A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



* except over the hall of Walton, and villeins.' ^'"' At Haughley, Gutmund the 

 brother of the Abbot of Ely held a manor under King Edw^ard before the 

 Conquest with soke and sac 'over the hall demesne only,' w^hile the soke of 

 the six sokemen on the demesne was in the hundred.^" In the borough of 

 Sudbury the soke is said to be in villa}^^ The freemen of those hundreds 

 which had not been granted out to the great religious houses seem to have 

 been normally under the soke of the public authorities, ' the King and the 

 Earl ' in the hundred court.^"' A good illustration of this is found in 

 Blything Hundred, in the case of those freemen of Roger Bigot who have a 

 special heading of the Suffolk Survey to themselves.-"* Even here, however. 

 Bigot and Robert Malet were beginning to encroach on the royal jurisdic- 

 tion,"" and the disputes over rights of sac and soke, which occur not 

 infrequently in the Survey, show that in Suffolk, as in other parts of England, 

 the Norman lords were 'assuming a soke which their antecessores did not 

 enjoy.' ^'"' At Combs and at Onehouse, on the fief of Robert of Mortain, ' no 

 custom was rendered in the hundred after Count Brien, Robert's antecessor, 

 had the land.' ^" Closely connected with these grants or assumptions of soke 

 is the extension of seignorial jurisdiction, and in particular, in Suffolk, the 

 surrender to St. Edmund's Abbey of the reserved pleas of the Crown, ' the 

 six forfeitures of St. Edmund.' ■"' 



If now we turn from franchises to those who exercised them, and look 

 at the list of Suffolk tenants-in-chief of the Crown at the date of the 

 Domesday Survey, we are at once struck by that ' unity of East Anglia,*"' 

 which was typified, both before and after the Conquest, not only by the 

 common earldom and the common bishopric of Norfolk and Suffolk, but by 

 the large number of territorial magnates, Norman feudatories and their 

 antecessores, who held land in both counties. Suffolk, indeed, was a sort of 

 half-way house, a meeting-place for the landholders of Norfolk on the one 

 hand, and of Essex on the other. Out of 71 Suffolk tenants-in-chief, 

 21 held directly of the Crown in both Norfolk and Essex, 17 held in 

 Norfolk and not in Essex, and 1 3 in Essex and not in Norfolk, while only 

 20 had a leading place in Little Domesday in Suffolk alone of the three 

 eastern counties. ^^^ It follows that much has already been written on these 

 holders of land in the articles on Essex and Norfolk, though something still 

 remains to be said of them, and one famous house at least, that of Richard 

 Fitz Gilbert of Clare, among the lay feudatories, with one great ecclesiastical 

 foundation, the abbey of St. Edmund, belong primarily to the history of 

 Suffolk. 



•^ Dom. Bk. 343*. 



*" Ibid. 408^. For other instances of freemen and sokemen whose soke was ' in the hundred,' cf. 285, 

 ■• Fineberga,' ' Staham,' 336, 350, 350^, ' Buckeshala.' 



»• Ibid. 286^. 



*" Vinogradoff, op. cit. 120 ; Maitland, op. cit. 95 ; F.C.H. Norf. ii, 32-4. 



*" Dom. Bk. 333* et seq. 



"' Ibid. 333^, 334 ; Thorpe. R. Bigot soke, R. Malet soke over 2 acres. * Cnotesheale.' R. Malet soke, 

 cf. 291^, 292^, 295, 305, 309, 313, 313^, for the soke of the 'King and the Earl.' 



"* Maitland. op. cit. 94, n. i. 



"' Dom. Bk. 291 ; cf 285^, 319^, 320 ; ' Eiam.' 360^, 'Anhus' ; here the king's reeve had 4/. for the 

 soke (' propter socam ') of a freeman. 



'"'Ibid. 349, 373, 3843, 391, 397, 3971}, 4133, 414*; 'Rexet Comes vi forisfacturas ' ; Maitland, 

 op. cit. 88 ; Vinogradoff, op. cit. 1 1 1, et seq. 



«« y.C.H. Norf. ii, 5. 



"° Of course many of these held also in Cambridgeshire and elsewhere. 



388 



