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Yorkshire only 447 sokemen against 5,079 villans and
1,819 bordars, but this was after the ravaging of
Yorkshire when the free population either perished or
was brought into an inferior position, while Lincolnshire
escaped with less damage, and showed the old
state of society as in King Eadward’s days. At
Domesday time there were few sokemen left in
Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Herts. and Bucks.,
but they were thick in Leicestershire, Notts. and
Northamptonshire. K. Rhamm, quoted by Prof.
Vinogradoff (Eng. Hist. Rev., xxi., p. 357), seems
in a recent work to regard sokemen as a Danish
alternative for villans, and developed out of leysings
or freedmen. As they existed also in Kent, they
must not be supposed a specially Scandinavian
institution, but they were more plentiful, not only in
Danish as compared with English districts, but in
Danish as compared with English manors. In
Lincolnshire, counting the sokemen, villans and
bordars of the Survey, it is found that in the manors
with distinctively English names the sokemen
numbered two-fifths of the population, while in
manors with names suggesting Danish origin they
formed three-fifths (Boyle, Hull Literary Club, 1895).
We may perhaps say that in the Danelaw they
represent the original freeholders of the settlement,
who even as odal proprietors owed at least obedience
to the local Thing, from which the transition to their
place in Anglo-Saxon England was easy. It was in
the districts not forcibly conquered by King Eadward
the Elder that the free settlers remained and flourished,
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