HISTORICAL NOTES THE MANORS OF CRICK - 6 Crick and the Domesday Book – Appendix The one part of the Domesday entry for Crick which has yet to be discussed, is that concerning the four "sokemen" who were attached to the manor. Like all Domesday subjects, the question of 'soke' is far from simple, tart because it is both essential to our knowledge of the period, and of significance even to our society today, it is worth some attention. When the king granted a manorial estate to a subject, besides the gift of the land involved, there were a number of rights, privileges and associated profits which properly speaking belonged to the king, but which could accompany the grant. One of the most important was known as 'sac and soke', which in practice implied local jurisdiction, the power to dispense justice in the manor court if the lord had one, and to exact and 'retain fines as profits, at the same time giving protection to all tenants of the manor. The word 'Sac1 or in its proper form 'SACO1 meant a dispute, quarrel, crime or cause for legal jurisdiction, and stood most probably for the right to hold a local court to deal with offences, and certainly to collect fines. 'Soke’, or 'SOCN' meant literally a seeking, that is of a lord or protector, derived from 'secan1, to search for, so that the two words together have the meaning already given. The district over which the jurisdiction was exercised was the 'soke' or 'sokeland', and it is a term still familiar in relation to Peterborough, where the abbot was originally granted the jurisdiction and profits over a considerable portion of . Such large areas of sokeland were not numerous but there were hundreds of examples of a modest size, for soke was not necessarily confined to a single manor1s territory. The lord of one manor could have soke of a number of others, some near, some more distant, or even include parts of other manors. Examples of such sokes in our neighbourhood include Fawsley, , Stanford and , all holding soke over nearby manors or parts of manors. 'Sokemen' were, literally, those men who had sought the protection of a particular lord at some time in the past and who usually tenanted sokeland freely. They were generally free, and to use the Domesday Book expression "could go with their land to what lord they pleased", although there were some sokemen by the time of the survey who were not able to change to another lord. In fact, in this county, most men who were free were sokmen, in contrast to the eastern counties where there appeared to be two separate classes, freemen and sokemen, but the distinction between them is not at all certain. In Crick, the four sokemen were within the jurisdiction of the lord of the Manor, paying lOd. per annum as a fee, but the location of their land is not given. Because they were specifically attached to Crick, their holdings must have been outside the manor, and the most likely place is the area of Shenley. As we have seen, the hidage assessment for this area had to be added to that for Crick to make up the 4 hide unit, whilst it was included in the manor of , so that it seems very reasonable to assume that this was the land held by the sokemen of Crick. There are the remains of some very early field-systems in Shenley, marking it out as an individual area of land separate from the neighbouring vills. When the early (iron-age) settlement at Crick was established, the area of land was larger than it now is, and Shenley was part of it; but during the Saxon occupation when Yelvertoft was carved out of parts of , Elkington and Crick, Shenley was taken out of Crick into the territory of Telvertoft, where it remained. The holders of Shenley probably preferred to stay within the soke of Crick, which would account for their successors continuing as sokemen belonging to that manor. The interesting thing about soke, is that even today, everyone in the is within the soke, that is, the jurisdiction of the Crown, who administer justice and collect the fines and profits associated with the process. Soke, in fact, is a foundation stone of civilisation, and without it there would be anarchy.

E. W. Timmins Copied by J Goodger in 2005 from Crick News Christmas1980

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