From these various examples it is easy to see that sake and soke, though not a rare privilege, had not under Edward become a right common to all landowners, for it would be pointless to give lists of those who were exercising it, if all landowners were free to do so. It is clear on the contrary from hundreds of other passages that the wielding of soke was regarded as primarily a royal right, and the general rule of the land still enjoined that all men should attend the hundred moots, and that these should be held under the presidency of officials appointed by the king and the earl, who shared the profits of jurisdiction between them, the king taking two-thirds of the fines and the earl one-third. Further, even where landowners had acquired some measure of soke over their estates, the resulting franchises were regarded primarily as subdivisions carved out of the hundreds by leave of the Crown, and consequently men could still conceive of seignorial justice as being merely a variant of the general scheme of national justice, and not as a distinct and rival type of jurisdiction to be feared by the Crown and suppressed whenever there was an opportunity. There was in fact no idea at all as yet that these franchises constituted encroachments on the powers of the Crown.
If we inquire into their origin we do not find that their existence can be put down chiefly to Edward's being a complaisant ruler, inclined to placate his more ambitious subjects by offering them bribes in the form of judicial concessions. Doubtless, Edward was rather lavish with his grants of sake and soke, and many English writs have survived which testify to his activities in this direction, but there is plenty of evidence to shew that he was no innovator and only followed the practice of his predecessors. For in this connexion we have only to turn to Knut's laws to be convinced that private sokes were plentiful in his day; for, if not, certain famous sections in them which declare that the king ought to have certain important pleas over all his subjects, unless he has expressly granted them away, would be meaningless. Nor does this conclusion depend solely on inferences; for a writ of Knut[1] still survives which was issued about 1020 in favour of the Archbishop of Canterbury, proclaiming to all the king's lieges that the archbishop was to be worthy throughout his lands of sake and soke, grithbrice, hamsocn, foresteal, infangennethef and flymena-fyrmth, and these specially mentioned rights turn out to be just the very pleas that the laws say ought to be reserved to the king except in very exceptional circumstances. There is nothing about this writ to lead us to question its genuineness. On the contrary it is quite on all fours with Knut's general policy of favouring the Church, and fits in well with some other evidence which shews that this was not the only case in which he was willing to give away the reserved pleas. The evidence which can be quoted to prove this is not indeed contemporary, but seems perfectly trustworthy, and consists in certain later writs issued by Norman
- ↑ Cf. Earle, Handbook to the Landcharters, p. 232.
