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A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE of Earls Edwin and Morcar, we shall be able to explain the strange absence in Leicestershire of any lands which we can prove to have been possessed by former holders of the Mercian earldom, though if this were the case Domesday, according to its customary practice, ought to have named either Earl jElfgar or Earl Edwin as the owner of these manors in King Edward's time, for there is every probability that Harold's marriage did not take place until after his coronation." This difficulty, however, is not insuper- able, for there exist other cases in which Domesday has given as the pre-Con- quest owner a man who did not enter into possession until after the Confessor's death. Moreover, a manor of the type of Barrow on Soar, with its great extent of dependent sokeland, would be more likely to be found in the hands of an earl than in those of a private subject, and it is not improbable that Barrow had been a residence of the early kings of Mercia. Unfortunately the description of Earl Hugh's land bears marks of having been written in extreme haste, and we are left in doubt about so important a point as the value of the several manors of which it was composed. Apart from Barrow on Soar the most interesting of these last is Loughborough, which had been held freely by five thegns before the Conquest, and had been sublet by Earl Hugh to as many of his knights, one of whom bore the English name of Godric. Among the earl's tenants elsewhere there appears no less a person than Roger de Busli, the lord of Blyth, but the passage in the manuscript which describes the holding is so corrupt that it is impossible to discover the vill in which it lay. Mr. Round attaches some importance to the position of Earl Hugh's fief as illustrating the construction of Domesday. It is entered in its right place in the list of fiefs at the commencement, but the scribe forgot it when its turn came, and thus made Hugh de Grentemesnil ' xm.' Thenceforth, the numbers do not correspond till we come to the fief of Roger de Busli, who is ' xvin,' both in the heading and in the text, but this is because, conversely, the heading omits but the scribe inserts the fief of Robert de Buci, which precedes Roger's. The numbers remain even down to ' XLII,' and then the fief of ' Earl Hugh ' has to be entered a second time in the margin of the heading, so that the scribe may insert it on the last folio, and thus repair his omission. But even this was not all. He appears to have detected a final omission due to the practice for this county of entering the lands of a baron's tenants together after those which he held in demesne. The lands of the count of Meulan's tenants had thus been overlooked, and were now entered as ' XLIIII' in the second column of the folio. Lastly, on the same folio, at the foot of the first column, there is crammed in the duplicate entry " of the lands of Robert the doorward (hostiarius), which had already been entered in their right place. From a consideration of the Norman tenants in chief in a county there is a natural transition to the relation between the social order which pre- vailed on their estates, and that which obtained ' on the day when King Edward was alive and dead.' The study of this matter in Leicestershire is affected by the fact that the compilers of the county survey have held them- selves at liberty to give or withhold at pleasure the names of the pre-Conquest 14 Freeman, Norman Conquest, iii, 625. " They have been printed side by side and discussed in Mr. Round's Feud. Engl, (26-7). 298