SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY IN 1086, at the time of the Domesday Survey, Rutland was chiefly forest land. Villages and hamlets, with their fields and meadows, lay in the fertile valleys between the gentle slopes of the low hills, but there was not a single burgh or aggregation of houses large enough to be called a town within the district known as Rutland.^ Small as is the Rutland of to-day, it was even smaller at that period, and consisted only of what we now know as the hundreds of Alstoe, Oakham-soke, and Martinsley. The other parts of the county, as it is now, were included in the Domesday Survey of Northamptonshire. The King held a large proportion of the manors, and a few of these were let ' at farm.' Holding at farm was very different from ' holding of the King,' or of any other overlord. It meant that the ' farmer ' could cultivate the land and make from it what profit he was able, but he had usually to give a certain fixed amount, not proportion, of the produce or its equivalent in money to the owner, and the term ' ad firmam ' did not imply any hereditary right to the land. That the ' farmer ' had not necessarily any claim to the services ^ of the men belonging to the land at farm may be seen by an entry concerning lands farmed by Hugh de Forth in Luffenham and Sculthorp ; the men there seem to have worked for the king when ordered to do so by the reeve.' The inhabitants of the villages consisted mainly of villeins and bordars (cottagers), but there were also priests and socmen. Authorities have not yet been able to agree as to the exact economic position of the sochemanni, but a few facts concerning them have been fairly well established : (i) Their holdings varied greatly in size ; * (2) they held their land freely, but per- formed agricultural services instead of the military services performed by the ordinary free tenant, their works being usually certain, and fixed in amount and kind, and thus differing from those performed by villeins ; (3) they very often, though not invariably, had power to alienate their land without licence from any lord. These socmen may have been the descendants of some of the Danes belonging to the later settlements, a fact which would explain why they were to be found only in the counties of the Danelaw.' ' Rutland was not a county until the reign of John. ' Arrangements concerning the farming of land varied considerably according to the special agreement made between owner and farmer. ' Dom. Bk. , zigti. ' The socman thus differed from the villein, whose typical holding was I virgate. ' W. F. Allen, Monographs and Essay, 327. 211
