A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE The great series of royal manors which is described above on page 297 supplies us with some excellent specimens of this variety of manorial economy, which was much more developed in Derbyshire than in any other county of the Danelaw. In the case of these royal estates the unity of each manorial group even affects its fiscal responsibilities, for we have seen above that such manors as * Mestesforde,' Ashbourne, Wirksworth, and Bakewell were assessed to the geld each as a united whole, thus forming an exception to the general rule that a manor as such is not recognised in the subpartitionment of the geld. With their curious payments in kind, and their groups of dependent hamlets, these manors would seem to represent the most archaic type of agricultural estate to be found in the county ; but we have to remember that the nature of the country in which they occur, consisting of great tracts of barren limestone rock with slender strips of cultivable soil along the watercourses, was not favourable to the development of the neat villar-manorial economy of the south of England. There is no doubt that the royal manors of north Derbyshire were largely the product of their geographical conditions. In this region at the present day we do not find ' nucleated ' villages of the normal Midland type, but scattered hamlets grouped into parishes for purposes of administrative convenience, while north Derbyshire on the map resembles south Derbyshire much less than it resembles west Somerset or Devonshire. Under these circumstances it is only natural to find these hamlets on the royal land grouped into large manorial blocks for the sake of agricultural organisation, and this helps to account for the fact, other- wise strange, that the wildest part of the county is covered the most thickly with place names on the Domesday map. 1 Very frequent in the Danelaw taken as a whole, though less prominent in Derbyshire than in any other county of this group, is the fourth manorial type, which consisted of a central ' manor,' with ' sokeland ' appurtenant to it. This is not the place to enter into the thorny questions connected with sokeland. 8 We may, however, note Professor Maitland's opinion, that sokeland ' in this context seems to be the territory in which the lord's rights are or have been of a justiciary rather than of a pro- prietary kind.' 8 The territory over which the lord enjoyed ' soke ' was usually much scattered ; it seems to represent rather a chance agglomera- tion of rights casually acquired than an estate regarded as an agricultural unit, and in Derbyshire at least it has no fiscal significance. We can unfortunately by no means affirm that a lord who possessed a manor with
- sokeland ' enjoyed rights of private jurisdiction over the latter either in
1 The distinction between manor and berewick is well shown in a writ which must be dated 1093 (Dugdale, Man. viii. 1271), by which William II. grants the churches of Chesterfield and Ashbourne, Derbyshire, and Mansfield and Orston, Notts, to Robert Bloet, bishop of Lincoln ' et capellas quae sunt in berewicis qux adjacent praedictis quotuor maneriis.' It is, however, curious to find Chesterfield regarded as an independent ' manerium ' within seven years of Domesday, since in that record it appears merely as a berewick of Newbold. Manorial geography at this early date was less stable than is always recognised.
- See Round, feudal England ; Maitland, Dam. Bk. and Beyond ; VinogradofF, The Growth of the
Manor. 8 Dm. Bk. and Beyond, 115. 312
