Definition
Sokemans (also sokemen) were a class of free or semi-free tenants in medieval English land law who held their lands by socage tenure. They occupied a distinct position in the feudal hierarchy — above villeins but generally below the knightly classes — and their tenure was characterized by fixed, certain services rather than the indefinite or degrading obligations that defined villein tenure. The defining feature of a sokeman's status was the nature of his hold on land: he owed specific, predictable duties (often agricultural services or money rents) to a lord, and he possessed a degree of legal protection for that tenure that serfs and villeins did not enjoy. The term is the plural of sokeman.
Why It Matters in Research
This term belongs almost entirely to medieval English legal history and will surface primarily in sources dealing with Domesday Book records, feudal land law, and the origins of freehold tenure. Researchers working in that corpus should be aware of several navigational points.
First, sokemans appear as a recognized category in Domesday Book (1086), where they are listed separately from villeins, bordars, and serfs. This makes the term significant in any research touching pre-Conquest and post-Conquest land tenure transitions. The Domesday distribution of sokemen is heavily concentrated in the Danelaw counties — Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Yorkshire — reflecting Scandinavian settlement patterns. A researcher treating sokemans as uniformly distributed across medieval England will misread the sources.
Second, the relationship between sokemans and socage tenure is definitional but not simple. Socage as a tenure category persisted long after the sokeman class itself had largely dissolved into broader categories of freehold tenure. By the time Blackstone was writing in the eighteenth century, socage had become the dominant tenure for ordinary landholders, but the specific class designation "sokeman" had faded from practical legal use. Sources from different periods use these terms at different levels of abstraction.
Third, Black's Law Dictionary in both editions points to 2 Bl. Comm. 100 as the authority, signaling that the primary doctrinal source is Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. Researchers who need depth beyond a dictionary definition should go directly to Blackstone and, for historical specificity, to Frederic William Maitland's Domesday Book and Beyond, which treats the sokeman question with significant rigor.
Fourth, do not conflate sokemans with freemen as that term appears in Domesday. The two categories were often enumerated separately, and the legal implications of each were distinct, though both sat above the villein in the tenurial order.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary define sokemans identically in substance: persons who held their lands in socage. The first edition's entry is fragmentary, omitting even the subject of the sentence, while the second edition supplies the complete formulation and cites 2 Bl. Comm. 100. Neither edition provides historical context, range of variation, or any indication of the Danelaw concentration of the class. The maxim appended in the second edition — Sola ac per se senectus donationem testamentum aut transactionem non vitiat — is unrelated to sokemans and appears to be a typographical artifact of the original printing, not substantive content.
The historical dictionaries are minimally useful here beyond confirming the definitional link to socage tenure. They do not engage with the question of whether sokemans were technically free or semi-free, a point on which legal historians have differed, nor do they address the class's disappearance as a distinct category following the consolidation of freehold tenure law.
Jurisdictional Note
Sokemans as a legal category is specific to English law and has no operative equivalent in American, Scottish, or other common law jurisdictions. The term appears in American legal sources only as a historical reference to English feudal law. Socage tenure was formally abolished in England by the Tenures Abolition Act 1660.