44 English and Continental Backgrounds
in money also. The land passed from father to son, and
the holder could not be evicted while all the regular
services were performed; but he probably had little
freedom to dispose of his land. As to whether he had
the right to quit the soil, it is hard to make a positive
statement, for he probably seldom attempted it. This
whole class shows the effects of the feudalising movements.
While legally free, and distinguished quite clearly from
the serfs, these villeins, owing to the hold the lords had
gotten upon their land and services, and the jurisdiction
which, in many cases, the lords had over them, were
practically quite unfree. In the north and east of England
there is evidence of a class of sokemen, the term freemen,
Uberi homines (used in some narrow and special sense),
being also common. The men indicated by these names
are not to be sharply distinguished from the villeins;
probably in many cases, men who were called sokemen in
one shire would have been called villeins in another.
Taken as a whole, the class stood a little higher in the
scale of actual freedom; in one way or another, the soke-
men were a little less dependent upon their lords. They
could choose their lords and were perhaps freer to "go
with their land" from one to another. Some of them
were lords themselves, but they were not, of course,
noble.1 Above the non-noble freemen were the nobles,
the great landholders. These were the thegns, the earls,
and the great ecclesiastics. It will be seen that, with
fairly definite lines marking off the servile from the free,
and the noble from the non-noble, there lay between the
servile and the noble a vast body of men over whom a
change was passing, a change that had gone just far enough
to blur the old characteristics, but not far enough to bring
1 There is a theory which has some plausibility that the sokemen were
the descendants of the Danish freedmen or tiesings. As members of the
conquering army they had to be given holdings and a position in the vills
somewhat above the Saxon villeins, and yet their former status precluded
their becoming lords of the land like the free, conquering Danes. It is to
be noted that very few sokemen are found in any part of England except
where the Danes conquered and settled. See Cambridge Medieval History,
iii., 354-