might indeed obtain an average manor; we might come to the conclusion that the average manor contained so many hides or acres, possibly that it included land occupied by so many sokemen, villeins, bordiers, serfs; but an average is not a type, and the uselessness of such calculations will soon become apparent.

[A large manor.]

We may begin by looking at a somewhat large manor. Let it be that of Staines in Middlesex, which is held by St Peter of Westminster[460]. It is rated at 19 hides but contains land for 24 plough-teams. To the demesne belong 11 hides and there are 13 teams there. The villeins have 11 teams. There are:--

3 villeins with a half-hide apiece. 4 villeins with a hide between them. 8 villeins with a half-virgate apiece. 36 bordiers with 3 hides between them. 1 villein with 1 virgate. 4 bordiers with 40 acres between them. 10 bordiers with 5 acres apiece. 5 cottiers with 4 acres. 8 bordiers with 1 virgate. 3 cottiers with 9 acres. 13 serfs. 46 burgesses paying 40 shillings a year.

There are 6 mills of 64 shillings and one fish-weir of 6_s._ 8_d._ and one weir which renders nothing. There is pasture sufficient for the cattle of the vill. There is meadow for the 24 teams, and in addition to this there is meadow worth 20_s._ a year. There is wood for 30 pigs; there are 2 arpents of vineyard. To this manor belong four berewicks. Altogether it is worth £35 and formerly it was worth £40.--This is a handsome manor.--The next manor that is mentioned would be a fairer specimen. It is Sunbury held by St Peter of Westminster[461]. It is rated at 7 hides and there is land for but 6 teams. To the demesne belong 4 hides and there is one team there. The villeins have 4 teams. There are:--

A priest with a half-virgate. 8 villeins with a virgate apiece. 2 villeins with a virgate. 5 bordiers with a virgate. 5 cottiers. 1 serf.

There is meadow for 6 teams and pasture enough for the cattle of the vill. Altogether it is worth £6 and has been worth £7. Within this one county of Middlesex we can see wide variations. There are manors which are worth £50 and there are manors which are not worth as many shillings. The archbishop's grand manor at Harrow has land for 70 teams[462]; the Westminster manor of Cowley has land for but one team and the only tenants upon it are two villeins[463].

[Enormous manors. Leominster.]

But far larger variations than these are to be found. Let us look at a few gigantic manors. Leominster in Herefordshire had been held by Queen Edith together with sixteen members[464]. The names of these members are given and we may find them scattered about over a wide tract of Herefordshire. In this manor with its members there were 80 hides. In the demesne there were 30 teams. There were 8 reeves and 16 beadles and 8 radknights and 238 villeins, 75 bordiers and 82 male and female serfs. These in all had 230 teams; so that with the demesne teams there were no less than 260. Further there were Norman barons paying rents to this manor. Ralph de Mortemer for example paid 15_s._ and Hugh de Lacy 6_s._ 8_d._ It is let to farm at a rent of £60 and besides this has to support a house of nuns; were it freed from this duty, it might, so thinks the county, be let at a rent of £120. It is a most interesting manor, for we see strong traces of a neat symmetrical arrangement:--witness the 16 members, 8 reeves, 8 radknights, 16 beadles; very probably it has a Welsh basis[465]. But we have in this place to note that it is called a manor, and for certain purposes it is treated as a single whole. For what purposes? Well, for one thing, it is let to farm as a single whole. This, however, is of no very great importance, for landlords and farmers may make what bargains they please. But also it is taxed as a single whole. It is rated at the nice round figures of 80 hides.

[Berkeley.]

[Tewkesbury.]

No less handsome and yet more valuable is Berkeley in Gloucestershire[466]. It brought in a rent of £170 of refined money. It had eighteen members which were dispersed abroad over so wide a field that a straight line of thirty miles would hardly join their uttermost points[467]. 'All the aforesaid members belong to Berkeley.' There were 29 radknights, 162 villeins, 147 bordiers, 22 coliberts, 161 male and female serfs, besides some unenumerated men of the radknights; on the demesne land were 54-1/2 teams; and the tenants had 192. Tewkesbury also is a splendid manor. 'When it was all together in King Edward's time it was worth £100,' though now but £50 at the most can be had from it and in the turmoil of the Conquest its value fell to £12[468]. It was a scattered unit, but still it was a unit for fiscal purposes. It was reckoned to contain 95 hides, but the 45 which were in demesne were quit of geld, and matters had been so arranged that all the geld on the remaining 50 hides had, as between the lord and his various tenants, been thrown on 35 of those hides. The 'head of the manor' was at Tewkesbury; the members were dispersed abroad; but 'they gelded in Tewkesbury[469].'

[Taunton.]

No list of great manors would be complete without a notice of Taunton[470]. 'The bishop of Winchester holds Tantone or has a mansion called Tantone. Stigand held it in King Edward's day and it gelded for 54 hides and 2-1/2 virgates. There is land for 100 teams, and besides this the bishop in his demesne has land for 20 teams which never gelded.' 'With all its appendages and customs it is worth £154. 12_d._' 'Tantone' then is valued as a whole and it has gelded as a whole. But 'Tantone' in this sense covers far more than the borough which bears that name; it covers many places which have names of their own and had names of their own when the survey was made[471]. We might speak of the bishop of Exeter's manor of Crediton in Devon which is worth £75 and in which are 264 villeins and 73 bordiers[472], or of the bishop of Winchester's manor of Chilcombe in Hampshire where there are nine churches[473]; but we turn to another part of England.

[Large manors in the midlands.]

If we wish to see a midland manor with many members we may look at Rothley in Leicestershire[474]. The vill of Rothley itself is not very large and it is separately valued at but 62_s._ But 'to this manor belong the following members,' and then we read of no less than twenty-one members scattered over a large area and containing 204 sokemen who with 157 villeins and 94 bordiers have 82 teams and who pay in all £31. 8_s._ 1_d._ Their rents are thus reckoned as forming a single whole. In Lincolnshire Earl Edwin's manor of Kirton had 25 satellites, Earl Morcar's manor of Caistor 16, the Queen's manor of Horncastle 15[475]. A Northamptonshire manor of 27 hides lay scattered about in six hundreds[476].

[Town-houses and berewicks attached to manors.]

It is common enough to see a town-house annexed to a rural manor. Sometimes a considerable group of houses or 'haws' in the borough is deemed to 'lie in' or form part of a manor remote from its walls. Thus, to give but two examples, twelve houses in London belong to the Bishop of Durham's manor of Waltham in Essex; twenty-eight houses in London to the manor of Barking[477]. Not only these houses but their occupants are deemed to belong to the manor; thus 80 burgesses in Dunwich pertain to one of the Ely manors[478]. The berewick (_bereuita_)[479] also frequently meets our eye. Its name seems to signify primarily a wick, or village, in which barley is grown; but, like the barton (_bertona_) and the grange (_grangia_) of later days, it seems often to be a detached portion of a manor which is in part dependent on, and yet in part independent of, the main body. Probably at the berewick the lord has some demesne land and some farm buildings, a barn or the like, and the villeins of the berewick are but seldom called upon to leave its limits; but the lord has no hall there, he does not consume its produce upon the spot, and yet for some important purposes the berewick is a part of the manor. The berewick might well be some way off from the hall; a manor in Hampshire had three berewicks on the mainland and two in the Isle of Wight[480].

[Manor and soke.]

Then again in the north and east the manor is often the centre of an extensive but very discrete territory known as its soke. One says that certain lands are 'soke' or are 'the soke,' or are 'in the soke' of such a manor, or that 'their soke belongs' to such a manor. One contrasts the soke of the manor with the 'inland' and with the berewicks[481]. The soke in this context seems to be the territory in which the lord's rights are, or have been, of a justiciary rather than of a proprietary kind[482]. The manor of the eastern counties is a discrete, a dissipated thing. Far from lying within a ring fence, it often consists of a small nucleus of demesne land and villein tenements in one village, together with many detached parcels in many other villages, which are held by 'free men' and sokemen. In such a case we may use the term _manerium_ now in a wider, now in a narrower sense. In valuing the manor, we hardly know whether to include or exclude these free men. We say that the manor 'with the free men' is worth so much[483], or that the manor 'without the free men' is worth so much[484], that the manor is worth £10 and that the free men pay 40 shillings[485], that Thurmot had soke over the manor and over three of the free men while the Abbot of Ely had soke over the other three[486].

[Minute manors.]

From one extreme we may pass to the other extreme. If there were huge manors, there were also tiny manors. Let us begin in the south-west of England. Quite common is the manor which is said to have land for but one team; common also is the manor which is said to have land for but half a team. This means, as we believe, that the first of these manors has but some 120 acres of arable, while the second has but 60 acres or thereabouts. 'Domesday measures' are, it is well known, the matter of many disputes; therefore we will not wholly rely upon them, but will look at some of these 'half-team' manors and observe how much they are worth, how many tenants and how much stock they have upon them.

(i) A Somersetshire manor[487]. Half the land is in demesne; half is held by 7 bordiers. The only plough beasts are 4 oxen on the demesne; there are 3 beasts that do not plough, 20 sheep, 7 acres of underwood, 20 acres of pasture. It is worth 12_s._, formerly it was worth 10_s._

(ii) A Somersetshire manor[488]. A quarter of the land is in demesne; the rest is held by 2 villeins and 3 bordiers. The men have one team; apparently the demesne has no plough-oxen. No other animals are mentioned. There are 140 acres of wood, 41 acres of moor, 40 acres of pasture. It is worth 12_s._ 6_d._ and has been worth 20_s._

(iii) A Somersetshire manor[489]. All the land, save 10 acres, is in demesne; 2 bordiers hold the 10 acres. There is a team on the demesne; there are 2 beasts that do not plough, 7 pigs, 16 sheep, 4 acres of meadow, 7 of pasture. Value, 6_s._

(iv) A Somersetshire manor[490]. The whole of the arable is in demesne; the only tenant is a bordier. There are 4 plough-oxen and 11 goats and 7 acres of underwood. Value, 6_s._

(v) A Devonshire manor[491]. To all seeming all is in demesne and there are no tenants. There are 4 plough-beasts, 15 sheep, 5 goats, 4 acres of meadow. Value, 3_s._

(vi) A Devonshire manor[492]. Value, 3_s._ All seems to be in demesne; we see no tenants and no stock.

We have been at no great pains to select examples, and yet smaller manors may be found, manors which provide arable land for but two oxen. Thus

(vii) A Somersetshire manor[493] occupied by one villein. We read nothing of any stock. Value, 15_d._

(viii) A Somersetshire manor[494] with 3 bordiers on it. Value, 4_s._

(ix) A Somersetshire manor[495] with one bordier on it. Value, 30_d._

The lowest value of a manor in this part of the world is, so far as we have observed, one shilling; that manor to all appearance was nothing but a piece of pasture land[496]. Yet each of these holdings is a _mansio_, and the Bishop of Winchester's holding at Taunton is a _mansio_.

[Small manors in the east.]

From one side of England we will journey to the other side; from Devon and Somerset to Essex and Suffolk. We soon observe that in describing the holdings of the 'free men' and sokemen of this eastern district as they were in King Edward's day, our record constantly introduces the term _manerium_. A series of entries telling us how 'a free man held _x_ hides or carucates or acres' will ever and anon be broken by an entry that tells us how 'a free man held _x_ hides or carucates or acres for a manor'[497]. We soon give up counting the cases in which the manor is rated at 60 acres. We begin counting the cases in which it is rated at 30 acres and find them numerous; we see manors rated at 24 acres, at 20, at 15, at 12 acres. But this, it may be said, tells us little, for these manors may be extravagantly underrated[498]. Let us then look at a few of them.

(i) In Espalle Siric held 30 acres for a manor; there were always 3 bordiers and one team and 4 acres of meadow; wood for 60 pigs and 13 beasts. It was then worth 10_s._[499]

(ii) In Torentuna Turchetel a free man held 30 acres for a manor; there were always 2 bordiers and one team and a half. It is worth 10_s._[500]

(iii) In Bonghea Godric a free man held 30 acres for a manor; there were 1 bordier and 1 team and 2 acres of meadow. It was then worth 8_s_.[501]

(iv) Three free men and their mother held 30 acres for a manor. There was half a team. Value, 5_s._[502]

(v) In Rincham a free man held 30 acres for a manor. There were half a team and one acre of meadow. Value, 5_s._[503]

(vi) In Wenham Ælfgar a free man held 24 acres for a manor. Value, 4_s._[504]

(vii) In Torp a free man held 20 acres for a manor. One team; wood for 5 pigs. Value, 40_d._[505]

(viii) In Tudenham Ælfric the deacon, a free man, held 12 acres for a manor. One team, 3 bordiers, 2 acres of meadow, 1 rouncey, 2 beasts that do not plough, 11 pigs, 40 sheep. Value, 3_s._[506]

We are not speaking of curiosities; the sixty acre manor was very common in Essex, the thirty acre manor was no rarity in Suffolk.

[The manor as a peasant's holding.]

Now it is plain enough that the 'lord' of such a manor,--or rather the holder of such a manor, for there was little lordship in the case,--was often enough a peasant, a tiller of the soil. He was under soke and under commendation; commended it may be to one lord, rendering soke to another. Sometimes he is called a sokeman[507]. But he has a manor. Sometimes he has a full team, sometimes but half a team. Sometimes he has a couple of bordiers seated on his land, who help him in his husbandry. Sometimes there is no trace of tenants, and his holding is by no means too large to permit of his cultivating it by his own labour and that of his sons. No doubt in the west country even before the Conquest these petty _mansiones_ or _maneria_ were being accumulated in the hands of the wealthy. The thegn who was the _antecessor_ of the Norman baron, sometimes held a group, a geographically discontinuous group, of petty manors as well as some more substantial and better consolidated estates. But still each little holding is reckoned a manor, while in the east of England there is nothing to show that the nameless free men who held the manors which are said to consist of 60, 40, 30 acres had usually more than one manor apiece. When therefore we are told that already before the Conquest England was full of manors, we must reply: Yes, but of what manors[508]?

[Definition of a manor.]

Now were the differences between various manors a mere difference in size and in value, a student of law might pass them by. Our notion of ownership is the same whether it be applied to the largest and most precious, or to the smallest and most worthless of things. But in this case we have not to deal with mere differences in size or value. The examples that we have given will have proved that few, if any, propositions of legal import will hold good of all _maneria_. We must expressly reject some suggestions that the later history of our law may make to us. 'A manor has a court of its own':--this is plainly untrue. To say nothing of extreme cases, of the smallest of the manors that we have noticed, we can not easily believe that a manor with less than ten tenants has a court of its own, yet the number of such manors is exceedingly large. 'A manor has freehold tenants':--this of course we must deny, unless we hold that the _villani_ are freeholders. 'A manor has villein or customary tenants':--even this proposition, though true of many cases, we can not accept. Not only may we find a manor the only tenants upon which are _liberi homines_[509], but we are compelled to protest that a manor need not have any tenants at all. 'A manor must contain demesne land':--this again we can not believe. In one case we read that the whole manor is being farmed by the villeins so that there is nothing in demesne[510], while in other cases we are told that there is nothing in demesne and see no trace of any recent change[511]. Thus, one after another, all the familiar propositions seem to fail us, and yet we have seen good reason to believe that _manerium_ has some exact meaning. It remains that we should hazard an explanation.

[The manor and the geld.]

A manor is a house against which geld is charged. To the opinion that in some way or another the definition of a manor is intimately connected with the great tax we shall be brought by phrases such as the following: 'Richard holds Fivehide of the Earl which Brihtmær held in King Edward's time for forty acres and for a manor[512].'--'Two free men who were brothers, Bondi and Ælfric held it for two hides and for two manors[513].' When we say that a man holds land 'as' or 'for' (_pro_) forty acres, we mean that his holding, be its real size what it may, is rated to the geld at forty acres. If we add the words 'and as (or for) one manor,' surely we are still speaking of the geld. For one moment the thought may cross our minds that, besides a tax on land, there has been an additional tax on 'halls,' on houses of a certain size or value; but this we soon dismiss as most unlikely. To raise but one out of many objections: had there been such a house-tax, it would have left plain traces of itself in those 'Geld Inquests' of the south-western counties that have come down to us. Rather we regard the matter thus:--The geld is a land-tax, a tax of so much per hide or carucate. In all likelihood it has been assessed according to a method which we might call the method of subpartitioned provincial quotas. The assumption has been made that a shire or other large district contains a certain number of hides; this number has then been apportioned among the hundreds of that shire, and the number allotted to each hundred has been apportioned among the vills of that hundred. The common result is that some neat number of hides, five, ten or the like is attributed to the vill[514]. This again has been divided between the holdings in that vill. Ultimately it is settled that for fiscal purposes a given holding contains, or must be deemed to contain, this or that number of hides, virgates, or acres. Thus far the system makes no use of the _manerium_. But it now has to discover some house against which a demand may be made for every particular penny of geld. Despite the 'realism' of the system, it has to face the fact that, after all, taxes must be paid by men and not by land. Men live in houses. It seeks the tax-payer in his house. Now, were all the occupiers of land absolute owners of the land that they occupied, even were it true that every acre had some one person as its absolute owner, the task would be simple. A schedule of five columns, such we are familiar with, would set forth 'Owner's Name,' 'Place of Residence,' 'Description of Geldable Property,' 'Hidage,' 'Amount due.' But the occupier is not always the owner; what is more, there is no absolute ownership. Two, three, four persons will be interested in the land; the occupier will have a lord and that lord a lord; the occupier may be a serf, a villein, a sokeman; there is commendation to be considered and soke and all the infinite varieties of the power to 'withdraw' the land from the lord. Rude and hard and arbitrary lines must be drawn. Of course the state will endeavour to collect the geld in big sums. It will endeavour to make the great folk answer for the geld which lies on any land that is in any way subject to their power; thus the cost of collecting petty sums will be saved and the tax will be charged on men who are solvent. The central power may even hold out certain advantages to the lord who will become responsible for the geld of his tenants or justiciables or commended men. The hints that we get in divers counties that the lord's 'inland' has borne no geld seem to point in this direction, though the arrangements about this matter seem to have varied from shire to shire[515]. On the pipe rolls of a later day we see that the geld charged against the magnates is often 'pardoned.' For one reason the king can not easily tax the rich; for another he can not easily tax the poor; so he gets at the poor through the rich. The small folk will gladly accept any scheme that will keep the tax-collector from their doors, even though they purchase their relief by onerous promises of rents and services. The great men, again, may find advantage in such bargains; they want periodical rents and services, and in order to obtain them will accept a certain responsibility for occasional taxes. This process had gone very far on the eve of the Conquest. Moreover the great men had enjoyed a large liberty of paying their geld where they pleased, of making special compositions with the king, of turning some wide and discrete territory into a single geld-paying unit, of forming such 'manors' as Taunton or Berkeley or Leominster.

[Classification of men for the geld.]

In King Edward's day, the occupiers of the soil might, so it seems to us, be divided by the financier into three main classes. In the first class we place the man who has a manor. He has, that is, a house at which he is charged with geld. He may be a great man or a small, an earl or a peasant; he may be charged at that house with the geld of a hundred hides or with the geld of fifteen acres. In the second class we place the villeins, bordiers, cottiers. The geld apportioned to the land that they occupy is demanded from their lord at his manor, or one of his manors. How he recoups himself for having to make this payment, that is his concern; but he is responsible for it to the king, not as guarantor but as principal debtor. But then, at least in the east and north, there are many men who fall into neither of these classes. They are not villeins, they are sokemen or 'free men'; but their own tenements are not manors; they belong to or 'lie in' some manor of their lord. These men, we think, can be personally charged with the geld; but they pay their geld at their lord's hall and he is in some measure bound to exact the payment.

[Proofs of connexion between the manor and the geld.]

Any thing that could be called a strict proof of this theory we can not offer; but it has been suggested by many facts and phrases which we can not otherwise explain. In the first place, our record seems to assume that every holding either is a manor or forms part of a manor[516]. Then we are told how lands 'geld' at or in some manor or at the _caput manerii_. Thus lands which lie many miles away from Tewkesbury, but which belong to the manor of Tewkesbury, 'geld in Tewkesbury[517].' Sometimes the same information is conveyed to us by a phrase that deserves notice. A piece of land is said to 'defend itself' in or at some manor, or, which is the same thing, to have its _wara_ or render its _wara_, that is to say, its defence, its answer to the demand for geld, there[518]. 'In Middleton two sokemen had 16 acres of land and they rendered their _wara_ in the said Middleton, but they could give and sell their land to whom they pleased[519].' When we are told that certain lands are _in warnode Drogonis_ or _in warnode Archiepiscopi_, it is meant that the lands belong to Drogo or the Archbishop for the purpose of 'defence' against the geld[520]. It is not sufficient that land should be taxed, it must be taxed 'in' some place, which may be remote from that in which, as a matter of physical fact, it lies[521]. One clear case of a free tenant paying his geld to his lord is put before us:--'Leofwin had half a hide and could withdraw with his land and he paid geld to his lord and his lord paid nothing[522].' Besides this we have cases in which the lord enjoys the special privilege of collecting the geld from his tenants and keeping it for his own use[523]. A remarkable Kentish entry tells us that at Peckham the archbishop had an estate which had been rated at six sullungs, and then that 'of the land of this manor a certain man of the archbishop held a half-sullung which in King Edward's day gelded with these six sullungs, although being free land it did not belong to the manor save for the purpose of the scot[524].' Here we have land so free that the one connexion between it and the manor to which it is attributed consists in the payment of geld--it gelds along with the other lands of the manor. In the great lawsuit between the churches of Worcester and Evesham about the lands at Hamton, the former contended that these lands should pay their geld along with the other estates of the bishop[525].

[Land gelds in a manor.]

Let us observe the first question that the commissioners are to ask of the jurors. What is the name of the _mansio_? Every piece of geldable land is connected with some _mansio_, at which it gelds. Let us observe how the commissioners and the jurors proceed in a district where the _villae_ and the _mansiones_ or _maneria_ are but rarely coincident. The jurors of the Armingford hundred of Cambridgeshire are speaking of their country vill by vill. They come to the vill of Abington[526]. Abington, they say, was rated at five hides. Of these five hides the king has a half-hide; this lies in Litlington. Earl Roger has one virgate; this lies in his manor of Shingay. Picot the sheriff has a half-virgate; this lies and has always lain in Morden. In what sense important to the commissioners or their master can a bundle of strips scattered about in the fields of Abington be said to lie in Litlington, in Shingay, or in Morden? We answer that it gelds there.

[Geld and hall.]

Hence the importance of the hall. It is the place where geld is demanded and paid. A manor without a hall is a thing to be carefully noted, otherwise some geld may be lost[527]. A man's land has descended to his three sons: if 'there is only one hall,' but one demand for geld need be made; if 'each has his hall,' there must be three separate demands. When we are told that two brothers held land and that each had his house (_domus_) though they dwelt in one court (_curia_), a nice problem is being put before us:--Two halls, or one hall--Two manors or one manor[528]?

[The petty manors.]

The petty _maneria_ of Suffolk, what can they be but holdings which geld by themselves? The holders of them are not great men, they have no tenants or just two or three bordiers; sometimes they can not 'withdraw' their lands from their lords. But still they pay their own taxes at their own houses.

[The lord and his man's taxes.]

In supposing that forces have been at work which tend to make the lord responsible for the taxes of his men, we are not without a warrant in the ancient dooms. 'If a king's thegn or a lord of land (_landrica_) neglects to pay the Rome penny, let him forfeit ten half-marks, half to Christ, half to the king. If a "townsman" withholds the penny, let the lord of the land pay the penny and take an ox from the man, and if the lord neglects to do this, then let Christ and the king receive the full _bót_ of 12 ores[529].' The right of doing justice is also the duty of doing justice. It is natural that the lord with soke should become a tax-gatherer, and he will gladly guarantee the taxes if thereby he can prevent the king's officers from entering his precinct and meddling with his justiciables. At no time has the state found it easy to collect taxes from the poor; over and over again it has been glad to avail itself of the landlord's intermediation[530].

[Distinction between villeins and sokemen.]

Our theory that while the lord is directly and primarily responsible for the geld of his villeins, he is but subsidiarily responsible for the geld of those of his sokemen or 'free men' who are deemed to belong to his manor, is founded in part on what we take to have been the wording of King William's writ[531], in part on the form taken by the returns made thereto. The writ draws a marked line between the villein and the sokeman. The king wishes to know how much land each sokeman, each _liber homo_, holds; he does not care that any distinction should be drawn between the lord's demesne lands and the lands of the villeins. And, on the whole, his commands are obeyed. A typical entry in the survey of East Anglia will first describe in one mass the land held by the lord and his villeins, will tell us how many carucates this land is rated at, how many teams there are on the demesne, and how many the men have, then it will enumerate sheep and pigs and goats, and then, as it were in an appendix, it will add that so many sokemen belong to this manor and that between them they hold so many carucates or acres[532]. In Suffolk even the names of these humble tenants are sometimes recorded[533]. And then, we have seen[534] that there is some doubt as to whether or no these men are or are not to be reckoned as part of the manor for all purposes. We have to say that the manor 'with the free men,' or 'without the free men' is worth so much.

[The lord's subsidiary liability.]

After all, we are only supposing that the fashion in which the danegeld was put in charge resembled in some of its main outlines the fashion in which a very similar tax was put in charge under Richard I. In 1194 the land-tax that was levied for the payment of the king's ransom seems to have been assessed according to the hidage stated in Domesday Book[535]. Then in 1198 a new assessment was made. We are told that the king ordained that every baron should with the sheriffs aid distrain his men to pay the tax cast upon them, and that if, owing to the baron's default, distresses were not made, then the amount due from the baron's men should be seized from the baron's own demesne and he should be left to recoup himself as best he could[536]. Now it is a liability of this sort that we are venturing to carry back into the Confessor's day. The lord is responsible to the state as principal, and indeed as sole, debtor for so much of the geld as is due from his demesne land and from the land of his _villani_, while as regards any lands of 'free men' or sokemen which are attached to his manor, his liability is not primary nor absolute; he is bound to take measures to make these men pay their taxes; if he fails in this duty, then their taxes will become due from his demesne[537].

[Manors distributed to the Frenchmen.]

When we read that in Nottinghamshire the relief of the thegn who had six manors or less was three marks, while his who had more than six manors was eight pounds[538], this may seem to hint that some inferior limit was set to the size of the manor. If so, it was drawn at a very low point in the scale of tenements. Possibly some general rule had compelled all men who held less than a bovate or half-virgate to 'add' themselves to the manor of some lord. But the Nottinghamshire rule is rude and arbitrary. He who has seven houses against which geld is charged is a big man. On the other hand, it is probable that the Norman lords brought with them some notion, and not a very modest notion, of what a reasonably sufficient _manerium_ should be. The king has in some cases rewarded them by a promise of ten or twenty manors without specifying very carefully what those manors are to be like. He has promised Count Eustace a hundred manors[539]. Thus we would explain a not uncommon class of entries:--'fourteen free men commended to Wulfsige were delivered to Rainald to make up (_ad perficiendum_) this manor of Carlington[540].'--'in Berningham a free man held 20 acres of land and this was delivered to Walter Giffard to make up Letheringsett[541].'-- 'Peter claims the land which belonged to seventeen free men as having been delivered to him to make up this manor[542].'--'This land was delivered to Peter to make up some, but his men do not know what, manor[543].' The small 'free men' of the east have been 'added to' manors to which they did not belong in King Edward's day. A few of the free men of Suffolk still 'remain in the king's hand' ready to be delivered out to complete the manors of their conquerors[544]. Here too we may perhaps find the explanation of the entry which says that Hugh de Port held Wallop 'for half a manor[545].' The king has promised him a dozen or score of manors; and this estate at Wallop worth but fifteen shillings a year, really no gentleman would take it for a manor.

[Summary.]

Such then is the best explanation that we can offer of the _manerium_ of Domesday Book. About details we may be wrong, but that this term has a technical meaning which is connected with the levy of the danegeld we can not doubt. It loses that meaning in course of time because the danegeld gives way before newer forms of taxation. It never again acquires a technical meaning until the late days when retrospective lawyers find the essence of a manor in its court[546].

FOOTNOTES:

[428] D. B. ii. 21, 26, 37 b, 59 b.

[429] D. B. i. 21.

[430] D. B. i. 45.

[431] D. B. i. 6 b.

[432] D. B. i. 27.

[433] D. B. i. 163.

[434] So in the Exeter record, D. B. iv. 390: 'Tenuerunt 3 tegni pro 4 mansionibus, et Robertus habet illas pro 1 mansione.'

[435] D. B. i. 169 b. Similar interlineations in i. 98.

[436] D. B. i. 148; on f. 149 is a similar case.

[437] D. B. i. 45 b.

[438] D. B. i. 280 b.

[439] In several passages in D. B. the word seems to be _manerius_.

[440] D. B. ii. 96 b: 'Huic manerio iacebant 3 liberi homines, unus tenuit dim. hidam et potuit abire sine licentia domini ipsius mansionis.'

[441] D. B. i. 149, Wicombe.

[442] D. B. ii. 38 b, Hersam.

[443] D. B. i. 174 b, Poiwic.

[444] D. B. i. 268, Gretford.

[445] D. B. ii. 350 b.

[446] D. B. ii. 263: 'sed fuerunt in aula S. Edmundi.'

[447] D. B. i. 337 b.

[448] D. B. ii. 408 b: 'cum soca et saca super dominium hallae tantum.'

[449] D. B. i. 45, Wicheham, Werste.

[450] D. B. i. 20, Waliland.

[451] D. B. i. 11 b, Acres.

[452] D. B. i. 26 b, Eldretune.

[453] D. B. i. 27, Percinges.

[454] D. B. i. 284 b, Ættune.

[455] D. B. ii. 29 b, 30 b.

[456] D. B. i. 307 b, Burghedurum; 308, Ternusc.

[457] D. B. i. 63: 'Ipse quoque transportavit hallam et alias domos et pecuniam in alio manerio.'

[458] D. B. i. 338 b: 'Ad huius manerii aulam pertinent Catenai et Usun 4 car. terrae ad geldum. Terra ad 8 carucas. Ibi in dominio 2 carucae et 20 villani et 15 sochemanni et 10 bordarii habentes 9 carucas. Ibi 360 acre prati. Ad eundem manerium iacet hec soca:--In Linberge 4 car. terrae etc.'

[459] Throughout Yorkshire the phrase is common, 'Totum manerium _x._ leu. long. et _y._ leu. lat.'

[460] D. B. i. 128.

[461] D. B. i. 128 b.

[462] D. B. i. 127.

[463] D. B. i. 128 b.

[464] D. B. i. 180.

[465] Compare the cases in Seebohm, Village Community, 267.

[466] D. B. i. 163.

[467] If we mistake not, the Osleuuorde of the record is Ashleworth, which, though some miles to the north of Gloucester, either still is, or but lately was, a detached piece of the Berkeley hundred.

[468] D. B. i. 163.

[469] D. B. i. 163 b: 'Hanc terram dedit regina Rogerio de Buslei et geldabat pro 4 hidis in Tedechesberie.'

[470] D. B. i. 87 b; iv. 161.

[471] Eyton, Somerset, ii. 34.

[472] D. B. i. 101 b; iv. 107.

[473] D. B. i. 41.

[474] D. B. i. 230.

[475] D. B. i. 338-9.

[476] D. B. i. 220, Tingdene.

[477] D. B. ii. 15 b, 17 b.

[478] D. B. ii. 385 b.

[479] The form _bereuita_ is exceedingly common, but must, we think, be due to a mistake; _c_ has been read as _t_.

[480] D. B. i. 38 b, Edlinges. Some of the 'wicks' seem to have been dairy farms. D. B. i. 58 b: 'et wika de 10 pensis caseorum.' On the Glastonbury estates we find persons called _wikarii_, each of whom has a _wika_. Glastonbury Rentalia, 39: 'Thomas de Wika tenet 5 acras et 50 oves matrices et 12 vaccas ... Philippus de Wika tenet unum ferlingum et 50 oves matrices et 12 vaccas.' Ibid. 44: 'A. B. tenet unum ferlingum et 50 oves matrices et 12 vaccas pro 1 sol. pro wika.' Ibid. 48: 'Ricardus de Wika tenet 5 acras et 50 oves matrices et 12 vaccas. Alanus de Wika eodem modo.' Ibid. p. 51

[481] D. B. i. 350: 'In Osgotebi et Tauelebi 2 bo[vatae] inland et 1 bo[vata] soca huius manerii.' D. B. i. 338 b: 'Hiboldeston est bereuuita non soca et in Grangeham sunt 2 car[ucatae] inland et in Springetorp dim. car[ucata] est inland. Reliqua omnis est soca.'

[482] When therefore, as is often the case, we find that the occupants of 'the soke' are not sokemen but villeins, this seems to point to a recent depression of the peasantry.

[483] D. B. ii. 330 b: 'In illo manerio ... sunt 35 liberi homines.... Tunc valuerunt liberi homines 4 libras. Manerium cum liberis hominibus valet modo 24 libras.'

[484] D. B. ii. 358 b: 'Hoc manerium exceptis liberis tunc valuit 30 solidos.'

[485] D. B. ii. 289 b.

[486] D. B. ii. 285 b.

[487] D. B. iv. 397; i. 93 b, Ichetoca.

[488] D. B. iv. 411; i. 94 b, Tocheswilla.

[489] D. B. iv. 398; i. 93 b, Pilloc.

[490] D. B. iv. 341; i. 96, Sordemanneford.

[491] D. B. iv. 355; i. 116 b, Labera.

[492] D. B. iv. 367; i. 112 b, Oplomia.

[493] D. B. iv. 338; i. 95 b, Aisseforda.

[494] D. B. iv. 395; i. 93, Terra Colgrini.

[495] D. B. iv. 394; i. 93, Rima.

[496] D. B. iv. 338; i. 95 b, Aisseforda.

[497] As the term _manerium_ is often represented by the mere letter _M_ or _m_, we will refer to some cases in which it is written in full. D. B. ii. 295 b: '40 acras pro uno manerio'; Ibid. 311 b: 'In eadem villa est 1 liber homo de 40 acris et tenet pro manerio.'

[498] The question whether the acreage stated in the Suffolk survey is real or rateable can not be briefly debated. We hope to return to it.

[499] D. B. ii. 322 b, 323.

[500] D. B. ii. 323.

[501] D. B. ii. 288.

[502] D. B. ii. 309.

[503] D. B. ii. 297 b.

[504] D. B. ii. 377.

[505] D. B. ii. 333.

[506] D. B. ii. 423.

[507] D. B. ii. 316: 'In Aldeburc tenuit Uluricus sochemannus Edrici T. R. E. 80 acras pro manerio.' Ibid. 353: 'Nordberiam tenuit Eduinus presbyter sochemannus Abbatis 30 acras pro manerio.'

[508] We have taken our examples of small manors from the east and the south-west because Little Domesday and the Exeter Domesday give details which are not to be had elsewhere. But instances may be found in many other parts of England. Thus in Sussex,