A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE distributed over the county ; the sokes of Rothley, Melton Mowbray and Great Bowden in the respective wapentakes of Gosecote, Framland, and Gartree, together with the Countess Judith's unmanorialized land in Guthlaxton wapentake, include 466 out of the 1,926 sokemen entered in the county survey. It is natural enough that sokemen should appear in preponderating numbers on sokeland, but even elsewhere in the county the sokeman appears as a fairly constant element in the villar population. We cannot enter here into the very difficult question of the legal criteria which underlay the technical distinction drawn in Domesday between sokemen and villeins, but with regard to the position of these classes in the manorial economy we may assume that the sokeman as a general rule was wealthier than the villein," and there is evidence to suggest that his services were less onerous, and that he would commonly owe an annual money payment to his lord. The co-existence of villeins and sokemen on royal sokeland, which to all seeming had never known any lord but the king, suggests that the main distinction between these classes was one of relative wealth, for so far as our evidence goes neither class can on this land have been to any extent implicated in the manorial system before the Conquest. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the wergild of the sokeman was fixed at a higher rate than that which applied to members of the villein class. It is more probable that the question of ' wer and wife ' enters into the distinction marked in Domesday between the sokemen and the liberi homines^ who appear in our county at Stoney Stanton, Hallaton, Gumley, Foston, and Theddingworth, to the number of nine in all. It has recently been suggested that these freemen were possessed of the wergild of 1,200 shillings 57 as against the wergild of 200 shillings which was assigned alike 'to villeins and sokemen. This suggestion would enable us to equate the liber homo of Domesday Book with the thegn of Anglo-Saxon law, and would to that extent tend to narrow the cleavage between the Old English and the Anglo- Norman social order. On the other hand it is worth noting that the Leicestershire Domesday contains no mention of the class of censarii or rent-paying tenants, which appears here and there in the surveys of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, so that we cannot be quite certain that our liberi homines are not simply men who were considered more free than the sokemen around them in virtue of holding their land at a money rent with- out the base associations implied in labour service. 68 Also it would be very unsafe to assume that members of this class were confined in Leicestershire to the six manors in regard to which the Domesday scribes have taken cognizance of them. From the liberi homines we may pass to the other end of the social scale the servi or men who were personally unfree. Leicestershire is the one county of the Danelaw in regard to which members of the servile class appear to be consistently enumerated in Domesday, and in this county they amount to " Professor Vinogradoff regards the distinction between sokemen and villani in Domesday as the result of Norman ideas acting on the undifferentiated mass of the Old English peasantry ; The Growth of the Manor, 341. " Ibid. 342.
- The best authority for the study of the cemarius is the Survey of the Burton Abbey Estates circa 1113.
See Round, Engl. Hist. Rev. xx, 275. Normally the agricultural work of the censarius would be confined to the boon-days at harvest. It is worth noting that as early as 1113 censarii appear on the Derbyshire portion of Appleby. 300
