Page:VCH Essex 1.djvu/427

 THE DOMESDAY SURVEY their name to Guines Court in Tollesbury, where, as at other places in Essex, they held of the Honour of Boulogne. 1 Woodham Walter, again, reminds us of its lords the house of Fitz Walter, descended in the male line from the Domesday lord of Clare. That those whom the Norman lords replaced as holders of wide estates were the chief sufferers by the Conquest is no doubt the case ; but if the peasantry, and even what may be termed the yeomanry, re- mained as before upon the land, it does not follow that their condition had in no way changed for the worse. Obscure as is still the gradation of classes in England before the Conquest, it appears to be now generally held that the coming of the Normans tended to simplify the classification. If the learned researches of Professor Maitland 2 failed to enable him to arrive at any clear or definite conclusion on the liberi homines, the socemanni and the "villani of Domesday, it is not likely that others will be more successful in the task. Indeed, the more one studies the Survey, the more one shrinks from attaching to its terms a denotation so precise as that of modern times. I have already drawn attention to the evidence in the Essex survey of such terms as ' thegn ' or ' free man ' being in- differently used. 8 It is this recklessness of the scribe as the modern mind would deem it which makes it rash to argue from such an entry as we find, for instance, under Goldhanger, where we read of an estate annexed, apparently, to the main manor that ' 9 free men dwelt on (in) half a hide, and one man (who was) a thegn held 30 acres, and two others (who were) free men held 10 acres.' Here we might infer that a * thegn ' was distinct from a * free man,' had we not evidence to the contrary in the Survey itself. Again, in this same entry we read lower down of 1 5 acres which had belonged to one ' free thegn ' (francus teignus), a formula which is probably unique in Domesday, although in its other volume we have once teini liberi (fo. 254). So, in Essex, when the scribe was tired of writing liberi homines, he wrote, for a change, franci homines* One ought, perhaps, to say something of the Essex entries bearing on the difficult subject of status, but for the general reader it will be sufficient to know that the English peasants did suffer by the substitution of English for French lords. . . . We cannot treat either the legal or the economic history of our peasantry as a continuous whole ; it is divided into two parts by the red thread of the Norman Conquest. That is a catastrophe. ... As a result of the Conquest, the peasants, at all events some of the peasants, had fallen from their free estate ; free men, holding freely, they had been compelled to do unfree services. . . . Domesday Book is full of evidence that the tillers of the soil are being depressed. Here we may read of a free man with half a hide who has now been made one of the villeins, etc., etc. 6 I break off the quotation here with an instance taken from the first entry in the Essex survey. The fate of this Benfleet ' free man ' is one of the most eloquent incidents recorded in the great Survey." 1 See feudal England, p. 463. 4 Illustrations of the scribe's vagaries will be afforded in the instances of duplicate entries below. 6 Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 51, 60, 61. * See p. 428 below. 357
 * Dometday Book and Beyond, pp. 25, 39-46, 67 et seq. * See p. 35* above.