DOMESDAY SURVEY 



shire. As the value of his lands in Derbyshire and Lincolnshire had 

 also risen since the Conquest, Walter de Aincurt may have the credit 

 of being a discreet and skilful landlord. 



The next fief entered in our survey was that of Geoffrey Alselin, 

 whose chief manor in our county was Laxton, which afterwards became 

 the head of the Everingham barony. Laxton, to which pertained nine 

 pieces of sokeland, had belonged to Geoffrey's regular predecessor in this 

 and other counties, ' Tochi ' (Toki) the son of Outi, 1 who appears 

 among those who had exercised sac and soc before the Conquest. It 

 may be convenient to note here that all the more important groups of 

 sokeland in our county, such as Laneham, Sutton, Newark, Clifton, 

 Granby, and this of Laxton, are connected by their pre-Conquest owners 

 with rights of jurisdiction existing in King Edward's time. 2 If we 

 include the king in our calculation, we can account for nearly four-fifths 

 of the recorded sokeland of Nottinghamshire. This is important, for it 

 makes it possible that the word ' sokeland ' may here at least have meant 

 what by derivation it implies, and that in these cases we may find a 

 fairly definite bond of union between manor and soke in jurisdictional 

 rights centred in the former. It is necessary to keep this question well 

 apart from the distinct problem, whether a thegn who possessed one or 

 two manors had ' sac and soc ' over them where the fact is not directly 

 stated ; and if we believe that such powers of jurisdiction must have 

 taken their origin from a royal grant, we must make a very large allow- 

 ance for our deficiency of information respecting the Anglo-Saxon 

 thegnhood in estimating the prevalence of private justice before 1066. 



We may pass more rapidly over the tenants-in-chief who remain, 

 for their Nottinghamshire estates were for the most part mere appen- 

 dages of large possessions elsewhere. Thus Geoffrey de Wirce, Osbern 

 fitz Richard, Durand and Robert Malet, and Hugh de Grentemaisnil 

 only held one manor, and William the Usher, Robert the son of William, 

 Henry de Ferrers and Hugh fitz Baldric, only two manors apiece in our 

 county. Ralf fitz Hubert has been considered in the Victoria County 

 History of Derbyshire, where he was lord of Crich. He held some nine 

 manors in the west of Nottinghamshire, and here, as in Derbyshire, he 

 had succeeded two Englishmen named Leofric and Leofnoth. Gilbert 

 de Gand had come into possession of a compact estate in the centre of 

 the county, most of which had belonged to the Ulf ' fenisc,' who had 

 held 'the earl's third penny' in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. In the 

 description of Gilbert's Nottinghamshire lands, Ulf is not assigned his 

 distinguishing adjective, but in six cases out of eight a space is left 

 vacant after his name, and the uniformity with which his possessions in 

 other counties had passed to Gilbert leaves no room for doubt as to his 



1 V. C. H. Nortkants, \, 292. 



' It should be noted that the famous list on f. 280^ is not quite consistent as to date, for while the 

 majority of names given in it are those of pre-Conquest owners, it also includes Walter de Aincurt and 

 Henry de Ferrers. It is just possible, however, that the list may really refer, as a whole, not to the 

 tempore regis Edwardi but to some time early in the Conqueror's reign, before the great confiscation 

 of Englishmen's lands had been thoroughly carried out. 



2 3 I 



