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].
§ 7. Manor and Vill.
Manorial and non-manorial vills.
After what has now been said, it is needless to repeat that in Domesday Book the manerium and the villa are utterly different things[547]. In a given case the two may coincide, and throughout a great tract of England such cases were common and we may even say that they were normal. But in the east this was not so. We may easily find a village which taken as a whole has been utterly free from seignorial domination. Orwell in Cambridgeshire will be a good example[548].
The vill of Orwell.
In King Edward’s day this vill of Orwell was rated at 4 hides: probably it was somewhat underrated for at the date of the survey it was deemed capable of finding land for nearly 6 teams. The following table will show who held the four hides before the Conquest:—
| H. | V. | A. | |
| Two sokemen, men of Edith the Fair | 2⁄3 | ||
| A sokeman, man of Abp Stigand | 11⁄3 | ||
| A sokeman, man of Robert Wimarc’s son | 11⁄3 | ||
| A sokeman, man of the King | 2⁄3 | ||
| A sokeman, man of Earl Ælfgar | 11⁄3 | ||
| A sokeman, man of Earl Waltheof | 3 | ||
| A sokeman, man of the King | 1⁄3 | ||
| Sigar a man of Æsgar the Staller | 11⁄3 | ||
| Turbert a man of Edith the Fair | 31⁄4 | 5 | |
| Achil a man of Earl Harold | 1 | ||
| A sokeman of the King | 1 | ||
| St. Mary of Chatteris | 1⁄3 | ||
| St. Mary of Chatteris | 1⁄4 | ||
| 4 | 0 | 0[549] |
It will be seen that eight of the most exalted persons in the land, the king, the archbishop, three earls, two royal marshals or stallers, and that mysterious lady known as Edith the Fair, to say nothing of the church of Chatteris, had a certain interest in this little Cambridgeshire village. But then how slight an interest it was! Every one of the tenants was free to ‘withdraw himself,’ ‘to give or sell his land.’ Now we can not say that all of them were peasants. Achil the man of Harold seems to have had other lands in the neighbouring villages of Harlton and Barrington[550]. It is probable that Turbert, Edith’s man, had another virgate at Kingston[551]: he was one of the jurors of the hundred in which Orwell lay[552]. Sigar the man of Æsgar was another juror, and held land at Thriplow, Foxton, Haslingfield and Shepreth; he seems to have been his lord’s steward[553]. But we may be fairly certain that the unnamed sokemen tilled their own soil, though perhaps they had help from a few cottagers. And they can not have been constantly employed in cultivating the demesne lands of their lords. They must go some distance to find any such demesne lands. The Wetherley hundred, in which Orwell lies, is full of the sokemen of these great folk: Waltheof, for example, has 3 men in Comberton, 4 in Barton, 3 in Grantchester, 1 in Wratworth: but he has no demesne land, and if he had it, he could not get it tilled by these scattered tenants. The Fair Edith has half a hide in Haslingfield and we are told that this belongs to the manor of Swavesey. Now at Swavesey Edith has a considerable manor[554], but it can not have got much in the way of labour out of a tenant who lived at Haslingfield, for the two villages are a long ten miles apart. As to the king’s sokemen, their only recorded services are the avera and the inward. The former seems to be a carrying service done at the sheriff’s bidding and to be only exigible when the king comes into the shire, while inward seems to be the duty of forming a body guard for the king while he is in the shire:—if in any year the king did not come, a small sum of money was taken instead[555].