DOMESDAY SURVEY owners of land, nor can we be certain that they are consistent in their enumeration of the members of the various social classes which were recog- nized in 1086. But after all deductions have been made we still possess a considerable amount of information respecting the condition of Leicestershire at the period of the Conquest. We have already remarked on the absence in this county of any great ecclesiastical properties of long standing, but the number of vills which just before the Conquest had been held in whole or in part by laymen of ' comital ' rank is no less striking. For convenience of reference we arrange the latter in the following table : Earl Ralf Earl Waltheof 'Valuif s. d. 'Valet' Valuit'
d.
Wigston Magna 8 o
8 Stockerston . 8
o 9 Great Easton . 6 o o 5 Lutterworth 7 o o 7 Welham . .
3
i Earl Morcar Croxton Kerrial . .10 o o Nether Broughton ..300 ? Saltby 900 o o Houghton on the Hill O O Oadby O O Peatling Magna O O Cosby 5 o Willoughby Waterless 5 4 Frolesworth Sharnford Heather Earl Harold 17 O Barrow-on-Soar'J 800 Theddingworth Value not given 10 o o Kegworth J Valet ' d - 100 To this table should, no doubt, be added the land of the Countesses Alveva and Godeva, and if we include in our list the possessions of King Edward and his wife we shall find that at least one-quarter of the vills of Leicestershire had stood in some definite relation, tenurial or justiciary, to men of the highest position in the land. But Leicestershire is also dis- tinguished from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire by the large estates which had been held by Englishmen below the dignity of earl. We have already noticed the number of instances in which a Norman tenant in chief has entered into possession of the undivided lands of a single Englishman, and the estates of such men as Ailric the son of Meriet, Leofric of Melton Mowbray, and Harding, Earl Aubrey's predecessor, all tend to minimize the distinction between the tenurial condition of the county as it existed in 1066 and 1086. But for all this Leicestershire was far from being a fully manorialized county even at the latter date. Some 275 vills are represented in the county survey, and at least seventy per cent, of them are described under two or more distinct headings. So far as we can tell, no steps had as yet been taken towards bringing such great territorial aggregations as the sokes of Rothley, Melton Mowbray, and Great Bowden under the manorial organization with its distinction between demesne and villein land and its regulated system of labour service, although the earl of Chester would seem to have begun the process on the sokeland belonging to his great manor of Barrow on Soar, where Domesday accounts for j ploughs as existing ' in dominio^ Moreover 45 per cent, of the county population consisted of sokemen, and the sokeman, whatever his origin, represented a type of relationship between lord and man quite other than that which the Normans were trying to express in the universal extension of the manorial formula. On the whole the Leicestershire sokemen seem to have been very uniformly 299
