THEIR CONDITION IN 1066 119 



not exclude the traditional view that a sokeman was under 

 the jurisdiction of the lord to whom he owed soke. We shall 

 contend that a sokeman without liberty of commendation 

 was the tenant of his lord, and therefore, if the lord had sake 

 and soke over his own men, he would receive the fines and 

 forfeitures from that man ; and if his charter forbad the in- 

 trusion of the sheriff, he would have a court of his own. But 

 our point is that the sokeman became his lord's justiciable, 

 because he first owed him his services, and that it was the 

 grant of sake and soke over his tenants which brought the 

 sokeman into the lord's jurisdiction. 



Let us revert to the phrase, " holding of the King," and 

 try to ascertain its meaning when used of pre-Conquest 

 times. In post-Conquest times, it is always used of the 

 magnates. They are always said to hold of the King. In 

 the case of those who were recipients of the Conqueror's 

 bounty, the expression indicates that they received their 

 estates of him, and that they rendered their services to him ; 

 and the same explanation will apply to those who received 

 grants from the magnates, and were said to hold of them. 

 And in the case of the ancient estates of the Church, many 

 of which were in the possession of the bishops and abbeys for 

 centuries before the Norman Conquest, the expression must 

 mean that they received these estates from the bounty of his 

 predecessors, and that whatever services were rendered in 

 respect thereof were rendered to the King. In post-Conquest 

 days, generally speaking, services fixed tenure, and the 

 person to whom services were rendered in respect of a piece 

 of land, was lord of that land. The Norman lawyers imported 

 by the Conqueror conceived that all the land in the country 

 belonged to the King, and proceeded from him to a subject, 

 and that it owed its service to its superior lord, whether such 

 superior was the King or a subject. They seem, too, to have 

 tried to apply this rule to pre-Conquest times, and to have 

 thought that in those days also, services fixed tenure, and 



