SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC 



HISTORY 



Part I 



jA T the time of the Conquest Suffolk was perhaps (excluding Middlesex) 

 /% the most densely populated county in England. The persons of 



/ % all classes mentioned in its Domesday Survey number 20,491. 

 Larger numbers are recorded in the case of Lincoln and Norfolk, 

 but the acreage of these counties is more than proportionately greater. The 

 population was moreover as remarkable for its quality as for its quantity. 

 Of the 12,423 freemen recorded in Domesday,^ 7,460, or more than 

 half, were in Suffolk. Of socmen, whose status differed from that of freemen 

 mainly in their inability to sell their land without the lord's permission, 

 Suffolk had 1,060. These two classes taken together constituted about the 

 same proportion to the rest of the population in Norfolk as in Suffolk, and 

 the same is true of the disappearing class of serfs who numbered 995 in 

 Norfolk, and 909 in Suffolk. There were, however, about four thousand 

 more villeins and cottars in Norfolk than in Suffolk, where the villeins only 

 numbered 2,814, and the cottars (bordarii) 6,226, making together con- 

 siderably less than half of the whole. Throughout England as a whole, and 

 in most of the separate counties, the villeins and cottars were more than two- 

 thirds of the recorded population. Both the larger numbers and the superior 

 status of the men of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire, must be mainly attributed 

 to the accident of geographical position. The successive waves of invasion 

 naturally left a richer deposit of settlers along the eastern coast, and the 

 defeated race left a smaller remnant in that region to swell the ranks of 

 serfdom. 



It may be inferred from what has been said that the typical holder of 

 land in Suffolk was the freeman of small estate. The larger manors of 

 several hundred acres, cultivated with the assistance of a score of villeins and 

 of one or two serfs, were to be found indeed in all parts of the county, and 

 accounted for the greater part of the soil, but they by no means dominated 

 every township as in most parts of England, nor did they contain the majority 

 of the cultivators of the soil. There were many small manors which had 

 none of the economic characteristics associated with the name, containing, as 

 they did quite commonly, only 30 acres, the usual size of a villein holding 



' F. W. Maitland, Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 19-20 ; Ellis, Introd. to Dom. ji, 469-70, 488-90, 51 1-14 ; 

 A. Ballard, The Dom. Surv. 114, 264. 



I 633 80 



