DOMESDAY SURVEY 



geld. One is in the soke of Southwell and the other is the king's, but, 

 nevertheless, it belongs to the hundred of Southwell.' Taken simply 

 these words would seem to imply that the soke of Southwell and the 

 hundred of Southwell were, or ought to be, identical, otherwise there 

 would be no object in Domesday pointedly noting an exception to this 

 arrangement. If this were so it would give us a welcome clue as to the 

 composition of one of these mysterious Danelaw ' hundreds.' 



The statement under Southwell that 2 bovates were ' in a prebend ' 

 is important in view of the appropriation of capitular revenues to par- 

 ticular canons which it implies, for such cases are rare in Domesday. 1 

 We shall not be far wrong in assigning the above 2 bovates to the 

 prebend of Normanton, for this was the only one of the early prebends 

 within the manor of Southwell which possessed an endowment in land. 

 Other manors said to have belonged to St. Mary of Southwell in pre- 

 Conquest times were Cropwell Bishop, with its berewick of Hickling, and 

 Norwell, with its soke ; and we may note that away in east Leicestershire 

 Tilton is said to belong to the alms of St. Mary of Southwell.* 



Passing now to the lands held in the archbishop's own hand, we may 

 recognize the northern part of the modern liberty of Southwell .and 

 Scrooby in his two large manors of Laneham and Sutton. The account 

 of the former gives us a wholesome caution not to press Domesday termin- 

 ology too far. It runs : ' In Lanun cum Berewitis his .... novem 

 carucatae terrae et ii bovatae ad geldum .... In dominio aulae sunt 

 x bovatae de hac terra. Reliqua est soca.' Here, then, although all the 

 vills dependent on Laneham are distinctly described as ' berewicks,' the 

 whole of the land in them not in demesne turns out to be ' sokeland.' 

 The phrase dominio aulae, which is contrasted with soca, is unique in 

 Nottinghamshire and Derby, and not very common elsewhere. The 

 manner in which Laneham is surveyed also deserves a passing notice. First 

 comes the archbishop's own portion of the manor, probably consisting 

 only of Laneham itself; then we read of the sokemen, villeins, and bordars 

 holding of him in its berewicks ; and, lastly, there are entered 33 soke- 

 men, 6 villeins, and 18 bordars, with the curious statement, ' hos cum 

 terra sua tenent ii milites de archiepiscopo.' This synthetical method 

 of description, as applied to large and discrete manors, is a sort of com- 

 promise between the usual practice of entering each parcel of ' sokeland ' 

 separately and the plan of merely giving a string of villar headings with 

 the appropriate assessments, such as was followed in the account of 

 Mansfield. The appurtenances of the manor with which we are dealing 

 extended across the Trent into Lincolnshire, for in the Domesday of 

 that county the archbishop is assigned 100 acres of meadow 'as belonging 

 to Laneham ' 



The manor of Sutton (with Scrooby) is interesting, because the York 

 Liber Albus has preserved the text of the charter by which Edgar granted 



1 Another instance occurs at Stafford, fol. 247^. 



1 This probably means that Tilton joined the vills of Nottinghamshire in the Pentecostal offering 

 which the latter made at the church of Southwell. 



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