A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE 



distributed over the county ; the sokes of Rothley, Melton Mowbray and 

 Great Bowden in the respective wapentakes of Gosecote, Framland, and 

 Gartree, together with the Countess Judith's unmanorialized land in Guthlaxton 

 wapentake, include 466 out of the 1,926 sokemen entered in the county 

 survey. It is natural enough that sokemen should appear in preponderating 

 numbers on sokeland, but even elsewhere in the county the sokeman appears 

 as a fairly constant element in the villar population. We cannot enter here into 

 the very difficult question of the legal criteria which underlay the technical 

 distinction drawn in Domesday between sokemen and villeins, but with regard 

 to the position of these classes in the manorial economy we may assume that 

 the sokeman as a general rule was wealthier than the villein," and there is 

 evidence to suggest that his services were less onerous, and that he would 

 commonly owe an annual money payment to his lord. The co-existence of 

 villeins and sokemen on royal sokeland, which to all seeming had never known 

 any lord but the king, suggests that the main distinction between these classes 

 was one of relative wealth, for so far as our evidence goes neither class can 

 on this land have been to any extent implicated in the manorial system before 

 the Conquest. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the wergild of the 

 sokeman was fixed at a higher rate than that which applied to members 

 of the villein class. 



It is more probable that the question of ' wer and wife ' enters into the 

 distinction marked in Domesday between the sokemen and the liberi homines^ 

 who appear in our county at Stoney Stanton, Hallaton, Gumley, Foston, and 

 Theddingworth, to the number of nine in all. It has recently been 

 suggested that these freemen were possessed of the wergild of 1,200 shillings 57 

 as against the wergild of 200 shillings which was assigned alike 'to villeins 

 and sokemen. This suggestion would enable us to equate the liber homo 

 of Domesday Book with the thegn of Anglo-Saxon law, and would to that 

 extent tend to narrow the cleavage between the Old English and the Anglo- 

 Norman social order. On the other hand it is worth noting that the 

 Leicestershire Domesday contains no mention of the class of censarii or 

 rent-paying tenants, which appears here and there in the surveys of 

 Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, so that we cannot be quite certain that our 

 liberi homines are not simply men who were considered more free than the 

 sokemen around them in virtue of holding their land at a money rent with- 

 out the base associations implied in labour service. 68 Also it would be very 

 unsafe to assume that members of this class were confined in Leicestershire 

 to the six manors in regard to which the Domesday scribes have taken 

 cognizance of them. 



From the liberi homines we may pass to the other end of the social scale 

 the servi or men who were personally unfree. Leicestershire is the one county 

 of the Danelaw in regard to which members of the servile class appear to be 

 consistently enumerated in Domesday, and in this county they amount to 



" Professor Vinogradoff regards the distinction between sokemen and villani in Domesday as the result 

 of Norman ideas acting on the undifferentiated mass of the Old English peasantry ; The Growth of the 

 Manor, 341. 



" Ibid. 342. 



* The best authority for the study of the cemarius is the Survey of the Burton Abbey Estates circa 1113. 

 See Round, Engl. Hist. Rev. xx, 275. Normally the agricultural work of the censarius would be confined to the 

 boon-days at harvest. It is worth noting that as early as 1113 censarii appear on the Derbyshire portion 

 of Appleby. 



300 



