A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE 



Nor is our difficulty lessened when we turn from the land itself to the 

 people who were settled on it. The classes of society in Domesday are 

 intricate, and the Derbyshire portion of the record contains so little detail 

 on these matters that we are here left more than usually in doubt as to 

 their significance. Excluding priests, five classes of peasantry are to be 

 found in Derbyshire, sokemen, villeins, bordars, serfs, and ' censarii,' of 

 which the numbers recorded in the county may be given here for purposes 

 of reference: sokemen, 128; villeins, 1,849; bordars, 737; serfs, 20; 

 censarii, 42. The latter form an interesting class ; the name ' censarius ' 

 seems to denote a rent-paying tenant, and is so rendered in the translation 

 of Domesday below ; it probably represents a portion of the widespread 

 class of ' liberi homines,' of which no member occurs in Derbyshire. The 

 distribution of the ' censarii ' in the county is very curious ; four members 

 of it appear at Weston-on-Trent, and five at Trusley, the same sum being 

 rendered by two sokemen in that vill. Six appear at Egginton, and four 

 at Ockbrook, while no less than eighteen are found at Duckmanton, of 

 which manor they constitute the sole recorded population. Three occur 

 at Ashover, and one each at Palterton and Swadlincote. The capricious 

 distribution of the class raises the important question whether the 

 Domesday scribes have consistently entered ' censarii ' whenever they were 

 to be found in the original returns. This point has been considered by 

 Mr. Baring with reference to the Burton Chartulary^ No ' censarii ' are 

 found on the Burton estates in the Derby Domesday, and yet large numbers 

 of them occur in a survey of these estates which belongs to the second 

 decade of the twelfth century. The significance of this for us will depend 

 on whether we regard it as more probable that the compilers of Domes- 

 day should have considered themselves free to include or admit at will a 

 distinct class of society mentioned in the original returns, or that the 

 great economic change implied in the appearance of these ' censarii ' 

 should have taken place within thirty years on the estates of Burton Abbey. 



A similar uncertainty attends the reckoning of the serfs in Domesday. 

 The Derbyshire serfs do not quite amount to per cent, of the total 

 recorded population of the county. Small as this number is, it is greater 

 than the number found in Nottinghamshire, but much less than the 

 number occurring in Leicestershire. It has often been remarked that no 

 seruus is recorded in the Lincolnshire Domesday. 9 Thirteen out of the 

 twenty Derbyshire serfs are to be found on the fief of Henry de Ferrers, 

 and ten of them occur on the manor of Duffield alone. Elsewhere in the 

 Survey they appear at Morton (four), Newbold, Eckington, and Barl- 

 borough (one each). No conclusion can be drawn from so haphazard 

 a distribution as this. 



The sokemen form a very interesting class, the exact position of 

 which is, however, by no means clear. Here again the most recent 



1 EngL Hist. Rev., vol. xi. (1896), pp. 98-102. 



8 The varying proportions of the servile class is graphically shown in the maps in Mr. Seebohm's 

 English Village Community. The figures on which the maps are based are not always reliable, but in 

 general the results are sound. 



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