A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE 



The great series of royal manors which is described above on page 297 

 supplies us with some excellent specimens of this variety of manorial 

 economy, which was much more developed in Derbyshire than in any other 

 county of the Danelaw. In the case of these royal estates the unity of 

 each manorial group even affects its fiscal responsibilities, for we have 

 seen above that such manors as * Mestesforde,' Ashbourne, Wirksworth, 

 and Bakewell were assessed to the geld each as a united whole, thus 

 forming an exception to the general rule that a manor as such is not 

 recognised in the subpartitionment of the geld. With their curious 

 payments in kind, and their groups of dependent hamlets, these manors 

 would seem to represent the most archaic type of agricultural estate to be 

 found in the county ; but we have to remember that the nature of the 

 country in which they occur, consisting of great tracts of barren limestone 

 rock with slender strips of cultivable soil along the watercourses, was not 

 favourable to the development of the neat villar-manorial economy of the 

 south of England. There is no doubt that the royal manors of north 

 Derbyshire were largely the product of their geographical conditions. 

 In this region at the present day we do not find ' nucleated ' villages of 

 the normal Midland type, but scattered hamlets grouped into parishes for 

 purposes of administrative convenience, while north Derbyshire on the 

 map resembles south Derbyshire much less than it resembles west Somerset 

 or Devonshire. Under these circumstances it is only natural to find these 

 hamlets on the royal land grouped into large manorial blocks for the sake 

 of agricultural organisation, and this helps to account for the fact, other- 

 wise strange, that the wildest part of the county is covered the most 

 thickly with place names on the Domesday map. 1 



Very frequent in the Danelaw taken as a whole, though less prominent 

 in Derbyshire than in any other county of this group, is the fourth 

 manorial type, which consisted of a central ' manor,' with ' sokeland ' 

 appurtenant to it. This is not the place to enter into the thorny questions 

 connected with sokeland. 8 We may, however, note Professor Maitland's 

 opinion, that sokeland ' in this context seems to be the territory in which 

 the lord's rights are or have been of a justiciary rather than of a pro- 

 prietary kind.' 8 The territory over which the lord enjoyed ' soke ' was 

 usually much scattered ; it seems to represent rather a chance agglomera- 

 tion of rights casually acquired than an estate regarded as an agricultural 

 unit, and in Derbyshire at least it has no fiscal significance. We can 

 unfortunately by no means affirm that a lord who possessed a manor with 

 * sokeland ' enjoyed rights of private jurisdiction over the latter either in 



1 The distinction between manor and berewick is well shown in a writ which must be dated 

 1093 (Dugdale, Man. viii. 1271), by which William II. grants the churches of Chesterfield and 

 Ashbourne, Derbyshire, and Mansfield and Orston, Notts, to Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln ' et capellas 

 quae sunt in berewicis qux adjacent praedictis quotuor maneriis.' It is, however, curious to find Chesterfield 

 regarded as an independent ' manerium ' within seven years of Domesday, since in that record it appears 

 merely as a berewick of Newbold. Manorial geography at this early date was less stable than is always 

 recognised. 



* See Round, feudal England ; Maitland, Dam. Bk. and Beyond ; VinogradofF, The Growth of the 

 Manor. 



8 Dm. Bk. and Beyond, 115. 



312 



