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Hence we find, around such pre-Viking names as
Alford, Horncastle, Partney, Tetford, Belchford and
Donington in the south wolds, and Frodingham, Bottesford, Caistor, Glanford Brigg, Binbrook and Ludford
in the north, groups of Danish place-names, chiefly
"byes," showing that individuals took up land on the
wolds, till then uncultivated. "Thorpes," indicating
villages as opposed to "byes" or isolated farmsteads,
and either Scandinavian or Anglian in origin
are found more plentifully on the lower and richer
pastures, where the earlier settlers had their estates
which were worked by the natives. Though the
Danes certainly owned thralls, it is not a little
remarkable that in later years the proportion of freemen
to slaves was much greater in the Danelaw than
in the rest of England, and greatest of all in the most
Danish districts and in the manors of Danish origin.
Professor Maitland (Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 22)
noted that at the time of Domesday the number
of servi was at its maximum in Cornwall and
Gloucestershire, very low in Norfolk, Suffolk, Derby,
Leicester, Middlesex and Sussex, but nil in Yorkshire
and Lincolnshire. The number of sokemen (or
comparatively free men, owing certain dues to the
Hundred courts or to a lord, but otherwise masters
of their own land, somewhat like the customary
tenants of Cumberland) was greater in Norfolk and
Suffolk than in Essex, while in Lincolnshire they
formed nearly half the rural population. In William
the Conqueror’s time there were in Lincolnshire
11,503 sokemen, 7,723 villans, and 4,024 bordars;
in
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