Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/489

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DOMESDAY SURVEY manner, Robert Malet had succeeded Edric of Laxfield. Here, though the manor is clearly seen, with its tenants and all its appurtenances, including a fishery, a mill, and a park, the urban element appears distinctly in the market with twenty-five burgesses living in or around it.*" Beccles was held by the Abbot of St. Edmunds before and after 1066, but the king had a fourth part of the market. It was a small place with twenty-six burgesses and a manor of 2 carucates.*" Clare, Richard Fitz Gilbert's manor, was much larger, with forty-three burgesses, five sokemen, and a considerable population of unfree peasants. Here, too, there was a market, but the urban element is somewhat obscured by the rural details entered in the Survey: — the woodland and mill, the vineyard, the farm-stock, and ploughs.*" At Sudbury, where King William had taken over the land of the mother of Earl Morcar, there were sixty-three burgesses attached to the hall, fifty-five burgesses on the demesne holding arable land and meadow, a market, and a mint {moneyers) .*^^ Of Bury St. Edmunds we have already spoken. It had a great history before it, but in 1086 it was still merely the vill {villa) ' where rests enshrined Saint Edmund King and Martyr of glorious memory.' *" We close the volume of ' Little Domesday ' and leave the Suffolk Survey with the consciousness that its secrets are still unrevealed, and that years of labour must be spent if the text is to be fully analysed, and if the many problems which arise from it are to be solved. But in all investigations we shall be wise to treat Great and Little Domesday as one whole, and, in the words of the colophon which closes the description of Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, to extend our studies * non solum per hos tres comitatus sed etiam per alios.'

  • " Dom. Bk. 3193, 320, 321 ; Thrandeston, 445^. *" Ibid. 369^, 370.

•" Ibid. 389^, 390. •" Ibid. 286^. «• Ibid. 372. 4"