DOMESDAY SURVEY 6 per cent., as against 1 5 per cent, in Northamptonshire. In part it is probable that this difference between two contiguous counties is to be explained by the large tracts of unmanorialized sokeland in the former, for the Domesday serf was essentially connected with the demesne land of his manor, where he would seem to have taken charge of his lord's ploughs and oxen. No consistent ratio, such as obtains in some of the southern counties, can be made out in Leicestershire between the number of demesne ploughs and the number of serfs on a manor, and in general the serfs tend to be found only on the more valuable estates in the shire. An interesting accompani- ment of the Leicestershire servus is the ancilla or serf wife, who is entered at Tur Langton, Lutterworth, Foxton, Barrow on Soar, Kegworth, and a dozen other manors in the county. It is obvious that she must have existed else- where, but she is probably only entered in the description of those manors where she held some definite position, being, for instance, in charge of the manorial dairy, and even so we must allow for the caprice of the Domesday scribe in the matter of her inclusion in the survey. The ancilla figures largely in the description of such western counties as Worcester and Hereford, but not at all in the surveys of Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, and in only two entries in Nottinghamshire, so that her casual appear- ance in Leicestershire gives us a useful hint that the distinction between the social arrangements of the east and west may not really have been so sharp and significant as is sometimes assumed. The town of Leicester is of peculiar interest in English municipal history as the one borough of high rank in regard to which the king's fiscal rights, elsewhere jealously guarded by the royal exchequer, came to pass into the hands of a subject." By 1 130 at least the earl of Leicester was possessed of all the dues from the town which in other boroughs were matters of crown revenue, and a great proportion of the land and houses within Leicester belonged directly to the earl of the shire. This being the case, it is not a little curious that the count of Meulan, the future earl of Leicester, held no land whatever in the county town in 1086, although his manor of Aylestone lay just outside the borough walls. The means by which he came to obtain his great position in Leicester are described by Ordericus Vitalis in the well- known passage to which we have referred above, and which deserves quotation here at length : The town of Leicester formerly had four lords, the king and the bishop of Lincoln, earl Simon, and Ivo son of Hugh (de Grentemaisnil). The aforementioned count of Meulan craftily gained his position by means of Ivo's share, who was governour of the town (municeps) and sheriff and the king's farmer; and through the king's assistance and his own cunning he gained possession of the whole city, and thereupon, being created an earl in England, he sur- passed all the magnates of the realm and nearly all his own kinsfolk in wealth and power. 60 The possessions of these four lords are revealed clearly enough in Domesday. Earl Simon's quarter of the town is represented by the twenty- eight houses and six carucates of borough land held by the Countess Judith, whose daughter Maud had married the first Senliz earl of Northampton. The bishop of Lincoln's estate is described with the rest of his fief apart from " Pollock and Maitland, Hist, ofEngl. Law, , 638 : 'The king can convey away his lordship, but in England it is not common to find a borough of high rank that has been mediatized. Leicester is the great example.' 60 Ord. Vit. Hist. Eccles. iv, 168. 301
