which has evidently to be applied to the whole population except the tofters, has dropped out in regard to the half-virgate tenants of the Earl Marshall. If we had only the fragment relating to his nine bondmen, we might conclude perhaps that there was no certain tenure in the manor. The inference would have been false, but a good many inferences as to the social standing of the peasantry are based on no better foundation. In any case the most important part of the population of Soham, as far as it belonged to the king and to the earl, consisted of socmen who at the same time are called bondmen, and were called villains in Domesday.
Soham is ancient demesne. Let us now take Crowmarsh in Oxfordshire.(48*) Two-thirds of it belonged to the Earl of Oxford in 1279, and one-third to the Lord de Valence. At the time of the Domesday Survey it was in the hands of Walter Giffard, and therefore not ancient demesne. On the land of the Earl of Oxford we find in 1279 nine servi socomanni holding six virgates, there are a few cotters and a few free tenants besides; the remaining third is occupied by two 'tenentes per servicium socomannorum,'
and by a certain number of cotters and free tenants. It can hardly be doubted that the opposition between servi and liberi is not based on the certainty of the tenure; the socmen hold as securely as the free tenants, but they are labourers, while these latter are exempted from the agricultural work of the village.
The terms are used in the same way as the 'terra libera' and the 'terra operabilis' of the Glastonbury inquest.
I need not say that the socmen of ancient demesne, privileged villains as Bracton calls them, are sometimes subjected to very burdensome services and duties. Merchet is very common among them; it even happens that they have to fine for it at the will of the lord.(49*) But all the incidents of base tenure are to be found also outside the ancient demesne in connexion with the class under discussion. If we take the merchet we shall find that at Magna Tywa, Oxon,(50*) it is customary to give the steward a sword and four pence for licence to give away one's daughter within twenty miles in the neighbourhood; in Haneberg, Oxon,(51*)a spear and four pence are given in payment. The socmen of Peterborough Abbey (52*) have to pay five shillings and four pence under the name of merchet as a fine for incontinence (the legerwite properly so-called), and there is besides a marriage payment (redempcio sanguinis) equal for socmen and villains. The same payment occurs in the land of Spalding Priory, Lincoln.(53*)The same fact strikes us in regard to tallage and aids, i.e. the taxes which the lord had a right to raise from his subjects. In Stoke Basset, Oxon,(54*) the socmen are placed in this respect on the same footing with the villains. The Spalding Cartulary adds that their wainage is safe in any case.(55*) On the lands of this priory the classes of the peasantry are generally very near to each other, so that incidents and terms often get confused.(56*)And not only socmen have to bear such impositions: we find them constantly in all shapes and gradations in connection with free tenantry. The small freeholder often takes part in rural work,(57*) sometimes he has to act as a kind of overseer,(58*)and in any case this base labour would not degrade him from his position.(59*) Already in Bracton's day the learned thought that the term 'socage' was etymologically connected with the duty of ploughing: -- a curious proof both of the rapidity with which past history had become unintelligible, and of the perfect compatibility of socage with labour services. Merchet, heriot, and tallage occur even more often.(60*) All such exactions testify to the fact that the conceptions of feudal law as to the servile character of particular services and payments were in a great measure artificial. Tallage, even arbitrary tallage, was but a tax after all, and did not detract from personal freedom or free tenure in this sense. Then heriot often occurs among free people in the old Saxon form of a surrender of horse and arms as well as in that of the best ox.(61*) Merchet is especially interesting as illustrating the fusion of different duties into one. It is the base payment par excellence, and often used in manorial documents as a means to draw the line between free and unfree men.(62*) Nevertheless free tenants are very often found to pay it.(63*) In most cases they have only to fine in the case when their daughters leave the manor, and this, of course, has nothing degrading in it: the payment is made because the lord loses all claim as to the progeny of the woman who has left his dominion. But there is evidence besides to show that free tenants had often to pay in such a case to the hundred, and the lords had not always succeeded in dispossessing the hundred.(64*) Such a fine probably developed out of a payment to the tribe or to a territorial community in the case when a woman severed herself from it. It had nothing servile in its origin. And still, if the documents had not casually mentioned these instances, we should have been left without direct evidence as to a difference of origin in regard to merchet or gersum. Is it not fair to ask, whether the merchet of the villains themselves may not in some instances have come from a customary recompense paid originally to the community of the township into the rights of which the lord has entered? However this may be, one fact can certainly not be disputed: men entirely free in status and tenure were sometimes subjected to an exaction which both public opinion and legal theory considered as a badge of servitude.
