SOCAGE. (This word, according to the earlier comm'on-lajw writers, originally signi fied a service rendered by a tenant to his lord, by the soke or ploughshare; but Mr. Somner's etymology, referred to by Blackstone, seems more apposite, who derivea it from the Saxon word soc, which signifies liberty or privilege, denoting thereby a free or privileged tenure.) A apecies of hnglish tenure, whereby the tenant held his lauds of tbe lord,by any cer tain service in lieu of all other services, so that the service was not a knight's service. Its principal feature was its certainty : as, to hold by fealty and a certain rent, or by fealty homage and a certain rent, or by homage and fealty without rent, or by fealty and cer tain corporal service, as ploughing the lord's land for a specified number of days. 2 Black stone, Comm. 80.
2. The term socage was afterwards ex tended to all services which were not of a military character, provided they were fixed: as, by the annual payment of a rose, a pair of gilt spurs, a certain number of capons, or of so many bushels of corn. Of some tene ments the aervice was to be hangtnan, or ex ecutioner of persons condemned in the lord's court; for in olden times such officers were not volunteers, nor to be hired for lucre,. and could only be bound thereto by tenure. There were three different species of these socage tenures,—one in frank tenure, another in an cient tenure, and the third in base tenure : the second and third kinds are now called, respeetively, tenure in ancient demesne, and copyhold tenure. The first is called free and
common socage, to distinguish it from the other twe ; but, as the term socage has long ceased to be applied to the two latter, socage and free and common socage now mean the same thing. Bracton ; Coke, Litt. 17, 86. See TENURE, 5, 3. By the statute of 12 Car. II. c. 24, the ancient tenures by knight's service were abolished, and all lands, with the exception of copyholds and of ecclesiastical lands, which continued to be held in free alms (fromkalmoigne), were turned into free and common socage, and the great bulk of real property in England is now held under this ancient tenure. Many grants of land in the United States, made, previous to the revolu tion, by the British crown, created the same tenure among us, until they were formally abolished by the legislatures of the different states. In 1787, the state of New York con verted all feudal tenures within its bounda ries into a tenure by free and common socage; but in 1830 it abolished this latter tenure, with all its incidents, and declared that from thenceforth all lands in the state should be held upon a uniform allodial tenure, and vested an absolute property in the owners according to their respective estates. Similar provisions have been adopted by other states ; and the ownership of land throughout the United States is now essentially free and un restricted. See TENURE.