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were Carlford and Colneis. Bishop’s Hundred was a private hundred of the bishop of
Thetford. The ecclesiastical hundredal liberties had a long life after the conquest. 195
Soc in Domesday Book, at least for East Anglia, meant having jurisdiction
over certain people in the kind of cases and issues that would be dealt with in a
hundred court. It seems to be the same as what is meant in the charters by sac and
soc, literarily ‘cause’ and ‘suit’. If the owner of the soc also possessed the hundred
court, the two would merge into one. When this was not the case, there were various
possibilities. The man under the soc might have to go to a court held by the owner of
the soc, instead of the hundred court, or perhaps the owner of the soc might receive
some of the profits that would normally go to hundred court, or even in some
respects the man might be answerable to two courts. 196
Peter Sawyer tends to regard sokes as concealing something like a post-
Conquest tenant-in-chief together with his subtenants. 197 It is true that if A grants
land over which he has the soc to B, A is likely, on whatever terms the grant was
made, to retain the soc over B’s land. However, while what Sawyer suggests may be
true in some cases, it is clearly not always or even usually true. Not all soc over the
land of others originated in grants of land by the soc holder. For example, the abbot
of Ely’s extensive soc in his private hundreds in eastern Suffolk clearly reflects
something different from widespread tenancies. 198
Commendation before 1066 was a kind of homage, where the freeman who
is commending himself promises loyalty and support to the lord, which might
195 Warner, Origins of Suffolk, pp. 145-6; Cam, Hundred and the Hundred Rolls, pp. 279-80.
196 Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 517-8; Loyn, Governance of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 129,
162-3, 171; for a pre-Conquest royal grant with sac and soc, ibid., p. 114; for post-Conquest charters
with sac and soc in East Anglia, see for example Regesta, i, no. 385; ibid., ii. no. 656; ibid., iii. no.
618.
197 Sawyer, “1066-1086: A Tenurial Revolution?”, p. 81.
198 For a broader criticism of Sawyer’s arguments for the continuity of lordships over the Norman
Conquest, see Fleming, “Domesday Book and the Tenurial Revolution”, pp. 87-101.
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