A careful study of Domesday and other authorities reveals many other features of interest in our social system which were due to Viking influence. Certain types of manorial structure are specially common in the Danelagh. Manor and vill are by no means identical, indeed several manors are included under one vill. Very frequent is the type which consists in a central manor with sokeland appurtenant. In the Danelagh there was a large number of small freeholders and the free peasant class was much more numerous than in Anglo-Saxon England. These districts stand in clear contrast to the strongly manorialised southern counties and they were not feudalised to any appreciable extent before the Norman conquest. When that system was imposed we often find single knight's fees having to be taken over by entire communities of sokemen. The 'holds' of Northumbria, who rank next after the earls, and the 'drengs' of Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire, Northumberland and Durham, are also of Scandinavian origin. The 'dreng' was 'a free servant of the king endowed with lands' and the name still survives in the Yorkshire place-name Dringhouses. The legal instinct was strong in the Scandinavian mind and English law bears deep marks of its influence. The very word 'law' itself is of Scandinavian origin and has replaced the English 'doom.' The chief judicial authority in Lincoln, Stamford, Cambridge, Chester and York was in the hands of twelve _lagmen_ or _judices_. These 'lawmen' (_v. supra_, p. 103) though they had judicial authority were not chosen by the king or by popular election. Their position was hereditary. Of special interest are the '12 senior thanes' of Aethelred's laws for the Five Boroughs enacted at Wantage in 997. They have to come forward in the court of every wapentake and to swear that they will not accuse wrongly any innocent man or conceal any guilty one. The exact force of this enactment has been a matter of dispute--whether the thanes simply bore witness to the personal status of the accused, thus enabling the court to determine the ordeal through which he should be put, or whether we have an anticipation of the system of presentment by jury. Whatever may be the exact truth there can be little doubt, says Dr Vinogradoff, that such a custom prepared the way for the indictment jury of the 12th century. The same author attributes to Danish influence a new conception of crime. It is no longer merely a breach of the peace or the result of a feud, to be settled by monetary compensation, it is a breach of that conception of honour which binds together military societies. The criminal is now branded as _nithing_, a man unworthy of comradeship with his fellow-warriors.