A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK spoke of manors as they existed T.R.E.,' though it is probable that they did not use the term manerium at random, and that it carried with it some idea of lordship, of landlordship, and of political responsibility. The Suffolk manor of the Domesday Inquest is an economic unit, but an economic unit which forms a link in an administrative system, organized on an aristocratic basis. Sometimes, as Professor Vinogradoff has shown,^* it is the economic unity on which stress is laid in the description of pre-Conquest estates, the manor appears primarily as an agrarian centre ; or it is an administrative centre, or a jurisdictional and political centre, while at the two extremes of the manorial scale are the great royal manors, and the maneriola or small peasant holdings, which are called ' manors ' in the returns. These small manors are sufficiently distinctive of East Anglia to be discussed somewhat more fully. Professor Maitland has asked what is the meaning of the ' petty maneria ' of Suffolk, and has answered that they are ' holdings which geld by themselves.'" In that case, at Elmham, in Wangford Hundred, there would be six such holdings, six houses against which geld was charged, in a vill of about seventy free and fifty-three unfree ' recorded ' inhabitants, with a 'recorded' area of 8 carucates 15 acres, a va/et of jTio 12s. lod., and an assessment to the geld of 2od. in the pound." Or again, at Helmingham, in Claydon Hundred, where there were eight manors to a ' recorded ' population of forty-one free and twenty-eight unfree persons in the days of King Edward, and a ' recorded ' area of 6 carucates, 1 3I acres, there would be a tax-centre to every eight or nine householders." It seems more probable that the term manerium, when applied to these small holdings, is less narrowly technical than Professor Maitland would make it." The little manors of the Suffolk freemen and sokemen were often enough estates of 60 or 30 acres with no apparent division between demesne and tenant land, cultivated by one team or half a team, and by the labour of a bordar or two, or even, it may be, in some cases, by the ' lord of the manor ' himself and his household." Thus at Raydon, on the land of the Bishop of Bayeux, in the south of the county, we have Edwi a freeman with a manor of i carucate in extent, one plough, 4 bordars, 5 acres of meadow and a mill, and in the same vill are two 30-acre manors, held by freemen, each with half a team, one bordar tenant, and 2 acres of meadow, and a 60-acre manor with one team and a bordar.*" At Tattingstone, in the same neighbourhood, no tenants at all are mentioned on the 60-acre manor of the freeman Turgot, which had been worked by a single plough before the Conquest," while at Thistleton, in Carlford Hundred, an instance occurs of a manor of 60 acres held by Ulmar, a freeman com- mended to the Abbot of Ely, with five freemen under him [sub se) and no servile or customary tenants.** From the parallel passage in the Inquisitio " Cf. his classification of manors, op. cit. 3 1 1 et seq. " Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 125. " Dom. Bk. 327^, 379, 380. " Ibid. 352*, 394*, 423. "For a different theory of the meaning of the Suffolk 'maneria' cf. Ballard, The Dom. Inq. 55, 135. 136. " Maitland, op. cit. 1 17-19 ; Vinogradoff, op. cit. 332-8.
- > Dom. Bk. 378. 'Reindune ;' cf. 394*, ' Scoteleia' (Celeolt), «Torp ' (Osbem).
" Ibid. 378*. 'Tatituna.' " Ibid. 386 ; Maitland, op. cit. 1 19, n. 2 ; Ballard, op. cit. 136. Mr. Ballard explains this by interpreting
- sub se ' as ' commended,' and concluding that the five freemen were not Ulmar's tenants. But the Survey
specially records that two of them were commended to the ' antecessor ' of Geofirey de Mandeville.
