Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/466

 A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK brother of the Abbot of Ely held a manor under King Edw^ard before the Conquest with soke and sac 'over the hall demesne only,' w^hile the soke of the six sokemen on the demesne was in the hundred.^" In the borough of Sudbury the soke is said to be in villa}^^ The freemen of those hundreds which had not been granted out to the great religious houses seem to have been normally under the soke of the public authorities, ' the King and the Earl ' in the hundred court.^"' A good illustration of this is found in Blything Hundred, in the case of those freemen of Roger Bigot who have a special heading of the Suffolk Survey to themselves.-"* Even here, however. Bigot and Robert Malet were beginning to encroach on the royal jurisdic- tion,"" and the disputes over rights of sac and soke, which occur not infrequently in the Survey, show that in Suffolk, as in other parts of England, the Norman lords were 'assuming a soke which their antecessores did not enjoy.' ^'"' At Combs and at Onehouse, on the fief of Robert of Mortain, ' no custom was rendered in the hundred after Count Brien, Robert's antecessor, had the land.' ^" Closely connected with these grants or assumptions of soke is the extension of seignorial jurisdiction, and in particular, in Suffolk, the surrender to St. Edmund's Abbey of the reserved pleas of the Crown, ' the six forfeitures of St. Edmund.' ■"' If now we turn from franchises to those who exercised them, and look at the list of Suffolk tenants-in-chief of the Crown at the date of the Domesday Survey, we are at once struck by that ' unity of East Anglia,*"' which was typified, both before and after the Conquest, not only by the common earldom and the common bishopric of Norfolk and Suffolk, but by the large number of territorial magnates, Norman feudatories and their antecessores, who held land in both counties. Suffolk, indeed, was a sort of half-way house, a meeting-place for the landholders of Norfolk on the one hand, and of Essex on the other. Out of 71 Suffolk tenants-in-chief, 21 held directly of the Crown in both Norfolk and Essex, 17 held in Norfolk and not in Essex, and 1 3 in Essex and not in Norfolk, while only 20 had a leading place in Little Domesday in Suffolk alone of the three eastern counties. ^^^ It follows that much has already been written on these holders of land in the articles on Essex and Norfolk, though something still remains to be said of them, and one famous house at least, that of Richard Fitz Gilbert of Clare, among the lay feudatories, with one great ecclesiastical foundation, the abbey of St. Edmund, belong primarily to the history of Suffolk. •^ Dom. Bk. 343*. ■• Fineberga,' ' Staham,' 336, 350, 350^, ' Buckeshala.' »• Ibid. 286^. "' Ibid. 333^, 334 ; Thorpe. R. Bigot soke, R. Malet soke over 2 acres. * Cnotesheale.' R. Malet soke, cf. 291^, 292^, 295, 305, 309, 313, 313^, for the soke of the 'King and the Earl.' "* Maitland. op. cit. 94, n. i. "' Dom. Bk. 291 ; cf 285^, 319^, 320 ; ' Eiam.' 360^, 'Anhus' ; here the king's reeve had 4/. for the soke (' propter socam ') of a freeman. '"'Ibid. 349, 373, 3843, 391, 397, 3971}, 4133, 414*; 'Rexet Comes vi forisfacturas ' ; Maitland, op. cit. 88 ; Vinogradoff, op. cit. 1 1 1, et seq. «« y.C.H. Norf. ii, 5. "° Of course many of these held also in Cambridgeshire and elsewhere. 388
 * except over the hall of Walton, and villeins.' ^'"' At Haughley, Gutmund the
 * " Ibid. 408^. For other instances of freemen and sokemen whose soke was ' in the hundred,' cf. 285,
 * " Vinogradoff, op. cit. 120 ; Maitland, op. cit. 95 ; F.C.H. Norf. ii, 32-4.
 * " Dom. Bk. 333* et seq.