A HISTORY OF DERBYSHIRE Nor is our difficulty lessened when we turn from the land itself to the people who were settled on it. The classes of society in Domesday are intricate, and the Derbyshire portion of the record contains so little detail on these matters that we are here left more than usually in doubt as to their significance. Excluding priests, five classes of peasantry are to be found in Derbyshire, sokemen, villeins, bordars, serfs, and ' censarii,' of which the numbers recorded in the county may be given here for purposes of reference: sokemen, 128; villeins, 1,849; bordars, 737; serfs, 20; censarii, 42. The latter form an interesting class ; the name ' censarius ' seems to denote a rent-paying tenant, and is so rendered in the translation of Domesday below ; it probably represents a portion of the widespread class of ' liberi homines,' of which no member occurs in Derbyshire. The distribution of the ' censarii ' in the county is very curious ; four members of it appear at Weston-on-Trent, and five at Trusley, the same sum being rendered by two sokemen in that vill. Six appear at Egginton, and four at Ockbrook, while no less than eighteen are found at Duckmanton, of which manor they constitute the sole recorded population. Three occur at Ashover, and one each at Palterton and Swadlincote. The capricious distribution of the class raises the important question whether the Domesday scribes have consistently entered ' censarii ' whenever they were to be found in the original returns. This point has been considered by Mr. Baring with reference to the Burton Chartulary^ No ' censarii ' are found on the Burton estates in the Derby Domesday, and yet large numbers of them occur in a survey of these estates which belongs to the second decade of the twelfth century. The significance of this for us will depend on whether we regard it as more probable that the compilers of Domes- day should have considered themselves free to include or admit at will a distinct class of society mentioned in the original returns, or that the great economic change implied in the appearance of these ' censarii ' should have taken place within thirty years on the estates of Burton Abbey. A similar uncertainty attends the reckoning of the serfs in Domesday. The Derbyshire serfs do not quite amount to per cent, of the total recorded population of the county. Small as this number is, it is greater than the number found in Nottinghamshire, but much less than the number occurring in Leicestershire. It has often been remarked that no seruus is recorded in the Lincolnshire Domesday. 9 Thirteen out of the twenty Derbyshire serfs are to be found on the fief of Henry de Ferrers, and ten of them occur on the manor of Duffield alone. Elsewhere in the Survey they appear at Morton (four), Newbold, Eckington, and Barl- borough (one each). No conclusion can be drawn from so haphazard a distribution as this. The sokemen form a very interesting class, the exact position of which is, however, by no means clear. Here again the most recent 1 EngL Hist. Rev., vol. xi. (1896), pp. 98-102. 8 The varying proportions of the servile class is graphically shown in the maps in Mr. Seebohm's English Village Community. The figures on which the maps are based are not always reliable, but in general the results are sound. 314
