A HISTORY OF HERTFORDSHIRE 



fordshire and Essex and south-west into Northamptonshire. Nor is it 

 only for the sochemanni that this district is remarkable. It was, in the 

 same writer's opinion, considerably 'richer and more populous' than the 

 western portions of the kingdom, as it was also 'the home of liberty.' 1 

 In tracing therefore, in Hertfordshire, the occurrence of sochemanni and 

 the widespread subdivision of the vills in the days before the Conquest, 

 we are dealing with no isolated phenomenon, but with the links that 

 connect the county with the district to its north-east, and with influ- 

 ences which had made it even then comparatively populous and wealthy. 

 'Domesday Book is full of evidence that the tillers of the soil are 

 being depressed.' Professor Maitland, who has told us this, observes 

 that 



the most convincing proof of the depression of the peasantry comes to us from Cam- 

 bridgeshire. . . . The Cambridgeshire of the Confessor's day had contained at the very 

 least 900 instead of 200 sokemen. This is an enormous and a significant change. . . . 

 The sokemen have fallen, and their fall has brought with it the consolidation of mano- 

 rial husbandry and seignorial power. . . . No one can read the survey of Cambridge- 

 shire without seeing that the freer sorts of the peasantry have been thrust out or rather 

 thrust down. 



Evidence so cogent as this we shall hardly find in any part of the record save 

 that which relates to Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire. But great movements of the 

 kind that we are examining will hardly confine themselves within the boundaries of 

 a county. ... In Essex we may see the liberi homines disappearing. . . . There have 

 been sokemen in Middlesex and in Surrey, but they have been suppressed. . . . Even 

 in Suffolk they are suffering ill at the hands of their new masters, while in Cambridge- 

 shire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire they have been suppressed or displaced.* 



It can, I think, be shown that the decrease in the number of 

 sokemen, as a result of the Norman Conquest, was proportionately even 

 more striking in Hertfordshire than in Cambridgeshire itself. If we 

 leave out of account the royal manor of Hitchin, which presents ex- 

 ceptional features, there were little more than 20 sokemen left in the 

 whole county at the time of the Domesday Survey. And yet there 

 had been no fewer than 195 under Edward the Confessor. 3 It was out 

 of the question that Professor Maitland, writing on the whole of England, 

 should be able to study minutely the Survey of each county, but a close 

 examination of the Hertfordshire evidence has convinced me that the 

 bulk of the sokemen are found in the extreme north and east of the 

 county, forming, as it were, a fringe extending from Lilley to Hoddesdon, 

 with Essex and Cambridgeshire as a kind of centre. 



Starting from Royston and working south, we have 6 sokemen at 

 Barley, 4 at Barkway and 2 at Newsells in Barkway, 6 at Hodenhoe 

 in Buckland, 9 at Widiall, 6 at ' Ichetone ' in Layston, 4 at Stonebury, 

 3 at Barksden Green to the west of it, and i at Westmill. Between 

 these last places and the Essex border were Boreson Green (' Bordes- 

 dene') with 13, Hormead with 7, and Pelham with 5. We have thus 

 accounted for 66 sokemen before the Conquest in the north-eastern 



1 Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 22-3. z Ibid. pp. 62-4, 67. 



3 But, as Professor Maitland warns us (p. 20), ' there is reason to think that some of the freemen 

 nd sokemen of these counties get counted twice or thrice over, because they held land under several 

 different lords.' 



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