DOMESDAY SURVEY 



the bishop's hand. On the other hand, we are told of Newark that : 

 ' Ad Newercke adiacent omnes consuetudines regis et comitis de ipso 

 wapentac,' and this distinction is borne out by the statement on folio 

 280^, that the Countess Godeva had held (over Newark wapentake) not 

 only the king's two pennies but the earl's third penny as well. From a 

 charter of Henry I we learn in addition that Newark was only reckoned 

 as a 'half wapentake, and, accordingly, that only two men were to be 

 summoned from it to pleas of the crown and the shire court. 1 



This district is interesting for another reason. Nottinghamshire as a 

 whole, was very far indeed from being a fully manorialized county ; and in 

 Newark wapentake, or at least in that strip of it which lay between the 

 Lincolnshire border and the Trent, the process which was always creating 

 the villar-manorial economy seems scarcely to have begun before the 

 Conquest. Wholly or in part seventeen vills are included in the soke of 

 Newark, the population of which is given by Domesday as 174 sokemen 

 and 14 bordars, not a single villein being mentioned, nor any hint given 

 of the existence of demesne. The conclusion forces itself upon us that 

 the predecessors of these sokemen had no immediate lord below the king 

 and the earl, and we see also that the bishop's rights over them are 

 essentially connected with his possession of the wapentake to which 

 they belonged. Moreover, such powers as he possessed can hardly have 

 been of such a nature as to affect very intimately the social organization 

 of the group. Large as was the manor of Newark, it can hardly have 

 called for any very onerous agricultural services from its appurtenant 

 sokemen ; it had 42 villeins of its own. Probably these sokemen 

 furnished to the bishop little more than their jurisdictional and fiscal 

 profits, such as the ' heriot ' and ' forfeiture ' of which our Lincolnshire 

 quotations speak. Something similar may doubtless be said of those 

 sokemen of Oswardbeck wapentake who belonged to the king's manor of 

 Mansfield. On the other hand, we shall shortly see an instance of soke- 

 land united to its manor by much more definite and stringent ties. No 

 argument could well be more unsafe than that which would represent 

 the vague and obscure bonds which so often connected vill with vill in 

 our county to have been even approximately the same in all cases. 



Even apart from the immediate soke of Newark, the vills of the wapen- 

 take show traces of extreme subdivision before 1066. Clifton upon Trent, 

 for instance, had been divided into five manors, Coddington into four manors 

 and one carucate of sokeland, Hawton into sixteen manors and three dis- 

 tinct parcels of sokeland. Most of the wapentake was held by the bishop, 

 and had come to him from numerous small owners. One of the latter, 

 the Agemund who had possessed i\ bovates as a manor in Clifton, con- 

 tinued to hold the same under the bishop. The ' Arnegrim ' who was a 

 joint tenant at Elston can safely be identified with the man of the same 

 name who held part of Sibthorpe and Elston under Ilbert de Lacy. 

 These two vills are connected in another way, for the ' Pilewin ' who had 



1 Man. Angl. viii, 1272. Rushcliffe was also reckoned as a 'half wapentake.' Nomina Villarum, 

 printed in Parly. Writs (Rec. Com.), iv, 401. 



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