A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



spoke of manors as they existed T.R.E.,' though it is probable that they did 

 not use the term manerium at random, and that it carried with it some idea 

 of lordship, of landlordship, and of political responsibility. The Suffolk 

 manor of the Domesday Inquest is an economic unit, but an economic unit 

 which forms a link in an administrative system, organized on an aristocratic 

 basis. Sometimes, as Professor Vinogradoff has shown,^* it is the economic 

 unity on which stress is laid in the description of pre-Conquest estates, the 

 manor appears primarily as an agrarian centre ; or it is an administrative 

 centre, or a jurisdictional and political centre, while at the two extremes of 

 the manorial scale are the great royal manors, and the maneriola or small 

 peasant holdings, which are called ' manors ' in the returns. These small 

 manors are sufficiently distinctive of East Anglia to be discussed somewhat 

 more fully. Professor Maitland has asked what is the meaning of the ' petty 

 maneria ' of Suffolk, and has answered that they are ' holdings which geld 

 by themselves.'" In that case, at Elmham, in Wangford Hundred, there 

 would be six such holdings, six houses against which geld was charged, in a 

 vill of about seventy free and fifty-three unfree ' recorded ' inhabitants, with 

 a 'recorded' area of 8 carucates 15 acres, a va/et of jTio 12s. lod., and an 

 assessment to the geld of 2od. in the pound." Or again, at Helmingham, in 

 Claydon Hundred, where there were eight manors to a ' recorded ' population 

 of forty-one free and twenty-eight unfree persons in the days of King Edward, 

 and a ' recorded ' area of 6 carucates, 1 3I acres, there would be a tax-centre to 

 every eight or nine householders." It seems more probable that the term 

 manerium, when applied to these small holdings, is less narrowly technical than 

 Professor Maitland would make it." The little manors of the Suffolk freemen 

 and sokemen were often enough estates of 60 or 30 acres with no apparent 

 division between demesne and tenant land, cultivated by one team or half a 

 team, and by the labour of a bordar or two, or even, it may be, in some 

 cases, by the ' lord of the manor ' himself and his household." Thus at 

 Raydon, on the land of the Bishop of Bayeux, in the south of the county, 

 we have Edwi a freeman with a manor of i carucate in extent, one plough, 

 4 bordars, 5 acres of meadow and a mill, and in the same vill are two 30-acre 

 manors, held by freemen, each with half a team, one bordar tenant, and 

 2 acres of meadow, and a 60-acre manor with one team and a bordar.*" At 

 Tattingstone, in the same neighbourhood, no tenants at all are mentioned on 

 the 60-acre manor of the freeman Turgot, which had been worked by a 

 single plough before the Conquest," while at Thistleton, in Carlford Hundred, 

 an instance occurs of a manor of 60 acres held by Ulmar, a freeman com- 

 mended to the Abbot of Ely, with five freemen under him [sub se) and no 

 servile or customary tenants.** From the parallel passage in the Inquisitio 



" Cf. his classification of manors, op. cit. 3 1 1 et seq. 



" Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 125. " Dom. Bk. 327^, 379, 380. 



" Ibid. 352*, 394*, 423. 



"For a different theory of the meaning of the Suffolk 'maneria' cf. Ballard, The Dom. Inq. 55, 



135. 136. 



" Maitland, op. cit. 1 17-19 ; Vinogradoff, op. cit. 332-8. 



*> Dom. Bk. 378. 'Reindune ;' cf. 394*, ' Scoteleia' (Celeolt), «Torp ' (Osbem). 



" Ibid. 378*. 'Tatituna.' 



" Ibid. 386 ; Maitland, op. cit. 1 19, n. 2 ; Ballard, op. cit. 136. Mr. Ballard explains this by interpreting 

 * sub se ' as ' commended,' and concluding that the five freemen were not Ulmar's tenants. But the Survey 

 specially records that two of them were commended to the ' antecessor ' of Geofirey de Mandeville. 



