THE DOMESDAY SURVEY 



their name to Guines Court in Tollesbury, where, as at other places in 

 Essex, they held of the Honour of Boulogne. 1 Woodham Walter, 

 again, reminds us of its lords the house of Fitz Walter, descended in 

 the male line from the Domesday lord of Clare. 



That those whom the Norman lords replaced as holders of wide 

 estates were the chief sufferers by the Conquest is no doubt the case ; 

 but if the peasantry, and even what may be termed the yeomanry, re- 

 mained as before upon the land, it does not follow that their condition 

 had in no way changed for the worse. Obscure as is still the gradation 

 of classes in England before the Conquest, it appears to be now generally 

 held that the coming of the Normans tended to simplify the classification. 

 If the learned researches of Professor Maitland 2 failed to enable him 

 to arrive at any clear or definite conclusion on the liberi homines, the 

 socemanni and the "villani of Domesday, it is not likely that others will 

 be more successful in the task. Indeed, the more one studies the Survey, 

 the more one shrinks from attaching to its terms a denotation so precise 

 as that of modern times. I have already drawn attention to the evidence 

 in the Essex survey of such terms as ' thegn ' or ' free man ' being in- 

 differently used. 8 It is this recklessness of the scribe as the modern 

 mind would deem it which makes it rash to argue from such an entry 

 as we find, for instance, under Goldhanger, where we read of an estate 

 annexed, apparently, to the main manor that ' 9 free men dwelt on (in) 

 half a hide, and one man (who was) a thegn held 30 acres, and two 

 others (who were) free men held 10 acres.' Here we might infer that 

 a * thegn ' was distinct from a * free man,' had we not evidence to the 

 contrary in the Survey itself. Again, in this same entry we read lower 

 down of 1 5 acres which had belonged to one ' free thegn ' (francus 

 teignus), a formula which is probably unique in Domesday, although in 

 its other volume we have once teini liberi (fo. 254). So, in Essex, when 

 the scribe was tired of writing liberi homines, he wrote, for a change, 

 franci homines* One ought, perhaps, to say something of the Essex 

 entries bearing on the difficult subject of status, but for the general 

 reader it will be sufficient to know that 



the English peasants did suffer by the substitution of English for French lords. 

 . . . We cannot treat either the legal or the economic history of our peasantry as a 

 continuous whole ; it is divided into two parts by the red thread of the Norman 

 Conquest. That is a catastrophe. ... As a result of the Conquest, the peasants, 

 at all events some of the peasants, had fallen from their free estate ; free men, holding 

 freely, they had been compelled to do unfree services. . . . Domesday Book is full 

 of evidence that the tillers of the soil are being depressed. Here we may read of a 

 free man with half a hide who has now been made one of the villeins, etc., etc. 6 



I break off the quotation here with an instance taken from the first entry 

 in the Essex survey. The fate of this Benfleet ' free man ' is one of the 

 most eloquent incidents recorded in the great Survey." 



1 See feudal England, p. 463. 



* Dometday Book and Beyond, pp. 25, 39-46, 67 et seq. * See p. 35* above. 



4 Illustrations of the scribe's vagaries will be afforded in the instances of duplicate entries below. 



6 Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 51, 60, 61. * See p. 428 below. 



357 



