A HISTORY OF HERTFORDSHIRE 



hides, 'since the coming of king William,' but had forced a 'man' of the 

 abbot of Ramsey, who held 5 hides, to undergo the same lot, although 

 he had no power to alienate his land from the abbey and had not be- 

 longed to the manor. Domesday's phrase for this is that he ' was not 

 there' (fo. 137), but this only means that he did not belong to the 

 manor. On the other hand, there did belong to the manor T.R.E. 

 3 sokemen, in so far as they were even then the ' men ' of Engelric, 

 and these 3 were still there in 1086, holding i hide between them. 

 At Wickham Geoffrey de Mandeville annexed a sokeman with a minute 

 holding to Thorley, 'where he was not T.R.E.' (fo. 140). Again, at 

 Ware 2 sokemen ' have, since the coming of king William, been 

 annexed (appositi) to this manor, to which they did not belong T.R.E. 

 says (the court of) the shire' (fo. 138^). Here the noticeable point is 

 that one of them, who held 2 hides and had ' power to sell,' was 

 a man of ' Anschil of Ware,' the lord of that great manor, and yet did 

 not ' belong to it.' An extreme case of the same kind was testified to 

 by 'the Hundred' at Hormead (fo. 142). The Norman sheriff Ilbert, 

 says Domesday, had there increased a manor of i| hides to 6| hides by 

 annexing to it 3^ hides which had been held by 7 sokemen of king 

 Edward and 2 hides which had belonged to ' men ' of Ansgar the staller 

 and .flLthelmasr of Bennington, though none of these men had belonged 

 to the manor (nonfuerunt ibi) T.R.E. This is one of those cases in which 

 the Domesday Survey means precisely the opposite of what it seems to 

 say, for these men, though not of the manor, had ' been there ' as indi- 

 viduals under Edward the Confessor, and what Ilbert had really annexed 

 to the manor was, not the men, but their lands. In 1086 the peasantry 

 existing on the manor ranged downwards from the villein to the serf; 

 of sokemen or free tenants no trace remained. As against these cases we 

 have two definite entries of sokemen existing within a manor even before 

 the Conquest. At Sacombe 4 hides were held 'as a manor' by ./Ethel- 

 masr, and 'in the manor that ^Ethelmasr held there were 4 sokemen,' 

 holding about a hide. All 4 were the 'men' of ^thelmaer, but 'king 

 Edward had sake and soke over 2 of them' (fo. 141). And of Standon, 

 a manor of archbishop Stigand, we read that ' in this manor there were 

 6 sokemen' (fo. 142^). 



The cases of annexing to a manor the lands of sokemen not belonging 

 to it, by which these last two were preceded, will have prepared us for 

 those in which a Norman manor was composed altogether of lands which 

 had been held by sokemen. The two Hertfordshire manors selected by 

 Professor Maitland are (though he does not name them) Tiscott, near 

 Tring, and Widiall. 1 Now the case of Tiscott is of special interest, 

 because we can account for the ' commendation ' of the small landowners 

 who held it under the Confessor. Its ' 4 hides ' were then in the 

 hands of 5 sokemen, of whom 2 were the ' men ' of Brihtric (lord 

 of the great neighbouring manor of Masworth, Bucks), 2 of Oswulf 

 son of Frane, whose great manor of Miswell lay to the south-east, and 



1 Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 137-8. 

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