Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/485

 DOMESDAY SURVEY twenty-four fishermen {piscatores) at Yarmouth.*" Suffolk was mainly an agricultural county, and the peasants, free and unfree, were chiefly occupied in the cultivation of the arable. The manorial estates were usually divided into the lord's demesne and the land of the tenants, to which corresponded the demesne ploughs and the men's ploughs, though this distinction is not always apparent. The centre of the manor, the outward visible sign of the lord's authority, was the hall or manor-house, the aula, halla, mansio, or, as it is once called, the caput manerii. The Suffolk Survey has not very much to tell us about the manorial halls, but its occasional references to them are not without interest. We hear of horses ' in the hall 'or ' in the demesne of the hall;' of berewicks 'belonging' {pertinens) to a hall in another hundred, and of soke which extended only over the demesne of the hall, or over the hall and the bordars ; of a freeman and his land held ' in the hall demesne ' ; *" of a caput manerii worth looj.,"* and of two manors which are described as mansiones^^^ In Suffolk, as in Norfolk and Essex, the stock on the manorial farms is recorded : — the ploughs and plough-oxen [boves), the ' beasts ' {animalid) and animalia otiosa, or cattle used for other purposes than ploughing, the rounceys [runcini) and horses {equi), the sheep and goats, the pigs and the bees.*" Cows (vaccae) are only occasionally mentioned, but they may sometimes have been included in the animalia on a manor.*" Sheep-farming seems to have been more evenly distributed throughout the county in Suffolk than in Norfolk.*" Flocks of loo sheep or more are found in every hundred except Loes and the half-hundreds of Parham and Ipswich. The largest flocks were in the northern hundreds of Lackford and Bradmere and the half-hundred of Lothing. On the royal manor of Milden- hall in Lackford Hundred there were i,ooo sheep, with 500 in the dependent berewick of Icklingham, while at Downham, in the same hundred, a manor which had passed from St. Edmund's Abbey to Frodo, the abbot's brother, there were 900 sheep ; at Eriswell, Godwin, King Edward's thegn, had kept a flock of 900 before the Conquest, which had been reduced to 800 in 1086.*" Goats are also entered in considerable numbers, especially in the hundreds of Blything and Bishop's, where as many as sixty are found in one herd. Of horses we hear frequently, but they are not very numerous and are more often rounceys or farm-horses than equi, which are generally connected with the hall, and may have been riding horses or horses used for breeding purposes, though the different terms were probably not applied with any great precision.*'** ' Forest mares ' {equae silvaticae), or mares turned "' Dom. Bk. 283, 314^, • Edwinus faber'; 334*, ' Bunda faber ' ; 339^, 'Godricus faber'; 435^, ' Faber ' ; cf. 314^, ' Aluricus filius fabri.' For the whole subject of the unfree peasantry cf. Vinogradoff, op. cit. sec. iii, chap, ii ; Maitland, op. cit. ♦" Dom. Bk. 286*, 304, 350^, 355, 355*5, 362, 362^, 374, 3813, 382, 382^, 401^, 402*, 403, 408^, 411, 416, 4163, 418, 449 ; cf. 343^ : St. Etheldreda had soke over all the land except Walton Hall and villeins ; Vinogradoff, op. cit. 3S3 et seq. et seq. "» F.C.H. Norf. ii, 23-4. "» Dom. Bk. 2883, 359, 4023. Domesday cf Maitland, Dom. Bk. and Beyond ; Index, 'Horses.' The horses which the Suffolk sokemen had to supply to the Abbot of Ely, which were presumably riding-horses, are called ' equi.' 407
 * " Dom. Bk. 2933. "« Ibid. 415, Cratfield.
 * " For the meaning of the entries relating to the plough-teams and ' boves,' cf. Vinogradoff, op. cit. 153
 * " Dom. Bk. 3763, 3973, 398^, 400, Middleton ; cf Thorington {animalia otiosa) ; cf F.C.H. Notf.u, 23.
 * " Where Domesday Book has ' equi ' the Inquisitio Eliemis usually has ' runcini.' For horses in