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 11⁄2 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.
§ 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.