Definition
Sokemannes is the Law French plural form of "socman" (also spelled sokeman), referring to a class of medieval English feudal tenants who held land by socage tenure — a form of landholding defined by fixed, certain services, typically agricultural or monetary, as distinguished from the more burdensome and indefinite obligations of villeinage. Sokemannes occupied an intermediate position in the feudal hierarchy: freer than villeins but not of the full dignity of freeholders holding by knight service. Their obligations were tied to the soke — the jurisdiction or district over which a lord exercised rights of local administration and justice — and their tenure was generally hereditary and alienable within customary limits.
Common Confusion
Sokemannes is closely related to, but distinct from, villeins and free sokemen. Villeins held land subject to uncertain, arbitrary services at the lord's will; sokemannes held by defined, fixed obligations. Additionally, "free sokemen" in some sources denotes a higher subcategory with greater legal protections, while sokemannes in the broader sense encompasses those whose freedom was customarily recognized but not always legally absolute. Researchers should not conflate socage tenure (the mode of holding) with the status of the tenant: socage is the tenure; sokemannes describes the persons holding by it.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in medieval English legal sources and is unlikely to surface outside that context. Researchers working in Anglo-Norman and early common law materials will encounter sokemannes primarily in records concerning feudal land tenure, manorial courts, and the administration of sokes. The term signals a jurisdictional and tenurial context — the soke — that carries implications for which courts had cognizance of disputes, what services were owed, and what rights of inheritance and alienation attached.
The Law French form sokemannes (versus the Latinized socmanni or the Middle English sokeman) is a marker of documentary period and register. Brittон, the late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman legal treatise cited by Burrill, uses the term in contexts of personal status and land tenure obligations. Researchers relying on translated or modernized sources may find the term rendered inconsistently — as sokeman, socman, sochemanni, or socmanni — depending on whether the underlying source is Latin, Law French, or vernacular English.
A critical research trap: the legal significance of sokeman status shifted considerably between the Domesday period and the fourteenth century. In Domesday Book, sokemannes appear as a substantial class with recognizable semi-free status; by the later common law period, distinctions between sokemen and free tenants in socage were increasingly collapsed or clarified by statute and judicial decision. Applying a definition from one period to sources from another will produce error.
Corpus connections to watch: records of manorial surveys, extents, and inquisitions post mortem are the most productive sources. The term also connects to discussions of ancient demesne, where sokemen on the ancient demesne of the Crown held a recognized and protected status distinct from ordinary customary tenants.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's entry is minimal: it identifies sokemannes as a Law French term in old English law, equates it with socmen, and cites Britton (fol. 164, 165, 212b, 278b) without elaboration. The entry's brevity is itself informative — by Burrill's time the term was purely historical, requiring only identification and cross-reference rather than operational definition.
Historical legal dictionaries generally treat sokeman and its variants under the headings of socage or soke, with fuller treatment found in Spelman's Glossarium Archaiologicum and Cowell's Interpreter, which situate the term within the broader architecture of feudal tenure. What historical dictionaries frequently miss is the Domesday-era distinction between sokemannes as a recognized social class with regional concentration (particularly in the Danelaw) and their later common law absorption into the category of socage tenants generally. The Danelaw dimension — where sokemen were especially numerous and their customs distinctive — is absent from most legal dictionary treatment.
Jurisdictional Note
Sokemannes as a legal category is specific to medieval English law and has no operational counterpart in other jurisdictions. Within England, sokeman status and its incidents varied regionally, with the greatest density of sokemen historically in the East Midlands and East Anglia under Danelaw influence, where their customs differed from those in southern and western counties.