Pre-Conquest kings laid claim to a variety of general rights. Apart from longstanding prerogatives such as the minting of coin, the booking of land and the ‘common burdens’, these had by the eleventh century come to include several which were regularly granted to subjects as franchises. Few received franchisal rights to compare with those of the abbots of Bury St Edmunds, whose later claims have been taken to preserve those of Anglo-Saxon kingship itself. This paper reviews evidence from the abbey's liberty and further afield to limit the content of soke, the most common franchise, before examining the nature of apparently public obligations.

Bury St Edmunds acquired what would become its liberty, meaning the territory in which public functions were delegated to the abbey, from Edward the Confessor. The king announced his grant of ‘the sokes of the eight and a half hundreds pertaining to Thingoe’ to St Edmund in a writ of 1043 × 1044, formally submitting a set of royal administrative units to the abbot. Thingoe was a barrow – the ‘assembly mound’ – just north of the town, where the hundreds met as a group. Between them, the hundreds of Thingoe, Thedwestry, Blackbourn, Bradmere, Lackford, Risbridge, Babergh (double) and Cosford (half) covered the western third of Suffolk and would make up the Liberty of St Edmund until the Dissolution (Map. 1).

The eight-and-a-half hundreds lend themselves to close study thanks to an unusual concentration of documentary material. Evidence for the workings of a particular franchise at a given time or place can rarely be held up against independent records, but at Bury St Edmunds a well-preserved archive sheds light on the abbey's privileges from several directions. Royal writs survive in a coherent run from the beginning of Edward the Confessor's reign, proclaiming grants of rights and land. An extensive series of vernacular wills begins in the mid-tenth century and, along with benefactor lists, reveals the provenance of many estates. Both landholdings and rights are recorded in three separate post-Conquest surveys. Earliest among these is Little Domesday Book (LDB), incorporating information reaching back to 1066. Although a royal record, LDB seems to have been influenced by the abbot where his holdings were concerned.