Definition
A feudal custom obligating tenants to grind their grain at the lord's mill, typically to the exclusion of any other mill. Socome was a manorial obligation rather than a freely negotiated arrangement — tenants were bound to it by virtue of their tenure, and the lord derived income from the milling fees (multure) collected as a result. The custom operated as a form of economic monopoly embedded in the tenurial relationship between lord and tenant.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A custom of tenants to grind corn at the lord's mill.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A custom of tenants to grind corn at the lord's mill.
The common and legal definitions are, for once, virtually identical — socome never passed into general English usage and exists almost exclusively as a term of feudal legal custom. The only nuance the legal sources add is the distinction between voluntary custom and compelled obligation, captured in the subtype below.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Bond-socome: The stricter form, in which tenants were legally bound to grind at the lord's mill by the terms of their tenure. Blount's Fragmenta Antiquitatis distinguishes this from socome more generally, suggesting that socome could sometimes describe a customary practice that had not yet hardened into an enforceable obligation. In practice, however, the distinction mattered primarily in disputes over whether a particular tenant could be compelled to use the lord's mill or merely expected to do so by custom.
Why It Matters in Research
Socome is a term a researcher will encounter almost exclusively in one context: historical sources dealing with manorial courts, feudal tenure, and the obligations of villeins and customary tenants in medieval and early modern England. It belongs to a cluster of milling-related terms — including multure, suit of mill, and soke — that describe the lord's economic rights over grain production on the manor.
The key research trap is assuming socome is synonymous with soke. They are related but not identical. Soke is the broader jurisdictional right, often including the right to hold court and exact various services; socome is specifically the milling obligation that could arise from soke but was a distinct custom. Historical dictionaries sometimes blur this line.
Because socome was an incident of villeinage and customary tenure, it largely disappeared as a legally operative concept with the transformation of villeinage in the post-medieval period. By the time English common law was being systematically reported and digested, socome was already an antiquarian term. Researchers working in Year Books, manorial records, or early equity proceedings may encounter it; researchers in anything later than the seventeenth century are unlikely to find it in active legal use.
In American legal materials, socome has no operative history. It appears in American editions of Black's Law Dictionary purely as a term of English legal history.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary give substantively identical definitions, each citing Cowell's Interpreter (1607) for the general definition and Blount's Fragmenta Antiquitatis (1679) for the bond-socome distinction. This dual citation pattern is characteristic of Black's treatment of obsolete feudal terms — the compilers drew on the same antiquarian legal glossaries rather than case law, because by the time Black's was compiled socome had no living jurisprudence.
Webster's 1913 and Wiktionary reproduce the Cowell formulation without the bond-socome distinction, confirming that the term passed into general reference works only in its simplified form. The historical dictionaries are in agreement on substance; there is no meaningful divergence between editions.
What historical sources do not address: the procedural mechanisms by which a lord enforced socome against a recalcitrant tenant, or how disputes over milling obligations were resolved in manorial courts. Researchers needing that level of detail should turn to primary manorial records or specialized histories of English agrarian law rather than the dictionary tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
Socome is exclusively a term of English feudal and manorial law. It has no counterpart in Scottish, Irish, or American legal systems, and was not transplanted into colonial or common-law jurisdictions as an operative legal concept.