SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY Part I jA T the time of the Conquest Suffolk was perhaps (excluding Middlesex) /% the most densely populated county in England. The persons of / % all classes mentioned in its Domesday Survey number 20,491. Larger numbers are recorded in the case of Lincoln and Norfolk, but the acreage of these counties is more than proportionately greater. The population was moreover as remarkable for its quality as for its quantity. Of the 12,423 freemen recorded in Domesday,^ 7,460, or more than half, were in Suffolk. Of socmen, whose status differed from that of freemen mainly in their inability to sell their land without the lord's permission, Suffolk had 1,060. These two classes taken together constituted about the same proportion to the rest of the population in Norfolk as in Suffolk, and the same is true of the disappearing class of serfs who numbered 995 in Norfolk, and 909 in Suffolk. There were, however, about four thousand more villeins and cottars in Norfolk than in Suffolk, where the villeins only numbered 2,814, and the cottars (bordarii) 6,226, making together con- siderably less than half of the whole. Throughout England as a whole, and in most of the separate counties, the villeins and cottars were more than two- thirds of the recorded population. Both the larger numbers and the superior status of the men of Suffolk, Norfolk, and Lincolnshire, must be mainly attributed to the accident of geographical position. The successive waves of invasion naturally left a richer deposit of settlers along the eastern coast, and the defeated race left a smaller remnant in that region to swell the ranks of serfdom. It may be inferred from what has been said that the typical holder of land in Suffolk was the freeman of small estate. The larger manors of several hundred acres, cultivated with the assistance of a score of villeins and of one or two serfs, were to be found indeed in all parts of the county, and accounted for the greater part of the soil, but they by no means dominated every township as in most parts of England, nor did they contain the majority of the cultivators of the soil. There were many small manors which had none of the economic characteristics associated with the name, containing, as they did quite commonly, only 30 acres, the usual size of a villein holding ' F. W. Maitland, Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 19-20 ; Ellis, Introd. to Dom. ji, 469-70, 488-90, 51 1-14 ; A. Ballard, The Dom. Surv. 114, 264. I 633 80
