escort

Latin, inwardus.

Escort, like bodyguard, was the customary obligation to provide a mounted escort on certain occasions. Many of those recorded in Domesday Book relate to the king or his officials, including the duty of providing a bodyguard for the king when he was in the area. Escort was most frequently mentioned in relation to the sheriff, and the detailed record for Cambridgeshire suggests that it was a common one. There was a marked resemblance between this obligation and the customary services of drengs, riders, and riding men in circuits 5 and 6, and of a class of free men in Wessex, recorded in other sources. Almost every explicit reference to escort duties in Domesday Book, however, occurs in circuit 3, the bulk in Cambridgeshire. This is yet another example of the individual quirks of the commissioners or their local scribes.

For more detail, see Paul Vinogradoff, English society in the eleventh century: essays in English medieval history (1908); N. Neilson, Customary rents (1910); and P.D.A. Harvey, 'Rectitudines singularum personarum and gerefa', English Historical Review, vol. 108 (1993), pages 1-22.