East Anglia and the Danelaw

Abstract

IT has been, and still is, the considered opinion of many scholars that the freemen and sokemen who figure so prominently in the Domesday Survey of the northern and eastern counties of England were the descendants of the rank-and-file of the Danish armies of the ninth century. The theory is not based on any precise knowledge of Scandinavian peasant-society in the ninth century, but on the geographical distribution of the free peasantry in England. It was first propounded by E. W. Robertson in 1862:In the Danelage, … omitting Yorkshirefrom the calculation, between a third and a fourth of the entire population were classified either as liberi homines or as socmen. … Free Socage, the very tenure of which is sometimes supposed to have been peculiarly a relic of Anglo-Saxon liberty, appears to have been absolutely unknown except among the Danes.