A HISTORY OF HERTFORDSHIRE fordshire and Essex and south-west into Northamptonshire. Nor is it only for the sochemanni that this district is remarkable. It was, in the same writer's opinion, considerably 'richer and more populous' than the western portions of the kingdom, as it was also 'the home of liberty.' 1 In tracing therefore, in Hertfordshire, the occurrence of sochemanni and the widespread subdivision of the vills in the days before the Conquest, we are dealing with no isolated phenomenon, but with the links that connect the county with the district to its north-east, and with influ- ences which had made it even then comparatively populous and wealthy. 'Domesday Book is full of evidence that the tillers of the soil are being depressed.' Professor Maitland, who has told us this, observes that the most convincing proof of the depression of the peasantry comes to us from Cam- bridgeshire. . . . The Cambridgeshire of the Confessor's day had contained at the very least 900 instead of 200 sokemen. This is an enormous and a significant change. . . . The sokemen have fallen, and their fall has brought with it the consolidation of mano- rial husbandry and seignorial power. . . . No one can read the survey of Cambridge- shire without seeing that the freer sorts of the peasantry have been thrust out or rather thrust down. Evidence so cogent as this we shall hardly find in any part of the record save that which relates to Cambridgeshire and Bedfordshire. But great movements of the kind that we are examining will hardly confine themselves within the boundaries of a county. ... In Essex we may see the liberi homines disappearing. . . . There have been sokemen in Middlesex and in Surrey, but they have been suppressed. . . . Even in Suffolk they are suffering ill at the hands of their new masters, while in Cambridge- shire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire they have been suppressed or displaced.* It can, I think, be shown that the decrease in the number of sokemen, as a result of the Norman Conquest, was proportionately even more striking in Hertfordshire than in Cambridgeshire itself. If we leave out of account the royal manor of Hitchin, which presents ex- ceptional features, there were little more than 20 sokemen left in the whole county at the time of the Domesday Survey. And yet there had been no fewer than 195 under Edward the Confessor. 3 It was out of the question that Professor Maitland, writing on the whole of England, should be able to study minutely the Survey of each county, but a close examination of the Hertfordshire evidence has convinced me that the bulk of the sokemen are found in the extreme north and east of the county, forming, as it were, a fringe extending from Lilley to Hoddesdon, with Essex and Cambridgeshire as a kind of centre. Starting from Royston and working south, we have 6 sokemen at Barley, 4 at Barkway and 2 at Newsells in Barkway, 6 at Hodenhoe in Buckland, 9 at Widiall, 6 at ' Ichetone ' in Layston, 4 at Stonebury, 3 at Barksden Green to the west of it, and i at Westmill. Between these last places and the Essex border were Boreson Green (' Bordes- dene') with 13, Hormead with 7, and Pelham with 5. We have thus accounted for 66 sokemen before the Conquest in the north-eastern 1 Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 22-3. z Ibid. pp. 62-4, 67. 3 But, as Professor Maitland warns us (p. 20), ' there is reason to think that some of the freemen nd sokemen of these counties get counted twice or thrice over, because they held land under several different lords.' 266
