I have not been able, in the present instance, to keep clear of the evidence belonging to the intermediate period between the Saxon and the feudal arrangements of society; this deviation from the general rule, according to which such evidence is to be discussed separately and in connexion with the Conquest, was unavoidable in our case, because it is only in the light of the laws of Henry I that some important feudal facts can be understood. in a trial as to suit of court between the Abbot of Glastonbury and two lay lords, the defendants plead that they are bound to appear at the Abbot's hundred court personally or by attorney only on the two law-days, whereas for the judgment of thieves their freemen, their reeves and ministers have to attend in order to take part in the judgment.(37*) It is clearly a case of substitution, like the one mentioned in Leg. Henrici, c. 7, and the point is, that the representatives of the fee are designated as reeves and freemen. Altogether the two contradictory aspects in which the hundredors are made to appear can hardly be explained otherwise than on the assumption of a fluctuation between the conception of the hundred as of an assembly of freemen, and its treatment under the influence of feudal notions as to social divisions. In one sense the hundredors are villains: they come from the vill, represent the bulk of its population, which consists of villains, and are gradually put on a different footing from the greater people present. In another sense they are free men, and even treated as freeholders, because they form part of a communal institution intended to include the free class and to exclude the servile class.(38*) If society had been arranged consistently on the feudal basis, there would have been no room for the representation of the vill instead of the manor, for the representation of the vill now by the lord and now by a deputation of peasants, for a terminology which appears to confuse or else to neglect the distinction between free and servile holding. As it is, the intricate constitution of the hundred, although largely modified and differentiated by later law, although cut up as it were by the feudal principle of territorial service, looks still in the main as an organisation based on the freedom of the mass of the people.(39*) The free people had to attend virtually, if not actually, and a series of contradictions sprang up from the attempt to apply this principle to a legal state which had almost eliminated the notion of freedom in its treatment of peasantry on villain land. As in these feudal relations all stress lay on tenure and not on status, the manorial documents seem to raise the hundredors almost or quite to the rank of freeholders, although in strict law they may have been villains. The net results seem to be: (1)that the administrative constitution of hundred and county is derived from a social system which did not recognise the feudal opposition between freeholder and villain; (2) that we must look upon feudal villainage as representing to a large extent a population originally free; (3) that this original freedom was not simply one of personal status, but actually influenced the conception of tenure even in later days.(40*)If in manorial documents these 'hundredors' occupy as it were an ambiguous position, the same may be said of another and a very important class -- the socmen. The socage tenure has had a very curious terminological history. Everybody knows that it appears in Domesday as a local peculiarity of Danish districts; in modern law it came to be a general name for any freehold that was neither knight service, frankalmoign, nor grand sergeanty. It became in fact the normal and typical free tenure, and as such it was treated by the Act of Charles II abolishing military tenure.
Long before this -- even in the thirteenth century -- 'free socage' was the name of a freehold tenure fully protected by the King's Courts. Very great men occasionally held land in free socage (per liberum socagium); they even held of the King in chief by free socage, and the tenure had many advantages, since it was free from the burdensome incidents of wardship and marriage. But no one would have called these men socmen (sokemanni, socomanni). On the other hand, the socmen, free socmen, were to he found all over England and not in the Danish country only. It is of the tenure of these socmen that we have to speak now. In a trial of Edward the First's time the counsel distinguish three manners of persons -- free men, villains, and socmen. These last are said to occupy an intermediate position, because they are as statu liberi in regard to their lords.(41*)The passage occurs in a case relating to ancient demesne, but the statement is made quite broadly, and the term 'socmen' is used without any qualification. As there were many socmen outside the King's possessions on the land of lay and spiritual lords, such usage may be taken as proof that the position of all these people was more or less identical. And so in our inquiry as to the characteristic traits of socage generally we may start from the ancient demesne. Further, we see that the socman's tenure is distinguished from free tenure, socmen from freeholders. In the law books of the time the free but non-military tenure has to be characterised not merely as socage, but as free socage: this fact will give us a second clue in analysing the condition.
