Danish landowners in Wessex in 1066

This pdf of your paper in Danes in Wessex belongs to the publishers Oxbow Books and it is their copyright. As author you are licenced to make up to 50 offprints from it, but beyond that you may not publish it on the World Wide Web until three years from publication (January 2019), unless the site is a limited access intranet (password protected). If you have queries about this please contact the editorial department at Oxbow Books (editorial@ oxbowbooks.com). Danes in Wessex Danes in Wessex The Scandinavian Impact on Southern England, c.800–c.1100 Print Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-931-9 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-932-6 Edited by Ryan Lavelle Simon Roffey © Oxbow Books 2016 Oxford & Philadelphia www.oxbowbooks.com Published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by OXBOW BOOKS 10 Hythe Bridge Street, Oxford OX1 2EW and in the United States by OXBOW BOOKS 1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083 © Oxbow Books and the individual authors 2016 Print Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-931-9 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-932-6 A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lavelle, Ryan, editor, author. | Roffey, Simon, editor, author. Title: Danes in Wessex : the Scandinavian impact on southern England, c.800-c.1100 / edited by Ryan Lavelle, Simon Roffey. Description: Philadelphia : Oxbow Books, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015031241 | ISBN 9781782979319 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Danes--England--Wessex--History. | Wessex (England)--History. | Great Britain--History--Anglo-Saxon period, 449-1066. | Scandinavians--England--Wessex--History. | Vikings--England--Wessex. | Wessex (England)--Antiquities. Classification: LCC DA670.W48 D36 2015 | DDC 942.201--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015031241 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing. Printed in the United Kingdom by Short Run Press, Exeter For a complete list of Oxbow titles, please contact: UNITED KINGDOM Oxbow Books Telephone (01865) 241249, Fax (01865) 794449 Email: oxbow@oxbowbooks.com www.oxbowbooks.com UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Oxbow Books Telephone (800) 791-9354, Fax (610) 853-9146 Email: queries@casemateacademic.com www.casemateacademic.com/oxbow Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate group Front cover: Winchester Cathedral, the north screen of the presbytery, 1525, with the tomb of Harthacnut, looking south-east. (Photograph © John Crook); inset: ‘King Alfred and the Danes’ by Andrew Brown Donaldson, c.1890 (Courtesy of Winchester City Museums Art Collection). Back cover: Trefoil brooch from Longbridge Deverill, Wiltshire, provided courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme. Contents Editorial Preface vii Foreword Barbara Yorke ix List of Contributors List of Abbreviations List of Illustrations x xi xiii 1. Introduction: Danes in Wessex Ryan Lavelle and Simon Roffey 1 2. West Saxons and Danes: Negotiating Early Medieval Identities Simon Roffey and Ryan Lavelle 7 3. The Place of Slaughter: Exploring the West Saxon Battlescape Thomas J. T. Williams 35 4. A Review of Viking Attacks in Western England to the Early Tenth Century: Their Motives and Responses Derek Gore 56 5. Landscapes of Violence in Early Medieval Wessex: Towards a Reassessment of Anglo-Saxon Strategic Landscapes John Baker and Stuart Brookes 70 6. Scandinavian-style Metalwork from Southern England: New Light on the ‘First Viking Age’ in Wessex Jane Kershaw 87 7. Death on the Dorset Ridgeway: The Discovery and Excavation of an Early Medieval Mass Burial Angela Boyle 109 vi Contents 8. Law, Death and Peacemaking in the ‘Second Viking Age’: An Ealdorman, his King, and some ‘Danes’ in Wessex Ryan Lavelle 9. Thorkell the Tall and the Bubble Reputation: The Vicissitudes of Fame Ann Williams 122 144 10. A Place in the Country: Orc of Abbotsbury and Tole of Tolpuddle, Dorset Ann Williams 158 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 C. P. Lewis 172 12. Danish Royal Burials in Winchester: Cnut and his Family Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle† 212 13. Some Reflections on Danes in Wessex Today Lillian Céspedes González 250 Select Bibliography Index 263 269 Editorial Preface This volume stems from a conference of the same title, which we ran at the University of Winchester as part of the Wessex Centre for History and Archaeology’s programme in September 2011. New work on the early middle ages, not least the excavations of mass graves associated with the Viking Age in Dorset and Oxford, was beginning to draw attention to the gaps in our understanding of the wider impact of Scandinavians in areas of Britain not traditionally associated with them, and that a multidisciplinary – at times interdisciplinary – approach to the problems of their study was required to be applied to the Wessex region. Our tentative plans to publish the papers delivered at the conference were given a boost when Martin Biddle was able to confirm that he and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle’s English translation of their contribution to Danske Kongegrave – a major work on Danish royal graves, due to go to press at the time of writing – could be made be available for our volume. We are delighted that all those who spoke at the conference have been able to present versions of their papers as chapters here but we have solicited further contributions, especially from those who, for a variety of reasons, were unable to speak at the conference. We are grateful to all of the contributors for their hard work, as well as their copious quantities of patience, good humour and forebearance. Editing this book has incurred a number of further debts of gratitude: Michael Hicks, David Hinton, and Barbara Yorke were instrumental in their encouragement and advice when organising the original conference, and we are especially grateful to Barbara Yorke for her advice at many points during the gestation of this volume and for kindly providing a foreword. Clare Litt and her colleagues at Oxbow Books have been extremely accommodating in helping bring this volume together, and in answering many technical queries. Our colleague Kate Weikert provided an invaluable final reading of the complete manuscript, which saved us from a number of infelicities. We also wish to record our thanks to Richard Abels, John Crook, Carey Fleiner, Charles Insley, Janine Lavelle, Duncan Probert, David Score, Sarah Semple, Gabor Thomas, Nick Thorpe, Katie Tucker, and Andrew Wareham. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society – whose generous grant has allowed a number of illustrations in this volume to be reproduced in colour – as well as the financial and institutional support of the Archaeology and History Departments of the University of Winchester. Ryan Lavelle Simon Roffey Winchester, September 2015 Foreword There have been many studies of the Scandinavians in Britain, but this, so far as I know, is the first collection of essays to be devoted solely to their engagement with Wessex. It must be welcomed as an important contribution to wider debates concerning Anglo-Scandinavian relations in the ninth to eleventh centuries. While there may not have been the same degree of impact, discernable particularly in place-names and archaeology, as in those areas of Britain which had substantial influxes of Scandinavian settlers, Wessex was a major theatre of the Viking wars in the reigns of Alfred and Æthelred Unræd. The succession of Cnut brought the Danish king and his court into the heart of Wessex, with some of his countrymen becoming major landowners and royal agents. These two major topics, the Viking wars and the Danish landowning elite, figure strongly in the collection, but are not its exclusive concern, nor the sole reasons for the presence of Danes, or items associated with them, in Wessex. Multi-disciplinary approaches mean that Vikings and Danes are evoked not just through the written record, but through their impact on real and imaginary landscapes and via the objects they owned or produced. Some never returned home, with, at one extreme, the executed Scandinavians of the Dorset Ridgeway, and, at the other, the burials of Cnut and members of his family and court in Winchester. The papers raise wider questions which the editors explore in their joint contribution. When did aggressive Vikings morph into more acceptable Danes, and what issues of identity were there for natives and incomers in a province whose founders were believed to have also come from North Sea areas, if not from parts of Denmark itself? Readers can continue for themselves aspects of these broader debates that will be stimulated by this fascinating and significant series of studies by both established scholars and new researchers. Read, enjoy and think! Barbara Yorke Professor Emeritus University of Winchester and Honorary Professor Institute of Archaeology University of London List of Contributors John Baker Institute of Name Studies, School of English, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK John.Baker@nottingham.ac.uk Jane Kershaw University College London Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31–34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY, UK J.Kershaw@ucl.ac.uk Martin Biddle Director of the Winchester Research Unit, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Archaeology, University of Oxford, Hertford College, Oxford, OX1 3BW, UK Martin.Biddle@hertford.ox.ac.uk Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle† was the excavator of the Old and New Minsters at Winchester, 1964–70, and Research Director of the Winchester Research Unit, 1972–2010. Angela Boyle Consultant for Oxford Archaeology, Janus House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK Ange.Boyle@tiscali.co.uk www.burialarchaeologist.co.uk Stuart Brookes University College London Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31–34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY, UK S.Brookes@ucl.ac.uk Lillian Céspedes González Department of History, University of Winchester, Winchester, Hants, SO22 4NR, UK L.Cespedes@winchester.ac.uk Derek Gore Honorary Fellow, University of Exeter, College of Humanities, Department of Archaeology, Laver Building, Exeter, EX4 4QE, UK D.A.Gore@exeter.ac.uk Ryan Lavelle History Department, University of Winchester, Winchester, Hants, SO22 4NR, UK Ryan.Lavelle@winchester.ac.uk C. P. Lewis Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU, UK Chris.Lewis@sas.ac.uk Simon Roffey Archaeology Department, University of Winchester, Winchester, Hants, SO22 4NR, UK Simon.Roffey@winchester.ac.uk Ann Williams Independent Scholar, Wanstead, London, UK Thomas J. T. Williams University College London Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31–34 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PY, UK T.Williams09@ucl.ac.uk List of Abbreviations AB Æthelweard, Chronicon ANS ASC ASE Asser ASSAH BAR Bede, HE BL CG DB EETS EHR EMC EME Exon GDB JW LDB Annales Bertiani, ed. G. Waitz, MGH Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum 5 (Hannover, 1883); trans. J. L. Nelson, The Annals of St Bertin (Manchester, 1991); cited by annal year Chronicon Æthelweardi: The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. and trans. A. Campbell (London, 1962) Various editors, Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies 1978 etc. (Woodbridge, 1979 etc.); cited by volume number and conference year Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Text edited in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition, general eds D. N. Dumville and S. D. Keynes (Woodbridge, 9 vols published, 1983–present). Unless otherwise noted, translations are cited from D. Whitelock, D. C. Douglas and S. I. Tucker, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: a Revised Translation (London, 1961; rev. 1965); entries are cited by MS where versions differ substantially and, unless otherwise noted, the corrected annal year assigned by Whitelock et al. Anglo-Saxon England; cited by volume and year Asser’s Life of King Alfred Together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erreoneously Ascribed to Asser, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1906); cited by chapter and page Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History; cited by volume and year British Archaeological Reports Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969); cited by book, chapter and page British Library Continental Germanic Domesday Book Phillimore county edition (J. Morris [general ed.], Chichester, 1975–86); referred to by county volume and cited by entry number Early English Text Society English Historical Review Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds; Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles, hosted by the Department of Coins and Medals, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge <http://www-cm. fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/emc/> Early Medieval Europe Exon Domesday, in Libri Censualis, vocati Domesday Book, Additamenta ex Codic. Antiquiss. Exon Domesday; Inquisitio Eliensis; Liber Winton; Boldon Book, ed. H. Ellis (London, 1816); entries cited according to folio, with a or b (for recto or verso) and the number accorded to the entry on that page Great Domesday Book, in Great Domesday, general ed. R. W. H. Erskine, Alecto Historical Editions (London, 1986–92); reference given by folio, column, and, where appropriate, cited place-name The Chronicle of John of Worcester: Volume II: The Annals from 450–1066, ed. and trans. R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk (Oxford, 1995); cited by annal and page Little Domesday Book, ed. A. Williams and G. H. Martin, Alecto Historical Editions (London, 6 vols, 2000). xii MGH NMR OE ON O.S. PAS PASE PDE RFA RS Sawyer, Charters TRE TRHS VCH WM, De ant. Glas. WM, GRA Abbreviations Monumenta Germaniae Historica English Heritage National Monuments Record <http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/nmr/> Old English Old Norse Ordnance Survey Portable Antiquities Scheme <http://finds.org.uk> King’s College London and University of Cambridge, Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England <http://www.pase.ac.uk> King’s College London, Profile of a Doomed Elite: The Structure of English Landed Society in 1066 research project; results integrated into PASE database ‘Royal Frankish Annals’: Annales Regni Francorum, ed. F. Kurze, MGH Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum (Hannover, 1895); trans. P. D. King, Charlemagne: Translated Sources (Kendall, 1987) Rolls Series Citation of charter, catalogued in Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, ed. P. H. Sawyer, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks 8 (London, 1968); revised version ed. S. E. Kelly, R. Rushforth et al., for the Electronic Sawyer: Online Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Charters website, King’s College London <http://www.esawyer.org.uk> Tempore Regis Edwardi (‘at the time of King Edward [the Confessor]’) Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Victoria County History (London, 1901–); volumes cited according to county and volume number William of Malmesbury, De antiquitate Glastonie ecclesie, in The Early History of Glastonbury: an Edition, Translation, and Study of William of Malmesbury’s ‘De antiquitate Glastonie ecclesie’, ed. and trans. J. Scott (Woodbridge, 1981) William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, Volume 1, ed. and trans. R. M. Thomson, M. Winterbottom and R.A.B. Mynors (Oxford, 1998); cited by chapter, passage and page number; Volume II: Introduction and Commentary, ed. R. M. Thomson (Oxford, 1999) is cited as ‘Vol. 2’ List of Illustrations Figures 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 4.1. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5. 5.6. Grave Slab (CG WS 104.2) and marker (CG WS 104.1) over the grave of Gunni, as found during the Old Minster excavations, looking north-east. (Photograph by J. W. Hopkins III, © Winchester Excavations Committee) Photograph and drawing of fragment with runic inscription of the word ‘Huskarl’, re-used in the tower of St Maurice’s, Winchester (H: c.92 mm, W: c.177 mm, L: c.185 mm, Diam. of curve: c.430 mm). (Courtesy of Winchester Excavations Committee and Winchester City Council) Queen Emma and King Cnut presenting a gold cross, in the early eleventh-century Liber Vitae of New Minster, Winchester (BL MS Stowe 944, fol. 6r.). (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved) Map of the region around Edington and Bratton, Wiltshire, from the first edition Ordnance Survey County Series 1:10560 (1889). (© Crown Copyright and Database Right 2013. Ordnance Survey (Digimap Licence)) Bratton Camp. Detail of the environs of Bratton Camp and Warden’s Down. Edington Hill. Detail of the region around Edington Hill. Places in western England discussed in the text. The Vikings in England as revealed in narrative sources. Named herepaðas in the Avebury region, Domesday settlement pattern and sites mentioned in the text. Occurrences of herepæð and related compounds in England. Yatesbury, Wiltshire. Photograph of the westfacing section of the ditch cut around the modified Bronze Age mound. (Image courtesy of Andrew Reynolds) Possible late Anglo-Saxon mustering sites in England. Plan of the ‘hanging promontory’ site by Moot Hill adjacent to the shire boundary of Dorset and Somerset, with photograph of the views south from the meeting-place over northern Dorset. 6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5. 6.6. 6.7. 6.8. 6.9. 6.10. 6.11. 6.12. 6.13. 6.14. 6.15. 6.16. Trefoil brooch from Longbridge Deverill, Wiltshire. (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) Strap-slide from Hannington, Hampshire. (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) Tongue-shaped brooch from Prestegården, Vestfold, Norway. (After E. Wamers, ‘Eine Zungenfibel aus dem Hafen von Haithabu’, fig. 11, 1) Strap-slide and strap-end from Wharram Percy, Yorkshire. (After A. R. Goodall and C. Paterson, ‘Non-ferrous Metal Objects’, figs 61, 22 and 23) Strap-end from Mudford, Somerset. (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) Tongue-shaped brooch from Eketorp, Sweden. (© Stockholm Historiska Museet) Strap-end from St Leonards and St Ives, Dorset. (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) Finger-ring found near Shaftesbury, Dorset. (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) Silver ingot from Headbourne Worthy, Hampshire. (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) Silver ingot from Over Compton, Dorset. (Image courtesy of Dorset County Museum) Inset lead weight from Kingston, Dorset. (© The Trustees of the British Museum) Enamel offcut from Winterbourne Zelston, Dorset. (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) Carolingian sword belt mount from Wareham, Dorset. (© The Trustees of the British Museum) Bridle mount from Ashburton, Devon. (Image courtesy of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) Distribution of Scandinavian-type metalwork in Wessex. (© Jane Kershaw) All early medieval metal work from the southwest recorded by the PAS, shown against modern constraints on metal-detecting. (© Jane Kershaw) xiv 7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7.4. 7.5. 8.1. 10.1 11.1. 11.2. 12.1. 12.2. 12.3. 12.4. 12.5. List of Illustrations Location of the Ridgeway Hill site. (Image courtesy of Oxford Archaeology) The full extent of the skeletal deposit within the pit. (Image courtesy of Oxford Archaeology) An eleventh-century depiction of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son, Isaac (BL MS Cotton Claudius B.IV, fol. 38r.). (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved) The Harley Psalter’s depiction of torture and a mound apparently containing decapitated corpses (BL MS Harley 603, fol. 67r.). (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved) Skeleton 3806: the decapitated skeleton of the individual who was probably the first to be executed and deposited in the pit. (Image courtesy of Oxford Archaeology) View of Portland and its harbour from Ridgeway Hill. (Photograph © Bob Ford 2004, http://www. natureportfolio.co.uk) Map of Lands of Orc and Abbotsbury, in their respective hundreds. (Map drawn by Ryan Lavelle with boundaries of the hundreds redrawn from the Alecto Domesday Map, with permission of Alecto Historical Editions) Landed estates of selected magnates. (Map drawn by Duncan Probert) Landed estates of selected great landowners. (Map drawn by Duncan Probert) Winchester Cathedral from the air. The excavation of the Anglo-Saxon Old Minster in progress, 1966, looking east. (Photograph R. C. Anderson. © Winchester Excavations Committee) Looking west down the axis of the plan of Old Minster laid out in modern brickwork along the north side of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. (Photograph © John Crook) Winchester in 1093: Old Minster, New Minster, and the east end of the new Norman cathedral, as they were on 15 July 1093, the day before the start of the demolition of Old Minster. (Drawn by Nicholas Griffiths. © Winchester Excavations Committee) Old Minster: reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral as it was between 992–4 and 1093, axonometric view, looking north-west. (Drawn by Simon Hayfield. © Winchester Excavations Committee) Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture from Old Minster showing what may be the episode of Sigmund and the Wolf from Volsungasaga. (Photograph R. C. Anderson. © Winchester Excavations Committee) 12.6. 12.7. 12.8. 12.9. 12.10a. 12.10b. 12.11. 12.12. 12.13. 12.14. Winchester Cathedral: (A) The Norman presbytery as built 1079–93, showing the suggested positions of the Anglo-Danish royal graves. (B) The presbytery after the reconstruction of c.1310–15, showing the same graves in their new positions. (Drawn by Hamish Roberton and Simon Hayfield. © Winchester Excavations Committee) Winchester Cathedral, looking west from the retrochoir towards the early fourteenth-century screen commemorating benefactors at the east end of the presbytery. The entrance to ‘The Holy Hole’ is in the middle. (Photograph © John Crook) The south screen of the presbytery, 1525, with the tomb of Earl Beorn and Richard son of William the Conqueror under the further of the two arched niches, looking north-east. On top of the screen are two of Bishop Fox’s chests of 1525, the further one containing the supposed bones of King Edmund (d.1016). (Photograph © John Crook) The tomb of Earl Beorn and Richard son of William the Conqueror, c.1525 and earlier. The Latin inscription of 1525 wrongly identifies Richard as BEORNIE DVCIS, ‘Duke of Beornia’. (Photograph © John Crook) The second half of the inscription on the later twelfth-century Purbeck marble tomb-slab of Earl Beorn and Richard, son of ‘King William the Elder’, reading REGI] S : FILI’ : ET : BEORN : DVX : [floral scroll] (Photograph © John Crook) The second half of the inscription on the later twelfth-century Purbeck marble tomb-slab of Edmund Ironside, reading [Eþ]ELDREDI : REGIS : FILIVS : (Photograph © John Crook) The tomb of Earl Beorn and Richard son of William the Conqueror, original drawing by F. J. Baigent when their tomb was opened on 27 May 1887. Winchester Cathedral Archives (Photograph © John Crook) The inscription on the lead coffin of Earl Beorn and Richard son of William the Conqueror, facsimile made by F. J. Baigent when their tomb was opened on 27 May 1887. (From Warren, Illustrated Guide to Winchester (1909), p. 65) Winchester Cathedral, the northernmost niches of the early fourteenth-century screen, with bases for the statuettes of King Æthelred, King Edward the Confessor, King Cnut, and King Harthacnut. (Photograph © John Crook) Winchester Cathedral, inscriptions identifying the bases of lost statuettes of ‘Cnutus Rex’ and List of Illustrations 12.15. 12.16. 12.17. 12.18. 12.19. 12.20. 12.21. 12.22. 13.1. ‘Hardecnutus Rex, filius eius’ in the northernmost niche of the early fourteenth-century screen. (Photograph © John Crook) Winchester Cathedral, the mortuary chest of 1661 on top of the south screen of the presbytery, beside the bishop’s throne, looking south-west. The chest, a replacement of 1661 following the sack of 1642, is said to contain the remains of Cnut and Emma. (Photograph © John Crook) The north side of the northern mortuary chest of 1661, showing the inscription added between 1684 and 1692. (Photograph © John Crook) Winchester Cathedral, the mortuary chests on top of the north screen of the presbytery, looking north-east. The nearest chest, a replacement of 1661 following the sack of 1642, is said to contain the remains of Cnut and Emma. (Photograph copyright © John Crook) The north side of the southern mortuary chest of 1661, said in the inscription to contain the remains of the bones of Kings Cnut and Rufus, of Queen Emma, and Bishops Wine and Ælfwine. (Photograph © John Crook) The northern mortuary chest of 1661, showing the bones, said to include those of Cnut and Emma, placed in the oak chest provided in 1932, looking west. (Photograph © John Crook) The southern mortuary chest of 1661, showing the bones, said to include those of Cnut and Emma, placed in the pine chest provided in 1932, looking east. (Photograph © John Crook) The north screen of the presbytery, 1525, with the tomb of Harthacnut, looking south-east. (Photograph © John Crook) The tomb of Harthacnut, c.1525. (Photograph © John Crook) Tableau from the Alfredian millenary celebrations of 1901, depicting Anglo-Saxons and Vikings at the Battle of Edington (878). (Reproduced from A. Bowker, The King Alfred Millenary (London, 1902), facing p. 178) 13.2. 13.3. 13.4. 13.5. xv A Southampton-based depiction of Viking culture: Skragbeard and the Vikings (Void Studios), by Tim Hall. (© Tim Hall; reproduced with permission) Thorkell the Tall’s force heading across Wessex, from Vinland Saga vol. 3, by Makoto Yukimura. (Vinland Saga © Makoto Yukimura/Kodansha, Ltd., All rights reserved) Words chosen for their associations with Vikings from online survey, recorded by frequency of response. A summary of issues cited in survey respondents’ views of Vikings (from online survey, recorded by frequency of response) Tables 10.1. 11.1. 11.2. 11.3. 11.4. 11.5. 11.6. 11.7. 11.8. 11.9. 11.10. 11.11 11.12. 11.13. 11.14. 11.15. 11.16. 11.17. 12.1. 12.2. Lands of Orc and Abbotsbury, with total holdings in hides and virgates. The Danish magnates of Wessex TRE. TRE holdings of Azur son of Thorth. TRE holdings of Bondi the staller. TRE holdings of Carl. TRE holdings of Mærleswein. TRE holdings of Saxi the housecarl. TRE holdings of Wigot of Wallingford. TRE holdings of Esgar the staller. TRE holdings of Siward Barn. TRE holdings of Aki the Dane. TRE holdings of Osgot of Hailes. The Danish great landowners of Wessex TRE. The Danish greater thegns of Wessex TRE. The Danish lesser thegns of Wessex TRE. The Danish rich peasants of Wessex TRE. TRE holdings of Tholf the Dane. TRE holdings of John the Dane. The burial places of the rulers of Wessex and England, 899–1100, and of Denmark, c.986–1042. Genealogy of the houses of England, Denmark, and Normandy, 959–1135. Chapter Eleven Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 C. P. Lewis No one has ever thought that the Danish conquest of England in 1016 had such far-reaching effects as those after the Normans arrived fifty years later. There were new men at the top, of course, but no transformation took place in the personnel, structure, or character of landed society as a whole to compare with the changes wrought after 1066. One whole category of evidence that might indicate the taking of land by Cnut’s Danes, however, has been almost entirely neglected: the significant numbers of Danish personal names among the landowners recorded in Domesday Book for 1066 in Wessex and other regions beyond the Danelaw: those parts of England which had no Viking settlement in the later ninth century and continued to stand apart from the Anglo-Scandinavian cultural traditions of the Danelaw in the eleventh.1 Put simply, why did mid eleventh-century Wessex have scores of landowners with Danish names, and can they tell us anything about the arrival of new men under Cnut and his sons?2 The opportunity to broach a new subject arises from research undertaken in 2010–12 for Profile of a Doomed Elite (PDE), a pilot for a larger and longer-term project which aims to identify all persons named in Domesday Book as holding land in 1066, and thus to allow the structure of landed society on the eve of the Norman Conquest to be described, analysed, and compared with what came after. The pilot refined a methodology for identification first sketched elsewhere,3 produced over 1,100 biographical profiles of individuals with supporting maps and tables (together with discussion of almost 500 different personal names), and published them on the web as part of the Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (PASE).4 Work on further names and profiles has continued since 2012. ‘Identification’ means distinguishing persons of the same name, and assigning to individuals all the parcels of land which they owned, as well as gathering and making sense of information in Domesday Book and other sources about family, lordship, career, and estate history. As a pragmatic aid to keeping different landowners distinct, PDE has assigned bynames to those who lack them in the historical record, supplementing the numbering system that has always been a feature of PASE; the usual practice has been to coin a topographical byname from the largest manor owned by each person, adopting what was in fact a common naming custom among the landed classes of late Anglo-Saxon England. In what follows, such invented bynames appear in quotation marks. The confidence with which judgements about identification can be made varies from absolute certainty to marginal probability, and PDE’s profiles indicate positive levels of confidence on a scale from A to E, all of which are above the point at which identity is more likely than not.5 Only a relatively small proportion of landowners have been identified to date, and fuller and firmer conclusions about the Danish landowners 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 of Wessex will have to await completion of the larger project. Not least, it is hard to say much about their relative numbers at different levels of landed society and in different parts of Wessex until the English landowners of Wessex have been identified too, as well as the Danes’ namesakes in other parts of England. Enough has emerged from the pilot, however, to show that the phenomenon of eleventh-century Danes acquiring land in the heartland of the English kingdom was real, and to suggest something of its historical trajectory. Wessex is here taken as Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Dorset, Devon (the six historic shires of the old kingdom of the West Saxons), and Cornwall, excluding the three south-eastern shires of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent which happened to share the same earl as Wessex for most of the period 1016–66. Even a cursory examination of Domesday Book reveals scores of Wessex landowners with Danish names, with over 60 different personal names represented across the region, holding some 350 distinct parcels of land.6 In pursuit of ‘ordinary’ landowners of the thegnly class, we can immediately set aside all but one of the Wessex Harolds as referring to Earl Harold, as well as all but one of the Tostis and all the Gyrths, Gythas, Gunnhilds, and Stigands, where the names – even where not explicitly identified – are those of Earl Harold’s brothers, mother, and sister,7 and of the pluralist archbishop of Canterbury and bishop of Winchester.8 A few Domesday forms are unresolvably ambiguous, notably the frequent name which the scribe of Great Domesday Book normally rendered Siuuard, which could stand for Old Danish Sigwarth or Old English Sigeweard,9 and which precisely because of that uncertainty modern scholarship normally renders as Siward. Context sometimes makes it clear that the bearer of the name was of Norse origin, as for the Northumbrian magnate Siward Barn, whose byname was the ON word barn, equivalent to OE cild, referring to nobility of birth.10 Besides Siward Barn, there were perhaps a dozen other Siwards holding land 173 in Wessex in 1066: they have all been taken, provisionally and until proven otherwise, as OE Sigeweard, and do not appear in what follows. Some of the Danish personal names of preConquest Wessex were common among the landed families of the Danelaw too (Swein, Thorkil, and Ulf, for example); others occur much less frequently there (Carl, Grim, Thorgot) or indeed very rarely (Api, Skræmir, Yric). Who were these Wessex Danes, and how did they become landowners in the core shires of the West Saxon dynasty? Their personal names suggest Danish identity of some kind, but without deeper knowledge about individuals’ origins, connections, and wealth, there remain many uncertainties about the social, cultural, and political meaning of Danish nomenclature in Wessex. All work on the pre-Conquest personal names of Domesday Book is indebted to Olof von Feilitzen’s comprehensive study from the 1930s,11 but his book no longer stands alone as a guide and some of his tacit assumptions can be shown to be unfounded. First, the work of Gillian Fellows-Jensen on Danish personal names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and that of John Insley on Norfolk, has revealed much more about patterns of naming in two parts of the Danelaw.12 A firmer grasp of Danish personal nomenclature there offers a clearer perspective on naming in other parts of England too. In particular, it has become easier to see how common or rare certain names were, and thus, when set against the Domesday materials, to judge with greater confidence whether, say, the twenty-five instances of the name Ulf in Wessex are more likely to refer to one man, twenty-five men, or some number in between. Insley’s regionally specific work on Scandinavian names in Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall from late Anglo-Saxon times through the twelfth century is, paradoxically, less useful for present purposes because there is no way of filtering out of the twelfth-century corpus the Danish names which had been adopted in Normandy and were introduced to Wessex by the conquerors of 1066.13 A flaw which runs through Feilitzen’s attribution 174 C. P. Lewis of Domesday spellings to original personal names, for all its philological rigour, is his neglect of the social dimension of naming. The name-forms always need to be approached with social realities in mind, such as the absence of any mass Danish settlement which might have carried names down to the lower reaches of landed society in Wessex. A case in point is the Somerset name which Feilitzen identified as ON Manni. Although that name was undoubtedly used in England (witness the substantial Suffolk thegn Manni Swart,14 and the abbot of Evesham from 1044 to 1058, Manni alias Wulfmær),15 the landowner who had a farm-sized holding of ½ virgate worth 4s. in west Somerset is much more likely to have had the OE monothematic name Manna, a name known from a Hampshire example to have been used in Wessex.16 The Somerset landowner’s name was given by Exon Domesday (a preliminary draft of materials for the Domesday Survey for the south-west) as Mannius, which ought indeed to represent Manni, but the scribe of Great Domesday Book copied it as Manno, suggesting that he recognized it as an English name.17 Likewise, the Gest who had ½ hide worth 10s. at Laverstock in Wiltshire probably bore a name coined from the OE noun giest, gest (‘guest’) and not the cognate ON noun: the estate in question had passed by 1086 to Gest’s brother, who had the English name Særic.18 Wherever a Domesday spelling could formally represent either an ON or an OE name it is safer in Wessex to assign it an Insular origin. Thus Bern is here regarded as representing OE Beorn, rather than ON Bjorn;19 Godmundus and Gudmund OE Guthmund, rather than ON Guðmundr;20 Caflo an unrecorded OE Cæfla related to the attested name Cæfel, rather than an ON byname Kafli;21 and the Sbern who had 1 virgate in Cornwall OE Osbeorn, rather than Danish Esbern (ON Ásbjorn).22 Feilitzen was disinclined to give much weight to Anglicized names or to hybridized AngloScandinavian names as the solutions to Domesday spellings, no doubt because his interest was primarily linguistic rather than historical, and in ultimate origins rather than eleventh-century usage. But some names of Danish origin were already being used so extensively in England that they were well on the way to becoming English names, culturally and even linguistically. The name Ketil, for example, came from Scandinavia and was frequent in the Danelaw, but by the mid eleventh century it was beginning to pass into wider use in the Anglicized form Cytel, evident in the spelling Chitel found once in Cornwall.23 The weakening of associations with its Viking ancestry would help to account for its frequency in Wessex TRE, when there seem to have been at least five landowners of the name, a level of popularity which is simply not found for most Danish names in Wessex. The landowning Ketils and Cytels of Wessex in 1066 ranged in status down to the man who gave his name to the lost place Chetelescote on Dartmoor, a single virgate worth 10s.24 There were undoubtedly more hybrid AngloScandinavian names than Feilitzen allowed. Colgrim and Colswein are examples. Feilitzen classified them as Scandinavian, discussing them under their ON forms Kolgrímr and Kolsveinn.25 The second element in each is indeed a common monothematic ON name (Grímr and Sveinn),26 but Scandinavian examples of the compound names seem to come only from Iceland27 and cannot have reached England from that source. Independent coinage in England is more likely. With that in mind, the first element was probably not ON but the English element Col–. Cola was a late OE name formed from the adjective col (‘coal’), meaning ‘black-haired’ or ‘swarthy’; the simplex name is first evidenced in the earlier tenth century28 and became more common in the eleventh,29 when its use as a name-element gave rise to such novelties as Colling and Colthegn30 as well as being spliced with second name-elements drawn indifferently from ON (Colbeinn and Colbrand as well as Colgrim and Colswein) and OE (Colbeorht, Colmann, and Colwine). The monothematic Cola and the dithematic compounds with OE second elements occur quite widely, in Wessex and beyond.31 The 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 whole family of related names shows signs of relatively low status; outside Domesday Book they were not borne by the highest ranks in landed society but by people of modest or non-landed wealth: witnesses of monastic leases and private wills,32 a royal official,33 and several moneyers.34 In Wessex, the two identifiable Colgrims who owned land in 1066 were a Hampshire man with notionally 1¼ hides worth 30s.,35 and a farmer in Somerset with just ½ virgate worth 4s.;36 the two Colsweins were a small landowner with ½ hide in west Wiltshire37 and a priest at Winchester.38 Two further names had Danish cultural connotations, though were linguistically English. Huscarl was coined as a name from the OE noun hūscarl (‘housecarl, member of a corps of elite troops’), a word adopted from the language and social organization of Denmark.39 It passed into use as a name in England in the earlier eleventh century among social groups which were relatively or absolutely low in standing. The identified Huscarls include a moneyer at Chester,40 two holders of farm-sized estates in Somerset,41 a virgater in Norfolk,42 and a Devon slave who bought his own freedom some time around the year 1100.43 The only larger landowners were men with £8 and £17 a year in Gloucestershire and Surrey respectively.44 The name was English, not Viking; tellingly, it was little used in the long twelfth century in the Danelaw counties of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire.45 The other name was Northmann, entirely English as a linguistic formation, literally meaning ‘man of the North’ and as a descriptive noun often referring to a person of Scandinavian origin.46 Sometimes it is plain that the personal name was given meaningfully, since Domesday Book mentions Yorkshiremen called Northmann son of Ulf and Northmann son of Maelcolumban,47 whose fathers had Norse and Norse-Gaelic names and had given their sons a baptismal name which was English but with a Viking slant. The Wessex landowners called Northmann are excluded from consideration here, though we know that one of them was in fact the son of a Dane.48 175 Another of Feilitzen’s strategies in solving Domesday name-forms was to prefer a Continental Germanic origin over any possible AngloScandinavian hybrid. Thus for the spelling Carman he followed Thorvald Forssner in suggesting the attested CG name Carlman, or (as an alternative) a nickname formed from the late OE word carlman, meaning ‘male, man’.49 In fact the name is far more likely to be an Anglo-Scandinavian hybrid, using the Danish name Carl as the first element and the popular late OE element –mann as the second. The person in question shared a Wiltshire holding of 2½ hides worth 20s. with an Englishman (Sigegar), and the holding was almost certainly already attached in some way to the lands of the Danish grandee Carl;50 Carlmann had quite likely been named in honour of Carl. A further example of Feilitzen’s preference for CG explanations is that although he allowed Thorbert to be a hybrid name with an ON first element, he regarded the second element as CG –bert rather than (the more likely) OE –beorht.51 Anglicized names like Ketil/Cytel and AngloDanish hybrids like Carlmann, Colgrim, Colswein, and Thorbert are evidence for Scandinavian influences on English naming culture in the eleventh century, but not necessarily for the arrival of Danish landowners in Wessex. The name-stock of English landed society well beyond the Danelaw was undoubtedly influenced by Scandinavian practices and fashions,52 but it remains an open question how far name-giving was linked to or independent of cultural affinity, language use, and descent. An important matter of chronology to be borne in mind in what follows concerns the likely ages of landowners named in Domesday Book for TRE, and thus the period – and historical circumstances – in which they received their given names. In principle, the great majority must have been between about 20 and 60 years old in 1066, that is, born in the period 1006–45. If the age cohorts were all the same size, then a quarter of TRE landowners were named in the last decade of the reign of Æthelred II (978–1016), half under Cnut (1016–35), say 16 per cent under Harold I 176 C. P. Lewis (1035/7–1040) and Harthacnut (1040–2), and 8 per cent in the earliest years of Edward. In practice the age cohorts are unlikely to have been evenly distributed, and even a back-of-the-envelope adjustment for likely average ages at death and succession among male members of landed society in the eleventh century suggests a bunching in the middle, with fewer landowners in their fifties and early twenties; it is very likely that a clear majority of TRE landowners were given their baptismal names while the Danish kings ruled England. In principle, one would like to be able to distinguish three types of Wessex landowners with Danish names in 1066, what one might call Real Danes, Anglo-Danes, and Adoptive Danes. Real Danes would be first- or second-generation migrants from Denmark. The men who fought with Swein and Cnut during the final campaigns of 1013–16 were surely all dead by 1066 (none of Cnut’s known associates survived that long), though most of their sons would have been living. Doubtless some Danish migrants came later too, accompanying Cnut when he returned to England in 1023 and 1029, or arriving with Harthacnut in 1040. Several of the Wessex Danes discussed below had ‘the Dane’ as a byname; at a stretch we might accept that they were of the second generation, with a Danish parent but themselves born in England, though it is perhaps more likely until proven otherwise that they were what their bynames claimed, Real Danes. By Anglo-Danes I mean families long settled in the Danelaw, descendants of the original Viking settlers in the later ninth century. The Danelaw had a rich stock of personal names of Scandinavian origin (a richness fully revealed not in Domesday Book but by twelfth-century and later sources), after six or eight generations of intermarriage and cultural accommodation between English and Viking traditions.53 It was hardly possible to say, looking at the faces in meetings of shire and wapentake in Lincolnshire or Nottinghamshire, who was English and who Danish. Danelaw families which retained or acquired Danish cultural norms in their personal naming can sometimes be glimpsed in the records of the tenth and eleventh centuries acquiring land and power beyond the Danelaw. Such Anglo-Danes could have acquired land in Wessex at any time before 1066 as additions to core holdings in eastern and northern England. Adoptive Danes were English families which took on elements of Danish identity during the reigns of Cnut and his sons by using Danish names, irrespective of their actual descent, though undoubtedly sometimes after intermarriage. The family of Earl Godwine is the prime example: four sons had Danish names, one English. At a less elevated but still wealthy social level, the Warwickshire family of Æthelwine the sheriff – seven brothers with native English names (his siblings were Æthelmær, Leofwine, Ælfsige, Ælfric, Ordric, and Eadmær) – started using Danish names in the next generation, with two Ketilberns, two Thorkils, and a Guthmund.54 Cultural preference, whether or not informed by calculations about political advantage, must have lain behind the choice of names for sons and daughters at many levels of English landed society under Cnut and his sons. A switch back to English norms, or even to Norman preferences, may well have begun after Edward came to the throne but cannot have been strongly represented in the name-stock of adult landowners in 1066 for the chronological reasons outlined above. The spread of Danish name-giving among English families of the highest social rank was doubtless encouraged by the fact that Cnut’s court was emphatically Danish in cultural orientation. Icelandic skalds visited the court and recited traditional praise poetry for the king before mixed audiences of Danes and Englishmen.55 Perhaps the most important physical location for such enactments of Viking identity was the West Saxon royal city of Winchester, and in particular the cathedral, the Old Minster, which Cnut turned into a mausoleum for himself and his family, adorned with a vast stone frieze depicting the saga scenes of Sigurd, a foundation story of his dynasty.56 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 Another focus for Danishness in eleventhcentury Wessex may have existed at Wallingford, on the Berkshire bank of the Thames downstream from Oxford. A line in Domesday Book says that King Edward had 15 acres in the borough ‘on which the housecarls used to live’ (in quibus manebant huscarles),57 a phrase which has naturally been read as indicating a garrison of Danish soldiers.58 Manebant clearly meant residency on the land in question, since the same verb was used a few lines earlier of the men who lived in tenements on the king’s land in Wallingford (qui ibi manebant).59 The housecarls’ 15 acres was in addition to (and thus perhaps physically distinct from) the king’s men’s 8 virgates.60 One acre of the 15 was attached to the nearby manor of Long Wittenham (Berks.), held TRE by Queen Eadgyth, and so must have included the eight tenements in Wallingford referred to in its Domesday entry.61 At that average density, the 15 acres occupied by the housecarls will have included 120 tenements, which sounds about right for an elite group of fighting men who formed a kind of royal bodyguard. ‘Garrison’ is probably the wrong word for this settlement, if it implies that the housecarls primarily served as a local defence force; maybe Wallingford was more like their home depot. Their houses may well have occupied much of the large site taken after the Conquest for the castle; its construction entailed the removal of only eight of the burgesses’ 276 tenements, but might also have swallowed up the greater part of the housecarls’ compound; apart from the manorial attachment to Long Wittenham, the housecarls’ land was in the hands of the castellan Miles Crispin in 1086.62 How Wessex was governed during and after Cnut’s reign is important for understanding how Danes of whatever description became established as landowners. Cnut initially kept Wessex in his own hands, without an earl, but probably from 1020 and certainly from 1023 the earldom was held by Godwine, a new man planted in Wessex. He remained earl for the rest of Cnut’s reign, under Harold I and Harthacnut, and throughout 177 Edward’s early years.63 The Danish kings were often present in England, but after the earliest years of Cnut’s reign, Wessex was under Godwine’s watch. He was the most powerful English supporter of the new dynasty. Godwine was bound into Cnut’s regime in any number of ways. He fought with Cnut in Denmark; was given as his wife the sister of Cnut’s brother-inlaw Earl Ulf; named his first-born son after Cnut’s father Swein, ravager and conqueror of Æthelred’s kingdom, and his second son after Swein’s father, the great Harold Bluetooth, first Christian king of the Danes. Two more sons had Danish names; a daughter shared a name with the king’s daughter, Gunnhild. The earl was the recipient of vast estates across Wessex and unparalleled opportunities for further enlarging his lands and lordships over an almost unbroken period of thirty years.64 Danish rule over Wessex was a partnership between the kings and a loyal English earl. The direct evidence for grants of land in Wessex by the three Danish kings is slender and unlikely to be representative: only eight charters survive which document Cnut’s grants to laymen and none for either Harold I or Harthacnut. Seven of Cnut’s charters are for estates in Wessex which passed later into the hands of religious communities: two in Hampshire to the Old Minster at Winchester; one in Devon to the bishop of Exeter (with a second estate remaining in lay hands but the charter also preserved at Exeter); and three in Dorset variously to the local houses at Shaftesbury, Abbotsbury, and Horton. This group of charters will bear cautious analysis. Both Hampshire manors were gifts to Englishmen, Earl Godwine himself in 1033,65 and an Englishman with a Danish father, Leofwine Bondansunu, ‘son of Bondi’, in 1023.66 The two Devon estates, both very much smaller, were also given to men with English names: Æthelric in 1031 and Hunuwine in 1033.67 All three of the grants in Dorset were of single estates to king’s thegns bearing Danish names: Agemund received 16 hides in 1019, Orc 7 hides in 1024, and Bovi 7 hides in 1033.68 The charters serve to show in general 178 C. P. Lewis terms that men with Danish names acquired quite substantial manors in Wessex direct from Cnut throughout his reign, but the circumstances in which the charters in question have survived make it unsafe to read anything more into their small numbers and restricted geographical distribution.69 The provisional identifications which follow give us a total number of Wessex landowners with Danish names, but what proportion of landed society they represented will remain elusive until the doomed elite of 1066 has been fully profiled. For the moment, a proxy measure can be obtained from the numbers of manors in the hands of owners with Danish and English names, regardless of how many individuals there were. The following calculations exclude the estates of the king, earls, and church, as well as all the manors (overwhelmingly rather small ones) for which we lack the name of the owner TRE, either because Domesday omits the information altogether or (more commonly) because it numbers the owners without naming them: ‘ten thegns’,70 ‘six Englishmen’,71 ‘three brothers’,72 or, in another region, ‘one little old lady’ (quædam uetula).73 Across Wessex as a whole, about one in ten thegns’ manors were owned TRE by men with Danish names. There were marked differences within the region, broadly a gradation from east to west: 17 per cent in Berkshire and Hampshire, 14 per cent in Wiltshire, 8–9 per cent in each of Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall. Those figures do not allow for the landowners who were not named, who must have been overwhelmingly English. There were certainly differences in the average size and value of Wessex manors held by Danish-named and English-named landowners, ‘Danish’ manors being significantly larger than ‘English’ ones. Note that in Nottinghamshire (taken as a representative shire of the Danelaw) there was hardly any difference: on average, the holdings of owners with English personal names were assessed at 0.7 carucates and worth £1.2, against 0.8 carucates and £1.5 for holdings of owners with Danish names. In Dorset (taken here as a representative West Saxon shire) the equivalents were 3.3 hides and £3.2 for the English, against a considerably larger 5.3 hides and £5.2 for the Danish. This suggests a hypothesis that needs testing by further research: that in Nottinghamshire (and, by extension, the Danelaw), there was no economic or social distinction between owners with native and Danish names, whereas in Dorset (and, by extension, Wessex), the Danes were richer. If proven, the hypothesis may have implications for how Danish as against English families had acquired their estates in Wessex, and for how long they had owned them. For the purposes of this paper, Danish landowners in Wessex are divided into five bands, based on the annual values of manors reported in Domesday Book. The bands are provisional, intended as a pragmatic way of creating groups which are comprehensible as types of landowner in terms of geographical reach as well as value, and so of the social standing which they reinforced: • • • • • magnates (over £100) great landowners (£30–£100) greater thegns (£10–£30) lesser thegns (£2–£10) rich farmers (under £2) The thresholds between the five groups are inevitably somewhat arbitrary. At the upper end, the point is to try to distinguish ‘great landowners’ with essentially regional interests from the supraregional magnates. Whether that is the most meaningful distinction in the upper echelons of landed society remains to be tested against a wider group than is being examined here. The boundary between regional landowners and shirebased thegns seems more solid, at least for present purposes, since the greater thegns are concentrated towards the lower end of the income band of £10– £30. The two groups of thegns, greater and lesser, are intended to be broadly comparable – in how their landed estates were distributed geographically – with the county gentry and parish gentry of later periods. This scheme deliberately avoids the break points used in other studies – 5 hides (or £5) for 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 a thegn and 40 hides (or £40) for a nobleman – which rely on normative texts74 rather than the social realities of the mid eleventh century. The bands adopted here may not in the end prove the most useful in analysing late Anglo-Saxon landed society, but they are a start. Magnates The magnates owned a great deal of land, and typically had manors that were individually valuable and very widely scattered as well as numerous. Their landed estates tended to be supraregional in character rather than truly national, that is to say, they extended into two or more regions (Wessex, the south-east, western Mercia, the southern Danelaw, East Anglia, etc.) but not all of them. Some were worth three, four, or even five times as much as the threshold of £100 a year. For context, £100 was as much as many abbots and the least well-provided bishops (Rochester and Lichfield) drew from their estates, but only half that of even the junior members of the earls’ families (Leofwine and Gyrth). At the very top level, £500 a year was as rich in land as the richest abbots (Westminster and Glastonbury). By comparison, Earl Harold had £3,000 and King Edward £8,000. On current reckoning, ten Danish magnates owned land in Wessex in 1066 (Table 11.1). Two were from the uppermost stratum between £400 and £500 a year, but only one of the others surpassed £200, and that not by much. Four of them had significant holdings in Wessex, making them magnates even in Wessex alone, irrespective of holdings elsewhere; all four, coincidentally, had around £120 from Wessex. At the other end of the scale, two magnates had under £30 from their Wessex manors. Not more than five of the ten can really be thought of as Wessex magnates in the sense of deriving around half or more of their landed income from estates in the region or having some other special connection with it. The essence of magnate status was, in any case, the possession of landed interests which transcended any single regional affiliation. The Domesday evidence for urban wealth and lordship is skewed towards a few counties, though allows us to see that Esgar the staller had property in Gloucester – a shire where he had no land – and commended men in two shires where he had no estates as well as in shires where he did. We can in fact take it that all the magnates had significant urban property and numerous retainers who were themselves landed proprietors. Table 11.1. The Danish magnates of Wessex TRE. Landowner Aki the Dane Azur son of Thorth Bondi the staller Carl Esgar the staller Mærleswein Osgot of Hailes Saxi the housecarl Siward Barn Wigot of Wallingford Total value of estates (£) Total value of estates in Wessex (£) 120 494 182 139 458 218 108 121 189 145 27 124 118 127 52 125 29 55 48 48 179 Proportion of value of estates in Wessex (%) 22 25 65 86 11 57 27 45 25 34 Core shires, with proportion of estates therein (%) Herts., Essex, Suff. (57) Suss., Surr., Kent (52) Dors., Hants, Wilts. (51) Wilts. (71) Essex, Mdx, Herts. (71) Som., Devon, Cornw. (53) Glos. (51) – – Oxon. (?) 180 C. P. Lewis The greatest Danish magnate with large holdings in Wessex was Azur son of Thorth (Table 11.2; Figure 11.1). Azur appears in the existing literature with a relatively modest estate worth £116,75 but research for PDE has established the likelihood that he was the same man who elsewhere in Domesday Book is called Azur son of Toti (Toti being a short form of the name Thorth) and (in Kent) Azur of Lessness, with property worth nearly £500 extending across twelve shires from Somerset to Northamptonshire to Kent.76 He was among the very wealthiest landowners in England below the king and earls. A little over a third of his landed estate was in Sussex, where he was the richest landowner after Edward and Harold, better provided even than the bishop of Selsey. Over half his landed wealth lay in the south-east (Sussex, Surrey, and Kent), but Wiltshire was his second most important shire after Sussex, and his sixteen Wessex manors (half of them in Wiltshire) accounted for a quarter of his estate in 1066. The estate history of Ditchampton (Wilts.), a suburb of the monastic town of Wilton, proves that Azur’s father was the Thorth who was prominent at court throughout the time of the Danish kings and into Edward’s reign. In 1045, the king gave the 2½ hides of Ditchampton to Thorth, probably already with the idea that he would present it to the nuns at the royal monastery of Wilton, where two of Thorth’s daughters were about to join the community; in fact, for whatever reason, their brother Azur retained possession of 2 hides in 1066.77 Thorth was close to Cnut, witnessing the earliest extant charters of the reign first among the thegns, and continued to witness royal charters over a career at court of twenty-seven years, disappearing during 1045.78 Such a prominent follower newly arrived in England may have been given an English heiress soon afterwards, plausibly dating Azur’s birth within a few years either side of 1020 and putting Azur in his mid twenties at his father’s probable death, around thirty when he first appears in the documentary record (at the Oxfordshire shire court in 105179 and selling a Gloucestershire manor to Earl Godwine before 105380), and in his mid forties in 1066. Further Table 11.2. TRE holdings of Azur son of Thorth. Note: In this and subsequent tables, monetary values are calculated in £ and decimal proportions thereof rather than £ s. d. Shire Buckinghamshire Dorset Hampshire Kent Middlesex Northamptonshire Oxfordshire Somerset Surrey Sussex Warwickshire Wiltshire Wessex Elsewhere Total Manors Hides 8 3 3 1 1 6 5 2 8 25 3 8 16 57 73 38.25 11.25 16.50 20.00 25.00 15.50 27.00 21.00 83.00 157.75 18.50 68.75 117.50 385.00 502.50 Proportion of total (%) 8 2 3 4 5 3 5 4 17 31 4 14 23 77 100 Value (£) 36.00 6.25 16.50 20.00 20.00 22.50 23.50 12.50 62.00 174.40 12.00 88.50 123.75 370.40 494.15 Proportion of total (%) 7 1 3 4 4 5 5 3 13 35 2 18 25 75 100 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 Figure 11.1. Landed estates of selected magnates. (Map drawn by Duncan Probert) 181 182 C. P. Lewis detailed work on estate histories might help to establish which parts of Azur’s vast landed property had belonged to his father and which were newly acquired by Azur himself during Edward’s reign. Bondi the staller (Table 11.3) was more obviously a Wessex magnate. His identification depends on linking the predecessor of Henry de Ferrers, who held large manors spread between Berkshire and Essex, with the Bondi whose property elsewhere in Wessex and in Kent was acquired by other Normans; their identity is recommended by the size of the manors concerned, their broad geographical pattern, the relative infrequency of the name among TRE landowners, and the fact that a small manor near Gloucester which had been Bondi the staller’s (and, as such, was claimed by Ferrers) had certainly passed, it seems legitimately, to one of the other Normans.81 With rather less confidence, Bondi could be assigned another two manors worth £15 in Oxfordshire, where Domesday’s statement about pre-Conquest tenure is ambiguous,82 and perhaps another Hampshire manor worth £15 on lease from the nuns of Winchester.83 Bondi had a tenant of his own in Hampshire and commended men in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, one of the latter a sizable landowner in his own right, with a manor of 7 hides.84 Why would such a man in the distant claylands of north Buckinghamshire commend himself to someone who was ostensibly a Wessex magnate? Perhaps because Bondi’s family origins were in south-east Mercia. If so, they had grown by 1066 to a wide scattering across eleven shires between Gloucester, Dorset, Essex, and Northamptonshire, with two thirds in Wessex. Bondi’s designation as a staller and his charter attestations, which suggest that he was appointed to a senior position in the king’s household around 1060,85 hint that he grew rich quickly on the back of royal service. Identification is easier with the Wiltshire thegn Carl (Table 11.4; Figure 11.1), because all his manors in Wiltshire, Somerset, Hampshire, and Surrey went after the Conquest to Alfred of Marlborough.86 Probably the same Carl had Speen in south Berkshire, which passed to a minor Norman tenant-in-chief instead,87 but not the manor in Sussex which must once have lain within the great royal manor of Steyning.88 Carl’s manors were much more concentrated than Bondi’s, and Table 11.3. TRE holdings of Bondi the staller. Shire Berkshire Buckinghamshire Dorset Essex Gloucestershire Hampshire Kent Northamptonshire Oxfordshire Somerset Wiltshire Wessex Elsewhere Total Manors Hides 2 2 2 3 1 3 1 2 1 1 1 9 10 19 18.25 9.00 30.00 23.00 3.00 27.50 3.00 14.08 8.00 5.00 10.00 90.75 60.08 150.83 Proportion of total (%) 12 6 20 15 2 18 2 9 5 3 7 60 40 100 Value (£) 20.00 12.00 40.00 30.00 1.00 27.75 8.00 6.00 7.00 5.00 25.00 117.75 64.00 181.75 Proportion of total (%) 11 7 22 17 1 15 4 3 4 3 14 65 35 100 183 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 he was unusual among the magnates in having so much of his property in just one shire. Mærleswein the sheriff (Table 11.5; Figure 11.1) had estates spread across Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset, with a couple of outliers in Gloucestershire, but also a second cluster far away in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. His identity is clear from his very unusual name and from the succession after 1066 of Ralph Paynel in both regions.89 Mærleswein served as sheriff of Lincolnshire under King Harold in 1066 and was confirmed in office by William I, but fled to Scotland with Edgar the atheling in 1068. He returned to take part in the northern rebellion against the Normans in 1070, and finally disappeared back to Scotland. Although he has been regarded as ‘primarily a northerner’,90 over half the value of his manors was in Wessex, and there seem to be different geographical patterns in the two regions. His Wessex manors were scattered in a way like other magnate estates, but his manors in the northern Danelaw had what seems a more artificial distribution, even a purposeful one, strung out from south to north; many of them lay near the route from southern England via Lincoln and York, along Roman roads through the entire length of Lincolnshire from the Welland to the Humber, then following the River Ouse upstream to York, and finally the Roman road up Swaledale towards Stainmore and the north. If anything, the Wessex manors look like family lands, and the Danelaw manors like an official estate constructed when Mærleswein was appointed to a military command in the north. Mærleswein’s name suggests an Anglo-Danish Table 11.4. TRE holdings of Carl. Shire Berkshire Hampshire Somerset Surrey Wiltshire Wessex Elsewhere Total Manors Hides 1 2 1 1 15 19 1 20 10.00 13.50 5.00 20.00 112.79 141.29 20.00 161.29 Proportion of total (%) 6 8 3 12 70 88 12 100 Value (£) 8.00 10.00 5.00 20.00 103.60 126.60 20.00 146.60 Proportion of total (%) 5 7 3 14 71 86 14 100 Table 11.5. TRE holdings of Mærleswein. Shire Cornwall Devon Gloucestershire Lincolnshire Somerset Yorkshire Wessex (+ Glos.) Elsewhere Total Manors 9 10 1 8 10 14 30 22 52 Hides 25.00 12.00 4.50 48.75 25.75 131.88 67.25 180.63 247.88 Proportion of total (%) 10 5 2 20 10 53 27 73 100 Value (£) 33.00 41.50 10.00 61.50 40.50 31.00 125.00 92.50 217.50 Proportion of total (%) 15 19 5 28 19 14 57 43 100 184 C. P. Lewis identity. The second element is the Viking name Swein (ON Sveinn), which was used in other compounds, but the first element has given rise to much bafflement.91 It appears Old English rather than Old Norse but is not on record either as an independent name or as an element in other dithematic names, and conjectural personal names reconstructed from place-names have formed the bulk of the evidence deployed. By far the most convincing suggestion is that there was an unrecorded OE personal name Mærel (strong form) or Mærla (weak form).92 Family estates in the far south-west, a hybrid Anglo-Scandinavian name, and a shrievalty in the Danelaw might be taken to suggest a second-generation Dane whose father had married into the regional aristocracy of Wessex. The housecarl Saxi (Table 11.6) had an estate whose formation has some parallels with Mærleswein’s, since it was more or less evenly balanced between Wessex (a tight group of six manors astride the boundary between Hampshire and Berkshire) and elsewhere, in this case the southern Danelaw (nine manors scattered across five shires).93 The two clusters have not previously been connected,94 but both sets of manors seem to have passed initially after 1066 to Earl William fitzOsbern. The Hampshire manor in King William’s hands in 1086 (and presumably the three Berkshire manors too) had once been in the fief of fitzOsbern’s son Earl Roger, and others in both geographical groups belonged to men closely connected with fitzOsbern: his minister Gilbert fitzTurold, his brother-in-law Ralph de Tosny, two men to whom he had apparently given lands in the Welsh marches (Thurstan fitzRolf and William d’Écouis), and a tenant named from one of the places in Normandy where he had founded a monastery (Jocelin de Cormeilles).95 There is probably another reference to fitzOsbern as Saxi’s successor in the fact that in 1086 Hugh de Bolbec was said to hold one of Saxi’s Huntingdonshire manors ‘from Earl William’ (tenet de comite Willelmo); the phrase has elsewhere been taken as referring to William de Warenne (not an earl until 1088) and even to King William,96 but more likely the scribe merely put the verb in the wrong tense. The Wessex connection of Wigot of Wallingford (Table 11.7) was less through the manors that he owned there than through his bynaming after the shire borough of Berkshire. His byname is found both in Domesday Book and in a writ of Edward the Confessor which also identifies him as the king’s ‘dear cousin’ (mine leofne mæi).97 Although he is nowhere named in the Domesday entry for the borough,98 he held property nearby, on the facing Oxfordshire bank of the Thames at Goring and Gatehampton. Wigot’s landed estate as a whole was spread across eight shires and had Table 11.6. TRE holdings of Saxi the housecarl. Shire Berkshire Buckinghamshire Cambridgeshire Essex Hampshire Hertfordshire Huntingdonshire Wessex Elsewhere Total Manors Hides 2 1 1 3 4 1 3 6 9 15 14.00 19.00 4.50 5.28 25.63 4.75 8.00 39.63 41.53 81.16 Proportion of total (%) 17 23 6 7 32 6 10 49 51 100 Value (£) 14.00 16.00 8.00 18.50 40.50 14.00 10.00 54.50 66.50 121.00 Proportion of total (%) 12 13 7 15 33 12 8 45 55 100 185 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 Wallingford at almost its exact centre. Besides the sixteen manors where Wigot’s name appears in Domesday Book,99 it included as his most valuable manor anywhere Ogbourne (Wilts.), where the scribe of Great Domesday left a gap for the name of the TRE holder, who is identified by a corresponding entry in the Geld Accounts for the hundred concerned.100 Less certainly, as they lack any statement in Domesday Book about their TRE tenure, Wigot also held some, many, or (least likely) all of the numerous other Oxfordshire manors which had come by 1086 into the hands of Robert d’Oilly, who had married his daughter Ealdgyth.101 They amounted to nearly two dozen manors worth £120.102 Wigot’s name appears as a witness in five forged royal charters purporting to date from the years 1062–6; the texts in their present form identify him variously as a thegn (minister), butler (pincerna), steward (procurator), and most bizarrely as ‘Wigot of Lincoln’.103 The last three titles are bogus or garbled; what can be gleaned reliably from the charters is that Wigot must have appeared in some genuine but lost charter witness lists as a staller, like the other procuratores of the supposed Wells charter of 1065, Robert fitzWimarc, Esgar, Ralph, and Bondi. His particular office is suggested by the fact that the monks of Abingdon remembered him as ‘lord of the oppidani of Wallingford’;104 in classical Latin oppidani were ‘townsmen’ but in twelfth-century England oppidum came to mean a castle, and the choice of that word to describe Wigot may reflect his command of the housecarls based at Wallingford. The Danish magnates with land in Wessex whose centres of power lay in other regions were led, in point of wealth, by Esgar the staller (Table 11.8), marshal of the king’s household, sheriff of Middlesex, and leader of the London army. Esgar was a third-generation Dane in England, the grandson of Tovi the Proud, himself a staller who must have started in the service of King Æthelred II. Esgar’s estates were surprisingly concentrated for their huge value. The core (a third of the total) was in Essex; Essex, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire together accounted for nearly 70 per cent.105 In Wessex, he owned three Berkshire manors worth £52; they passed after the Conquest, with nearly all the rest of his property, to Geoffrey de Mandeville.106 Siward Barn (Table 11.9) was probably a Northumbrian magnate (Northumbrian estates were not recorded in Domesday Book) with Table 11.7. TRE holdings of Wigot of Wallingford. Note: Oxfordshire perhaps as many as another 23 manors of 145 hides worth £120; on those figures, Oxfordshire would account for 61 per cent by hidage and 58 per cent by value, Wessex 16 per cent by hidage and 18 per cent by value. Shire Berkshire Buckinghamshire Gloucestershire Middlesex Oxfordshire Sussex Warwickshire Wiltshire Wessex Elsewhere Total Manors Hides 1 2 2 2 4 2 1 3 4 13 17 10.00 17.50 1.75 16.00 42.00 33.00 5.00 38.00 48.00 115.25 163.25 Proportion of total (%) 6 11 1 10 26 20 3 23 29 71 100 Value (£) 15.00 18.00 7.00 18.00 27.00 23.00 2.00 33.00 48.00 95.00 143.00 Proportion of total (%) 10 13 5 13 19 16 1 23 34 66 100 186 C. P. Lewis property south of the Tees which straggled from the head of the Humber estuary south through Derbyshire, Warwickshire, and probably Oxfordshire to Berkshire.107 Aki the Dane (Table 11.10; Figure 11.1) had manors scattered between Suffolk and Wiltshire. His close involvement in other regions is shown variously by his lordship over fully a tenth of the burgesses of Hertford and his major stake in the important coastal borough of Dunwich in Suffolk; he had connections with the abbeys of St Albans and Westminster, was probably the Aki who witnessed a charter of Harthacnut for Abingdon abbey, and was probably also the Aki son of Toki Table 11.8. TRE holdings of Esgar the staller. Shire Manors Hides Proportion of total (%) Value (£) Proportion of total (%) 3 2 68.75 34.25 20 10 52.00 19.00 11 4 12 urban 2 3 64.93 19 155.00 34 33.25 80.00 9 23 68.00 102.00 15 22 8 3 2 1 3 33 36 15.97 19.25 4.00 30.00 68.75 281.65 350.40 5 5 1 9 20 80 100 18.40 17.25 11.00 15.00 52.00 405.65 457.65 4 4 2 3 11 89 100 Bedfordshire Berkshire Buckinghamshire Cambridgeshire Essex Gloucestershire Hertfordshire Middlesex Norfolk Northamptonshire Oxfordshire Suffolk Warwickshire Wessex Elsewhere Total Commended men • • • • • • • • • Table 11.9. TRE holdings of Siward Barn. Shire Berkshire Derbyshire Essex Gloucestershire Lincolnshire Norfolk Nottinghamshire Oxfordshire Warwickshire Yorkshire Wessex Elsewhere Total Manors Hides 3 9 1 1 3 2 2 3 6 1 3 28 31 55.00 33.33 2.25 15.00 15.25 6.00 4.19 20.00 31.50 6.00 55.00 133.52 188.52 Proportion of total (%) 29 18 1 8 8 3 2 11 17 3 29 71 100 Value (£) 48.00 35.00 10.00 20.00 15.00 6.00 6.30 19.00 25.50 4.00 48.00 140.80 188.80 Proportion of total (%) 25 19 5 11 8 3 3 10 14 2 25 75 100 187 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 who extracted a huge sum of money from the monks of Worcester to hand over a manor which his father had left to the church.108 Finally, Osgot of Hailes (Table 11.11) was a landed proprietor in the Cotswolds and the Thames valley. His identification is securely based on the succession to the greater part of his estates by William fitzRichard alias William Leofric, though others of his manors were dispersed for reasons which are not yet apparent.109 Osgot was given his topographical byname (from one of his Gloucestershire manors) in a witness list of the earlier or mid 1050s attached to a Worcester charter.110 His forename was an Anglicized version of ON Ásgautr, substituting the OE first element Os–.111 Osgot had exactly equal shares in the Berkshire manors of Childrey and Sparsholt with two other men, so perfectly divided that it is impossible to resist the deduction that the three men were brothers.112 The other two had English names, Beorhtric and Edmund, and Osgot seems at most an Adoptive Dane, the one brother in three given a name which nodded towards accommodation with Cnut. Table 11.10. TRE holdings of Aki the Dane. Shire Berkshire Cambridgeshire Essex Hertfordshire Huntingdonshire Middlesex Northamptonshire Suffolk Wiltshire Wessex Elsewhere Total Manors Hides 2 3 3 3 2 1 2 7 3 5 21 26 10.00 4.08 10.75 16.25 11.00 8.00 3.50 13.27 18.00 28.00 66.85 94.85 Proportion of total (%) 11 4 11 17 12 8 4 14 19 30 70 100 Value (£) 9.00 7.64 17.00 37.00 10.00 6.00 2.50 15.83 18.00 27.00 95.97 122.97 Proportion of total (%) 7 6 14 30 8 5 2 13 15 22 78 100 Table 11.11. TRE holdings of Osgot of Hailes. Shire Berkshire Buckinghamshire Essex Gloucestershire Herefordshire Oxfordshire Surrey Worcestershire Wessex Elsewhere Total Manors 3 1 1 7 1 1 1 1 3 13 16 Hides 30.33 8.25 7.00 47.13 1.00 3.42 3.50 5.00 30.33 75.30 105.63 Proportion of total (%) 29 8 7 45 1 3 3 5 29 71 100 Value (£) 29.33 9.00 6.00 55.50 0.25 2.00 1.20 5.00 29.33 78.95 108.28 Proportion of total (%) 27 8 6 51 0 2 1 5 27 73 100 188 C. P. Lewis The Danish-named magnates who had property in Wessex in 1066 thus included several who must be accounted Real Danes of the second generation: certainly Azur son of Thorth, probably Aki the Dane (son of Toki) and Mærleswein, perhaps Bondi the staller. Esgar the staller and Siward Barn both had deeper Danish ancestry and a landed base outside Wessex. Osgot of Hailes seems an Adoptive Dane, and there is an element of Adoptive Danishness about Esgar, too, since the family was in a sense reinventing itself as Danish when his father Athelstan, who bore a royal English forename, chose a Danish name for his son. Great Landowners Great landowners are here defined as regional nobles with estates in the range £30–£100 a year. None owned land in fewer than three shires, but they tended to have their landed wealth concentrated quite heavily in just one or at most two adjoining shires (Table 11.12). On average, their manors were smaller than magnate-owned properties (mean value £4.6 against £7.1) as well as being fewer in number. As with the magnates, we can distinguish great landowners based in Wessex from those whose core estates were elsewhere. Six in each category have been identified. Two of the insiders, Tholf the Dane and John the Dane, are discussed as detailed case studies in the appendix below. Tholf was the wealthiest great landowner whose property was confined to Wessex, with a value which made him almost as significant as any of the Danish magnates who had land there. Ulf presents some difficulties (Figure 11.2). The name was very frequent in Domesday Book, and two great men of the name had property on the fringes of Wessex. The Danelaw magnate Ulf Fenisc, predecessor of Gilbert of Ghent,113 had estates as far south and west as Ewelme in south Oxfordshire and Whichford at the southern tip of Warwickshire,114 and the king’s housecarl Ulf son of Manni Swart had land in Middlesex and Surrey besides the eight manors scattered from Suffolk to south Gloucestershire which passed after the Conquest to Robert de Tosny.115 Like other magnates, Ulf Fenisc’s and Ulf son of Manni’s manors were large and valuable, and for that reason alone it is unlikely that either of them was the Ulf who owned as many as twenty-five mostly rather small manors scattered across Devon and into the fringes of Somerset and Dorset.116 Devon had low manorial values, but even so, Ulf ’s manors lay towards the bottom of the range. They are relatively isolated from other manors assigned to the name Ulf outside Wessex, and the two factors together, distribution and values, make it probable we are dealing with a local landowner. The other three great landowners local to Wessex can be dealt with more summarily. Esgar the crippled (contractus) had eight manors centred in south Devon with one just across the Tamar in Cornwall and a distant outlier on the coast of north Somerset (Figure 11.2).117 Ketil ‘of Dibden’ had fifteen manors with their core in south Hampshire, including exempt land in the borough of Southampton, but extending also into Wiltshire and Somerset (Figure 11.2). He would qualify for this wealth band even if the lesscertain identifications in Somerset and Wiltshire were disallowed.118 Tovi ‘of Sutton Scotney’ had manors chiefly in north-west Hampshire and west Berkshire (Figure 11.2).119 The six ‘outsiders’ among the great landowners were based in different regions. Esbern Bigga was the head of an important east Kent family of English origin which extended its holdings beyond Kent probably during Cnut’s reign, at the same time that it was adopting some Danish forenames and a Danish byname borne by successive generations.120 Esbern had a single manor in Wessex, not far from Winchester. The king’s thegn Fulki was wealthiest in Sussex and had all his land near major royal boroughs in the south-east and Wessex, Chichester, Guildford, and Winchester again.121 The Eskil who owned the valuable 5-hide manor of Mapledurwell in northeast Hampshire was more likely than not Eskil of Beckenham, a landowner in Kent and Surrey.122 189 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 Two were based in the Thames valley: Hacon ‘of Nuneham’, an Oxfordshire man with two small manors in Wessex,123 and Halden, a housecarl of Edward the Confessor whose chief property was the very large manor of Hanslope in Buckinghamshire but who also owned smaller manors scattered across Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Hertfordshire, and Essex.124 The Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire thegn Tonni, who only just fails to qualify as a magnate, had a straggle of manors as far south as Berkshire.125 One curiosity of the outsiders is that there is little sign of Danish-owned estates spilling across the boundary between Wessex and the three shires Table 11.12. The Danish great landowners of Wessex TRE. (Each owner’s most important shires are in bold). Landowner Esbern Bigga Manors 14 Value (£) 80 Wessex (£) Hants (4) Esgar the crippled 8 59 Eskil of Beckenham 7 40 Cornw. (6) Devon (43) Som. (10) Hants (10) Fulki 5 31 Hants (6) Hacon ‘of Nuneham’ 7 53 10 43 Hants (5) Wilts. (2) Berks. (8) 7 54 Ketil ‘of Dibden’ 15 41 Tholf the Dane 18 95 Tonni 15 99 Tovi ‘of Sutton Scotney’ 17 49 Ulf 25 35 Halden John the Dane Devon (6) Dors. (15) Som. (18) Hants (31) Som. (5) Wilts. (5) Devon (6) Dors. (39) Hants (36) Som. (10) Wilts. (5) Berks. (6) Berks. (20) Hants (20) Wilts. (10) Devon (32) Dors. (<1) Som. (3) Elsewhere (£) Essex (7) Kent (53) Surr. (4) Suss. (8) Warws. (4) Kent (22) Surr. (8) Surr. (3) Suss. (22) Oxon. (46) Bucks. (25) Essex (2) Glos. (2) Herts. (4) Northants (1) Glos. (15) Lincs. (54) Northants (27) Oxon. (10) Warws. (2) 190 C. P. Lewis Figure 11.2. Landed estates of selected great landowners. (Map drawn by Duncan Probert) 191 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 in south-west Mercia which had Danish earls under Cnut (Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and Herefordshire). The reason may be that the three earls gave land there to men who were their own followers rather than Cnut’s. The great landowners reinforce the conclusions tentatively drawn from the magnates. They had varied origins as Real, Anglo-, and Adoptive Danes, and some were based in Wessex, with others based elsewhere. There are some limited indications of how the outsiders had acquired property in the south-west, though their typicality is uncertain: Esbern Bigga’s solitary manor in Wessex was held from Queen Eadgyth, and Fulki was a tenant of Archbishop Stigand. Greater and Lesser Thegns With the greater thegns (£10–£30 a year) we come to a group whose members often had lands confined to a single shire, usually not extending over more than about 10 miles (Table 11.13). One Table 11.13. The Danish greater thegns of Wessex TRE. Landowner Agemund ‘of Wellow’ and Agemund ‘of Hotlop’1 Auti ‘of Ellisfield’2 Bisi ‘of Calverton’3 Grim ‘of Thrushelton’4 Ingvar ‘of Inwardleigh’5 Skræmir ‘of Bradenstoke’6 Swein ‘of Castle Combe’7 Thorkil the Dane ‘of Backwell’8 Thorkil ‘of Chalgrove’9 Toti ‘of Donnington’10 Tovi ‘of Bradworthy’11 Tovi the sheriff 12 Tovi the king’s thegn13 Shires Hants Hants Berks., Bucks., Oxon. Cornw., Devon Devon Wilts. Som., Wilts. Som. Berks., Oxon. Berks., Wilts. Devon Som. Berks., Bucks., Surr. 1. PASE, ‘Agemund 14’ and ‘Agemund 15’. 2. GDB fols 46r. Esewelle, 49v. Dummere (DB: Hants 23:59; 69:7). 3. PASE, ‘Bisi 3’; GDB fols 61v. Edtune (DB: Berks. 33:8), 150v. Stantone, Calvretone (DB: Bucks. 23:32; 26:8), 159v. Hegford (DB: Oxon. 35:19). 4. GDB fols 108v. Tresetone, Aisselie (DB: Devon 17:3, 9), 122r. Languer, 122v. Amal, 123r. Botharder (DB: Cornw. 5.2:4; 5.4:10, 13); GDB fol. 122r. Languer (DB: Cornw. 5.2:20) is here treated as a duplicate of DB: Cornw. 5.2:4. 5. GDB fols 105v. Cochalescome, 106r. Lege, 111r. Cadebirie, 116r. Tambretone, Blachestane (DB: Devon 15:62; 16:23; 21:7; 39:19–20). The later name of his largest manor, Inwardleigh, incorporated his name: Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, ed. Watts, p. 332. 6. PASE, ‘Skræmir 1’; GDB fols 69v. Stoche, 74v. Tornuele, 74v. col. 2 lines 1–3 (DB: Wilts. 24:19; 68:22–3). 7. GDB fols 69v. Ticoode, 71r. Come (DB: Wilts. 24:30; 27:23), 99r. Claftertone (DB: Som. 45:11). Manors 10 2 4 5 5 2 3 4 3 4 2 8 7 Hides 19 13 23 3 6 25 17 22 23 17 4 15 33 Value (£) 17 15 25 14 14 12 19 14 21 17 13 15 28 8. GDB fols 88r. Clutone, Cliveware, Bacoile, 98r. Calviche (DB: Som. 5:14, 19, 30; 44:2); his byname ‘the Dane’ is given at Exon 450a2. 9. GDB fols 60v. Wibalditone, 61r. Chingestune (DB: Berks. 21:8; 22:12), 159r. Celgrave (DB: Oxon. 35:6). 10. GDB fols 61r. Deritone, Aneborne, Mortune (DB: Berks. 26:1–3), 72r. Hiwi (DB: Wilts. 41:4). 11. GDB fol. 114r. Dunewinesdone, Brawordine (DB: Devon 34:2, 6). 12. GDB fols 87r. Beletone (duplicated at 91v. Belgetone), 88v. Firford, 94v. Berchelei, 98v.–99r. Lopen (= Exon 490b2, where he is identified as the sheriff), Brade, Capilande, Bocheland, Dinescove (DB: Som. 1:28 (duplicated at 17:6); 5:35; 22:25; 47:3–5, 7–8). 13. GDB fols 34r. Aissele, 34v. Ferlega, 36v. col. 2 lines 18–20, Molesham (DB: Surr. 10:1; 19:8; 35:1–2), 63v. Bras (DB: Berks. 65:6), 151v. Celfunte, 152v. Hibestanes (DB: Bucks. 43:2; 48:1). 192 C. P. Lewis of the more scattered estates was that of Tovi, sheriff of Somerset in the 1060s, who went on to serve William I in the same office.126 The greater thegns included two Agemunds who shared a group of manors in Hampshire. All the people profiled in this section look something like a rank and file of Danish newcomers to the region. Toti can be taken as representative. He had three manors in west Berkshire, one by the Thames and two on the Downs, containing arable for eleven ploughteams (so perhaps 1,000 or 1,200 acres), some demesne meadow and woodland, and two watermills; in 1086 the peasant tenants on those manors numbered fewer than thirty, and there were small home farms with 1½ ploughs; Toti had also taken 1 hide in Wiltshire on a lease for three lives from Malmesbury abbey. The lesser thegns are here defined as having lands bringing in £2–£10 a year, generally from only one or two manors (Table 11.14). Viking was unusual in owning a scatter of eleven small properties: they were mostly in the immediate vicinity of Exeter, and he was probably identical with the moneyer Wicing who struck coins in the city for the issue assigned to 1059–62,127 so may have been a rich townsman who had bought rural property rather than chiefly a rural landowner. Very likely he was the same Viking who was among the witnesses to an agreement about a south Devon manor in 1045 or 1046, and, as Viking the boatswain, to a manumission of about the same period at Topsham near Exeter.128 Representative among the others was Tunbi’s manor at Sunwood, high on the Hampshire Downs near the Sussex border. In 1086, his successor had land for 4 ploughs (perhaps 400–500 acres), divided equally between a home farm and ten peasant farmers; the manor included a small church and some woodland.129 Some of the lesser thegns held all their land by dependent tenure: in Hampshire, for example, Herki from the bishop of Winchester, Iusten (jointly with the English-named Leofsige) from the Old Minster, and Elaf from the New Minster. Tunbi and Thorir ‘of Funtley’ had been the tenants Notes to Table 11.14 1. PASE, ‘Api 2’. 2. PASE ‘Azur 9’ (forthcoming); GDB fols 57v. Eddevetone, 62r. col. 2 lines 18–10 up (DB: Berks. 1:28; 41:6). 3. PASE, ‘Colbrand 5’. 4. PASE, ‘Colbrand 6’. 5. GDB fol. 42r. Candevre (DB: Hants 6:13). 6. GDB fols 62v. Avintone (DB: Berks. 43:2), 73r. Calestone (DB: Wilts. 58:1). 7. PASE, ‘Gunni 6’. 8. PASE, ‘Gunward 2’. 9. PASE, ‘Herki 2’. 10. GDB fol. 99r. Estone (DB: Som. 45:10). 11. GDB fol. 125r. Deliau, Trefrioc (DB: Cornw. 5.25:1–2). 12. PASE, ‘Iusten 6’. 13. PASE, ‘Iusten 7’. 14. GDB fol. 114r. Ciretone (DB: Devon 34:15). 15. GDB fol. 70r. Sclive, Bichenehilde (DB: Wilts. 25:11–12). 16. GDB fols 44r. col. 2 last 6 lines, 53r. Scaldeford 1st and 2nd entries (DB: Hants 18:3; IoW 7:10; IoW 8:1). 17. GDB fols 103r. Walcome, 106r. Acha, 118r. Madone (DB: Devon 3:90; 16:24; 52:31). 18. PASE, ‘Ottar 8’. 19. GDB fol. 62v. Hurlei (DB: Berks. 46:5). 20. PASE, ‘Sibbi 3’. 21. GDB fol. 60v. Chingestune (DB: Berks. 21:14). 22. GDB fol. 92v. Cocintone (DB: Som. 19:64). 23. GDB fol. 49v. Ormeresfelt (DB: Hants 68:1). 24. GDB fol. 74v. Suindone (DB: Wilts. 68:25). 25. GDB fols 70r. Bechenehilde (DB: Wilts. 25:18), 160r. Bortone (DB: Oxon. 40:1). 26. GDB fol. 91v. Celeworde (DB: Som. 17:5). 27. GDB fol. 49r. Funtelei (DB: Hants 66:1). 28. GDB fol. 61r. Chingestune (DB: Berks. 22:12). 29. GDB fol. 102r. Mertone (DB: Devon 3:5). 30. GDB fol. 74r. Contone (DB: Wilts. 67:63). 31. PASE, ‘Thormund 2’. 32. GDB fol. 71r. Brenchewrde (DB: Wilts. 28:8). 33. GDB fol. 109v. Botreforde, Stotberie, Ocheneberie, Lamesete (DB: Devon 17:62–3, 65, 67). 34. PASE, ‘Tunbi 2’. 35. GDB fols 110r. Esseminstre, Matford, 110v. Hewise, Aulescome 2nd entry, Wipletone, 111r. Alseminstre, 114r. Peumere, Hochesham, Chisewic, 114v. Wigegroste, Hevetrove (DB: Devon 19:8–9, 22, 26, 38, 45; 34:12, 29–30, 52, 56). 36. GDB fol. 70r. Caldefelle (DB: Wilts. 25:8). 37. GDB fol. 102r. Cliste (DB: Devon 3:7); identified as a priest in Exon 132b1. of Earl Godwine before 1053. The Berkshire Azur (distinguishable from Azur son of Thorth because he was still alive in 1086) was Edward the Confessor’s bursar (dispensator). 193 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 Table 11.14. The Danish lesser thegns of Wessex TRE. Landowner Api ‘of Timsbury’1 Azur the bursar2 Colbrand ‘of Creech’3 Colbrand ‘of Blackdown’4 Elaf ‘of Brown Candover’5 Gunnar ‘of Avington’6 Gunni the Dane7 Gunward ‘of Timsbury’8 Herki ‘of Fareham’9 Ingulf ‘of Batheaston’10 Iolf ‘of Delamere’11 Iusten ‘of Hordle’12 Iusten ‘of Sutton’13 Ketil ‘of Cheriton’14 Ketil ‘of Clyffe Pypard’15 Osgot brother of Almær16 Osgot ‘of Welcombe’17 Ottar ‘of Ford’18 Ragnhild ‘of Hartley’19 Sibbi ‘of Timsbury’20 Stenkil ‘of Kingston Bagpuize’21 Swein ‘of Cucklington’22 Swein ‘of Dogmersfield’23 Thorbert ‘of Swindon’24 Thorgot ‘of Black Bourton’25 Thorir ‘of Chelwood’26 Thorir ‘of Funtley’27 Thorkil ‘of Kingston Bagpuize’28 Thorkil ‘of Merton’29 Thorkil ‘of Compton Bassett’30 Thormund ‘of Winterborne’31 Toki ‘of Brinkworth’32 Tovi ‘of Okenbury’33 Tunbi ‘of Sunwood’34 Viking ‘of Awliscombe’35 Waltheof ‘of Chalfield’36 Wigot the priest ‘of Clyst St Mary’37 Shires Som., Wilts. Berks. Dors. Devon Hants Berks., Wilts. Som. Som. Hants Som. Cornw. Hants Hants Devon Wilts. Hants Devon Devon Berks. Som. Berks. Som. Hants Wilts. Oxon., Wilts. Som. Hants Berks. Devon Wilts. Dors., Som. Wilts. Devon Hants Devon Wilts. Devon Among the thegns there are two striking examples where individual manors had been split in a highly regular way between two or three men with Danish names. As with Osgot, Beorhtric, and Manors 2 2 1 3 1 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 2 2 3 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 4 1 11 1 1 Hides 4 11 2 1¾ 2½ 14 3½ 5 4 3 1 5 3½ ⅛ 4 3 1¾ 2¾ 2 2 5 3½ 5 12 6 3 1 5 ¾ 6 7½ 6 2¾ 3 6¼ 2½ 3 Value (£) 3 9 2 5 2 10 3 3 2 2 3 8 4 2 2 5 6 2 2 1 3 4 5 3 5 3 4 5 6 5 5 4 5 4 8 4 3 Edmund, discussed above, the neatest explanation is that they were brothers, and thus that what we are seeing in Domesday Book is a rearrangement of property in the second generation of ownership by 194 C. P. Lewis a Danish family. The first example is on a Berkshire manor. Abingdon claimed to have bought the whole 20-hide vill of Kingston Bagpuize, in the Vale of the White Horse, in the 970s, but by 1066 controlled only 10 hides, under the name of Draycott.130 The other 10 hides was divided equally in 1066 between Stenkil and Thorkil, men with Danish names who shared a final nameelement; each had 5 hides, land for 4 ploughs, and 30 acres of meadow.131 Abingdon further claimed that Thorkil, ‘a rich man’ (quidam diues), with the advice of Earl Harold, commended himself and his land to Abbot Ordric, intending that it should belong to Abingdon in perpetuity, but that after the Conquest, when Thorkil was killed at the battle of Hastings, the Norman Henry de Ferrers took the land for himself in defiance of the abbey’s rights.132 Abingdon’s account of the loss was rewritten in the later twelfth century,133 and in the process evidently confused the two TRE owners, since it was actually Stenkil, not Thorkil, who had the share taken by Ferrers.134 The confusion between the two men reinforces the idea that they were brothers. Thorkil more likely than not also held property near by at Willington (Berks.) and Chalgrove (Oxon.), a total of 23 hides worth £21;135 that identification would better justify Abingdon’s characterization of Thorkil as a rich man. The other divided estate was Timsbury in northeast Somerset, another vill of 10 hides, divided in a complicated way between three men with the Danish names of Gunward, Api, and Sibbi, so that it was first split into two holdings of 5 hides, one of which continued intact (Gunward), the other being further parcelled into units of 3 hides (Api) and 2 hides (Sibbi).136 The division of the meadow and pasture evidently also followed a primary 50:50 split, with Api and Sibbi then dividing their share 2:1,137 since Api probably had 26 acres of each to Sibbi’s 13 acres; and between them they had 39 acres to Gunward’s ‘40 acres less 1’. Likewise, Api had two thirds of a watermill paying 3s. and Sibbi one third paying 2s., a total for their mill of 5s. or 60d.; Gunward’s mill paid 40d., though Domesday’s .XL. is perhaps an error for .LX. The division between Gunward, Api, and Sibbi was thus arranged 5:3:2 for the hidage; 3:2:1 for the meadow and pasture; and (conceivably) 5:3:2 for the mill renders. Exon notes that Sibbi held his manor jointly (in paragio) but does not say the same for Api or Gunward, though the absence of the formula is not evidence that they were not so held.138 Gunward and Sibbi held nothing other than Timsbury,139 but Api had a second, equally modest manor a few miles away in Wiltshire.140 The Old Danish name Sibbi evidently originated as a short form of Sigbjorn; it does not seem to have been widely used in England, and its absence from both the minor place-names and the later personal nomenclature of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire suggests that it did not reach England during the period of the Viking settlement but rather was first used in the eleventh century, that is, by settlers under Cnut.141 Api is alleged to be an ON byname meaning ‘fool’, though the occurrence of the name in parallel with Sibbi suggests that we ought at least to wonder if it might instead be a variant of the recorded name Abbi, a short form of Old Danish Abjorn.142 At any rate, the names Api and Sibbi look like a family pair. Rich Peasants and Burgesses Below £2 a year we are at the social boundary between small landowners and rich peasant farmers, a functional distinction between men who mostly supervised the farming operations on their manors and men who regularly got their hands dirty (Table 11.15). Significantly, the Danish names thin out, even in absolute numbers, let alone as a proportion of a very much larger total of individuals. For comparison, the 20 rich Wessex farmers with Danish names (some of which are hybrids or Anglicizations not necessarily denoting Danish ancestry) stand alongside perhaps 30 called Godric alone (one of the commoner English names). The holdings concerned, although all farmsized, span a range. At the upper end, Yric’s manor 195 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 had land for 4 ploughs and in 1086 accommodated a flock of almost 100 sheep. At the lower end, Summerled’s property at ‘Leigh’, tentatively identified as Widcombe Barton Farm in the hills of south Devon, had land for only ½ plough besides 3 acres of demesne woodland, 20 acres of pasture, and 2 acres of meadow; in 1086, it was populated by a single bordar.143 Thorbert ‘of Cullompton’ might have been a priest, since his holding was attached to Cullompton church, which had been detached from the ancient royal manor of Silverton.144 Evidence for the names of burgesses in the towns of Wessex is thin but worth bringing into the reckoning of the Danish impact on the region. Table 11.15. The Danish rich peasants of Wessex TRE. Landowner Bondi ‘of Empshott’1 Bondi ‘of Knighton’2 Brothir ‘of Henford’3 Carlman ‘of Clyffe Pypard’4 Colswein ‘of Horningsham’5 Elaf ‘of Newton’6 Elaf ‘of Speccott’7 Harold ‘of Knighton’8 Ketil (Cytel) ‘of Balsdon’9 Ketil ‘of Chetelescote’10 Onlaf ‘of Briddlesford’11 Osgot ‘of Spriddlescombe’12 Summerled ‘of Leigh’13 Swein ‘of Sydling’14 Thorbert ‘of Cullompton’15 Thorbert the huntsman16 Thorkil ‘of Cheverton’17 Toki ‘of Mudford Sock’18 Topi ‘of Wilson’19 Yric ‘of Bulkworthy’20 Shire Hants Hants (IoW) Cornw., Devon Wilts. Wilts. Som. Devon Hants (IoW) Cornw. Devon Hants (IoW) Devon Devon Dors. Devon Hants Hants Som. Devon Devon 1. GDB fol. 49r. Hibesete (DB: Hants 62:1). 2. GDB fol. 54r. Chenistone (DB: Hants IoW 9:15). 3. GDB fols 109r. Hindeford (DB: Devon 17:20), 123r. Maronecirche (DB: Cornw. 5.5:5); the name might be the cognate OE Brothor: Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 208 and note 7; the case for an English name formed from the common noun brōðor (‘brother’) rests on the fact that in both cases the scribe of Great Domesday Book changed an almost unintelligible spelling in Exon (232b3 Brotdra, 319b1. Brorus) to a form intelligible as that word. 4. GDB fol. 70v. Clive 2nd entry (DB: Wilts. 26:17). 5. PASE, ‘Colswein 11’. 6. GDB fol. 93r. Niwetone (DB: Som. 21:3). 7. GDB fol. 115r. Spececote (DB: Devon 36:5). 8. GDB fol. 39v. Chenistone & Done (DB: Hants 1:W1). Manors 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Hides 1 ½ Virgates 1 ½ 2 1 3 1 1 ¼ 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1½ 1 1 Value (s.) 10 3 21 10 10 20 7½ 5 5 10 20 7 3 10 30 21 20 15 5 20 9. GDB fol. 123v. Bellesdone (DB: Cornw. 5.7:5). 10. GDB fol. 112v. Chetelescote (DB: Devon 24:27). 11. PASE, ‘Onlaf 3’; GDB fol. 53r. Breilesforde (DB: Hants IoW 7:4). 12. GDB fol. 105v. Combe (DB: Devon 15:77). 13. GDB fol. 117v. Lege (DB: Devon 48:12). 14. GDB fol. 79v. Sidelince (DB: Dors. 26:27). 15. GDB fol. 104r. Colitone (DB: Devon 9:1). 16. GDB fol. 51v. Otreorde, 1st entry (DB: Hants NF 9:4). 17. GDB fol. 52v. Cevredone (DB: Hants IoW 6:9). 18. GDB fol. 94v. Soche (DB: Som. 21:95). 19. PASE, ‘Topi 6’; GDB fol. 108r. Welingedinge (DB: Devon 16:146). 20. PASE, ‘Yric 3’; GDB fol. 104v. Buchesworde (DB: Devon 15:14). 196 C. P. Lewis At Southampton, three of the nine men named as holding exempt land (quieta terra) TRE had Danish names: Eskil the priest, Ketil (identified above as the great landowner Ketil ‘of Dibden’), and Tosti (conceivably the earl).145 For Winchester, the TRE survey of royal lands which survives outside Domesday Book has only seven or eight Danish names among perhaps 265 men paying landgable and brewgable: Colswein (a hybrid Anglo-Danish name), Elaf, Farmann, Gautr, Huni, Stenulf, Toki, and Ulfketil.146 A useful point of comparison is that only one of some twenty-four moneyers who issued coins at Winchester during Edward’s reign had a Danish name, Brand.147 Winchester might have been central to Cnut’s rule over England, but it was far from being a Danish town in the mid eleventh century. Conclusions The profiles outlined here offer plentiful but indirect evidence for Danish families as landowners in Wessex in 1066, but only sporadic clues about how and when they had arrived in the region, and what sort of Danish identities lay behind the names. The idea that the great majority had come direct from Denmark in the entourages of Cnut and/or Harthacnut in and after 1016 and 1040 remains impervious to actual proof, though more robust than a mere plausibility, since it is hard to think what other social mechanism could have produced the effects that can be seen. What can be offered now is a much clearer idea of the numbers of people involved. On current reckoning, eighty-one individuals with Danish names were Wessex landowners in 1066, in the sense of holding most or all of their landed property there. They form a social pyramid, with progressively larger numbers further down the scale of wealth until we reach the rich peasants. On the bands adopted for this study, they comprised four magnates (annual landed income £100 or more), six great landowners (£30–£100), fourteen greater thegns (£10–£30), thirty-seven lesser thegns (£2–£10), and twenty rich peasants (under £2). A more normative division to correspond with the idea that ‘5 hides made a thegn’ and ‘40 hides made a noble’ would give fifty-seven sub-thegnly landowners (under £5), sixteen thegns (£5–£40), and eight nobles (over £40). By either reckoning, the numbers fall away sharply only below an annual value of about £1 a year: there were quite substantial numbers of Danes with single manors worth £2 or £3 a year in 1066. Eighty-one Danes is a significant number (set against some 210 Norman tenants-in-chief in Wessex in 1086, for example), though no comparison is yet possible with the numbers of English landowners in each wealth band. It is also significant that they permeated every part of Wessex, without signs of concentration around Cnut’s capital of Winchester or the housecarls’ base at Wallingford. At the very least, they represent scores of families at all levels of landed society which either were Danish or identified themselves as such in their naming practices in the period down to the early years of Edward’s reign. Such a wide geographical and social distribution argues against any single episode of ‘Danish settlement’ in Wessex, and in favour of multiple processes in the acquisition of landed wealth. The mechanisms through which Danes became landowners in Wessex are mostly not transparent. A few who can be identified with a great deal of confidence can be seen variously as Real Danes, Anglo-Danes, and Adoptive Danes. In theory, many more might have been Anglo-Danes from the Danelaw, newly given lands in Wessex in the eleventh century, but the stock of Danish personal names found in Wessex in 1066 tells against that possibility. It was not really like that of the Danelaw as a whole, even given the known regional variation across the areas settled by the Vikings in the ninth century.148 Some names, of course, appear in both Wessex and the Danelaw – Auti, Azur, Bondi, Eskil, Grim, Ketil, Swein, Toki – but equally, some of the most prolific Scandinavian names of the Danelaw do not occur at all in the south-west, including all 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 the names in Arn– (Arnbern, Arnbrand, Arnger, Arngrim, Arni, and Arnketil/Arnkil), Gamel, Grimkil, Ketilbern and Ketilbert, Orm, and Ulfketil/Ulfkil. One might have expected at least some of those very common Danelaw names to be carried to Wessex if significant numbers of the Wessex Danes had been transplanted from the Danelaw. Most of the Wessex Danes of 1066 were probably Real Danes of the second generation, the sons of men who first acquired land under Cnut. There are three striking examples of manors divided equitably between two or three Danes who were probably brothers: John the Dane and Strang the Dane at Shipton Moyne, Gunward, Api, and Sibbi at Timsbury, Thorkil and Stenkil at Kingston Bagpuize. But family histories must have been almost infinitely varied: other Danish settlers in Wessex will not have left male heirs at all, and some will have assimilated by giving their sons English names. There are plenty of examples of the dilution of Danish identity through the adoption of English personal names at all social levels, from Athelstan son of the staller Tovi the Proud,149 through the Hampshire thegn Leofwine son of Bondi (fl. 1023),150 to the Winchester burgess Godwine son of Ketil (fl. 1066).151 The Danish presence in Wessex in 1066 does not look much like the result of a land-grab after 1016. Although there was fighting in Wessex during the final Danish wars of 1013–16, it did not really compare with the Norman campaigns of 1066–71, and the men of Wessex are explicitly said on more than one occasion to have fought for Cnut against Æthelred II and Edmund Ironside. The Danes who came to Wessex after 1016 probably mostly acquired land by peaceful means, principally through marriage into English families and clientage from Cnut and Earl Godwine; in other words, by exactly the same means that shaped the landed estates of native English families. Besides settlement directly in Wessex, we can see at the upper levels of landed society that Danish families based in neighbouring regions had been 197 drawn into Wessex during the eleventh century – from the Thames valley (Wigot of Wallingford, Osgot of Hailes, Hacon ‘of Nuneham’), the southeast (Esbern Bigga, Fulki, Eskil of Beckenham), the Mercian shires north of London (Esgar the staller, Aki the Dane), and even further afield (Tonni, Siward Barn). The richest of the outsiders had enough of a stake in Wessex to make a mark and play some part in its affairs. It is interesting, for example, that Esgar the staller’s 30-hide Berkshire manor at Lambourn must already have acquired the unofficial name of ‘Esgar’s tūn’ in his time in order for it to have changed its name later to East Garston.152 At the highest social levels, some of the processes which planted men with Danish names as landowners in Wessex are perfectly clear. The most prominent secular landowners with Danish names in 1066 were, after all, Earl Harold, his mother Gytha, and his siblings Tosti, Gyrth, and Gunnhild. And the chief Danish newcomer to Wessex in the time of Edward the Confessor was Stigand, who was made bishop of Winchester in 1047; he was from a wealthy Anglo-Danish family in Norfolk and had been a royal chaplain under Cnut.153 Harold’s family and Bishop Stigand owed their presence in Wessex to royal patronage. Royal patronage of Danes in Wessex, and the equally important but barely visible patronage of Earl Godwine, was a continuing process that ran from Cnut’s reign through to Edward’s. It went in parallel with the penetration of other outside influences, in particular the arrival of French landowners which started with the marriage of Æthelred II and Emma of Normandy in 1002. The non-native landowners of Wessex at the start of 1066 also included men like Edward’s cousin the Norman priest Osbern fitzOsbern,154 his Breton courtiers Ralph the staller and Alfred the marshal, Baldwin fitzHerlwin (perhaps, from his name, a Fleming or Picard), and a sprinkling of lesser landowners.155 At the upper levels of landed society the biographical profiles which underpin the analysis 198 C. P. Lewis offered here provide some markedly different figures for the wealth of individuals from those published by Clarke. There are six names which are altogether new, not identified by Clarke as holding land worth over £40 a year, one of whom (Aki the Dane) had over £100; almost every rich landowner had more land than Clarke reckoned, in some cases very significantly more; Azur son of Thorth has emerged as one of the wealthiest men in England. The adjustments to Clarke’s figures involve more than tinkering with the details, because they reveal that the greatest landowners had far wider crossregional interests than was previously apparent. They show how unusual was the configuration of Mærleswein’s landed estate, split equally between the south-western peninsula and the northern Danelaw, with nothing between, and rooted in his acquisition of office; how housecarls like Aki the Dane, Saxi, Azur son of Thorth, and Wigot of Wallingford had very scattered property which made nothing of the boundaries between the traditional English regions; and how landowners like Tholf the Dane and Esbern Bigga were extending their reach from core family holdings into other districts. For Wessex generally, they show that the largest non-royal, non-ecclesiastical, noncomital estates were held by a mixture of insiders and outsiders. All this is suggestive of the growing integration of landed society at supra-regional and even national levels, a process which was propelled forward rather than retarded by the arrival of new Danes in the earlier eleventh century. Appendix: Two Case Studies What follows is a more detailed presentation of the evidence in two case studies. It shows more of the working methods of Profile of a Doomed Elite than was possible or desirable in the main body of the paper, in particular as a warning that virtually all identifications depend upon shades of confidence rather than certainty. The examples chosen are two Wessex landowners with the strongest claim to be considered new settlers from Denmark because they both bore the explicit byname ‘the Dane’. The first is hedged about with many levels of confidence; the other sits squarely at the more robust end of the scale. 1. Tholf the Dane Very few landowners in England in 1066 were called Tholf.156 One in Wessex was explicitly given the byname ‘the Dane’ (dacus) at a manor in Hampshire.157 His forename (normalized in modern onomastic scholarship as ON þólfr) originated as a shortened form of ON þórulfr, but the two forms were characteristic of different regions in the Scandinavian homeland: the longer form mainly in Iceland, the short form peculiar to Denmark. The spelling Tholf represents a standardized Old Danish form.158 The name must have come to England from Denmark rather than Norway. The geographical associations of the forename and the ‘ethnic’ byname thus reinforce one another, underlining the point that Tholf the Dane is likely to have been a first- or at most second-generation newcomer to Wessex. The identifications made by PDE for the handful of landowners called Tholf bring together the Domesday spellings which have long been recognized as variants of the name with others which Feilitzen assigned (often tentatively) to different head-forms: Teolf (derived by him from CG Theodulf or ON Þióðólfr), Teos (origin obscure), Tous (perhaps ON Tófi), and Þurs (an ON byname).159 They also reassign to Tholf a handful of instances where the spellings point at first sight to ON Tóli and OE Cuthwulf.160 Those last two are undoubtedly present in Domesday as the names of persons who were quite distinct from any of the Tholfs, but some of the instances listed by Feilitzen seem rather to refer to Tholf the Dane, for reasons which will become apparent. The key to identifying Tholf the Dane is the recognition that he was one of the two main pre-Conquest predecessors in the west country of the Norman lord William d’Eu, the other being Ælfstan of Boscombe. Over much of the west 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 country, William I constructed fiefs for his barons on an antecessorial basis; that is, he assigned en bloc to one of his followers the landed estates of one or more pre-Conquest owners, who were termed the Norman’s antecessores, his antecessors.161 Tholf and Ælfstan were not, strictly speaking, William’s antecessores, since there was an intermediate Norman landowner, Ralph de Limésy, who acquired the Englishmen’s lands but had himself disappeared by 1086. Technically, it was Ralph who was William’s d’Eu’s antecessor. Ralph’s tenure will be important later in this discussion. The analysis which follows takes each of the relevant shires in turn, starting with Dorset, where Tholf the Dane’s manors were most heavily concentrated.162 In Dorset, William d’Eu had two main predecessors, Ælfstan of Boscombe and a man whose name is variously spelled Tou (× 2), Toul (× 3), and Tol (× 2), all of which are readily recognizable as Tholf.163 William also acquired one large manor from Tholi,164 a spelling which Feilitzen assigned to the name Toli. This is the only Tholi in Dorset, and is most unlikely to be a different person from Tholf. It might represent the spelling Thol (phonetically identical with Tol) inadvertently given an additional letter, or the spelling Thou (phonetically identical with Tou) with the minims of the final letter misread as li instead of u. The metamorphosis of Tol (for Tholf ) into Toli (for Toli) is discussed below in connection with Devon. In Hampshire, William had the same two main predecessors, Tholf appearing first with his byname as Tol dacus, and then in the immediately following entry as Thol.165 Both forms stand unambiguously for the name Tholf, but there is a twist. The first entry originally had a further letter at the end of the name after Tol, which the scribe erased by scratching the ink off the parchment. A small part of the erased letter remains visible: it was certainly not an i, and looks most like an a, making the name as first written Tola, which would be the feminine ON name Tóla. Interlined above the forename, the scribe has written the masculine byname dacus, using an abbreviation mark for the last two letters. 199 The scribe may have scratched out the final a of Tola when he added the byname, realizing that he was dealing with a masculine name. In any case, the emendation is a clear reminder that even the expert scribe of Great Domesday Book made some mistakes. The separate section of the Hampshire folios which deals with the New Forest lists a further manor belonging to William d’Eu, naming his predecessor there as Coolf.166 Coolf might be the OE name Cuthwulf, as Feilitzen thought (though the spelling would be eccentric),167 but the association with William d’Eu raises the suspicion of another miscopying. Three other Cuthwulfs who occur as TRE landowners in southern England can be securely identified, and none of them is likely to have held this particular estate.168 Might the name instead be a misreading of Toolf, a perfectly acceptable spelling for Tholf? Although in contemporary English script the capital letters C and T looked rather different from one another, some of the Domesday texts which preceded Great Domesday Book are known routinely to have started personal names with lower-case letters, and the graphs for lower-case c and t were easily confusable. The likelihood is indeed that William d’Eu’s predecessor Coolf was not some Cuthwulf but Tholf the Dane. That same spelling Coolf occurs only once more anywhere in Domesday Book, also in Hampshire, and at a manor on the Isle of Wight just across the Solent from the first Coolf in the New Forest.169 If one of them was really Tholf the Dane, then surely both were. The Wight manor was in the hands in 1086 of King William rather than William d’Eu, but that was because there were no antecessorial grants on Wight: after the Conquest, the whole island was given first to the king’s most loyal friend William fitzOsbern, and fell back into the king’s hands after fitzOsbern’s son Earl Roger de Breteuil rebelled in 1075.170 Hence its failure to pass into the ownership of William d’Eu is not a barrier to identifying its pre-Conquest owner as Tholf the Dane. In Wiltshire, William d’Eu’s main predecessor 200 C. P. Lewis was again Ælfstan of Boscombe; two of the three manors which had not been Ælfstan’s were entered with the TRE landowner’s name as Toli.171 Most instances of that spelling in Domesday Book stand for the Danish name Toli (ON Tóli), and Feilitzen naturally assigned the Wiltshire examples to Toli along with the rest. But the same consideration applies in Wiltshire as in Dorset: Toli in Wiltshire, like Tholi in Dorset, could stand for Tol or Tou, and thus for Tholf. The descent of the manors concerned to William d’Eu is a powerful argument that it did. The argument is reinforced by the fact that although almost a dozen men who really were called Toli can be identified as TRE landowners, none of them had land in the west country.172 There was in fact another instance of Toli in Wiltshire, at Bincknoll, which did not pass to William d’Eu, as well as a Tous at Upton Scudamore, a manor which also went to a different Norman; both places and both name forms will be brought into this analysis below. William d’Eu’s fief in Somerset introduces a further complication, but one which casts light on Toli of Bincknoll (Wilts.). William’s Somerset manors had again mostly belonged to Ælfstan of Boscombe. One of the others, Tickenham, had been held as two manors TRE by Saulf and Teolf,173 and the corresponding entry in Exon shows that they had held jointly, with exactly equal shares of 4 hides 1 virgate apiece.174 The circumstances suggest the two landowners were kinsmen. As a west country predecessor of William d’Eu, Teolf is likely to be yet another spelling of Tholf, and not, as Feilitzen suggested, the CG name Theodulf or ON þióðólfr,175 the first of which is not well attested in pre-Conquest England and the second only once or not at all.176 We need to return now to Bincknoll. In 1066, the place was in divided ownership: half the 10hide vill belonged to the great Danish landowner Hacon ‘of Nuneham’, and half was divided between Toli’s manor and a holding shared by Saul and Aluuinus.177 The last two holdings interlocked and had perhaps recently formed a single unit: Toli’s was assessed for tax at 2 hides less 1 virgate (a relatively uncommon way of expressing 1¾ hides) and the other at 3 hides 1 virgate, together making 5 hides. The ploughlands were disposed in almost the same proportions, Saul and Aluuinus having land for 10 oxen and Toli land for 6 oxen (altogether land for 16 oxen or 2 ploughs), a ratio of 10:6 which is close to the assessment ratio (in virgates) of 13:7.178 This looks like a relatively recent division between Saul and Aluuinus on the one hand and Toli on the other. The shares of Saul and Aluuinus are not recorded, but conceivably Saul had exactly the same number of hides and ploughlands at Bincknoll as Toli, leaving Aluuinus with a smaller share. There are good grounds for thinking that Saulf of Tickenham (Som.) and Saul of Bincknoll (Wilts.) were the same person, a man with the OE name Sæwulf.179 At Bincknoll, he was co-owner with another Englishman, Alwine. We should further conclude that Teolf of Tickenham (who had an equal share with Sæwulf ) was identical with Toli of Bincknoll (whose share might well have been the same size as Sæwulf ’s), namely Tholf the Dane. William d’Eu had only two manors in Devon, one of which had belonged to Toli. Here the successive drafts of the Domesday materials show that the spelling certainly stands for Tholf rather than Toli.180 The Exon scribe had written the name as Tolus,181 with the masculine Latin ending which is routine in Exon. Tolus was a Latinization of Tol rather than Toli, since the latter would have been Latinized as Tolius, as it was in Little Domesday Book.182 Exon thus shows how the spelling Tol for Tholf mutated first into Tolus and then into Toli, simply through copying. Successive recensions of the Domesday materials in which Latin endings were added to personal names and then taken off is the best explanation of how an original spelling Tol became Toli in all the instances discussed above. William d’Eu’s other Devon manor had belonged TRE to Torsus (Torssus in Exon),183 a name explained by Feilitzen and his predecessor Redin as an ON byname þurs.184 There is, however, no independent evidence that Thurs was ever used as a forename, 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 and the eccentric form in the Domesday materials is surely better interpreted as yet another variation of Tholf. In this case a plausible explanation is that the sequence lf at the end of Tolf was misread in some earlier recension as the tall Insular form of the letter r followed by a long s, Latinized in Exon by doubling the final letter and adding –us, and then losing one of the ss in Great Domesday. All these considerations amount to a compelling case for identifying Tholf the Dane as the predecessor of William d’Eu across Wessex, but masquerading in Domesday Book under a great variety of spellings, some of them readily recognizable as the name Tholf, others at first sight standing for different names. That reconstruction is far more plausible than the alternative: that William d’Eu had west country predecessors called Tholf, Thurs, Teolf, and Toli, an unlikely recurrence as William’s predecessors of men with names which were vaguely similar and in some cases unusual or even unique. As already evident, not all the manors which can be assigned to Tholf the Dane passed into the hands of William d’Eu. William, son and eventual successor of Robert, count of Eu,185 is not known to have been active in England before the 1080s.186 Ralph de Limésy was explicitly called his antecessor in a Gloucestershire entry187 and is implied to have been such at several other places,188 preceding William on estates which had belonged TRE to both Tholf the Dane and Ælfstan of Boscombe. William d’Eu’s late arrival in England leaves plenty of time for estates which had originally passed from Tholf the Dane to Ralph de Limésy to have been dispersed, and so not have ended up with William d’Eu. Four such manors are in question. One was Wellow on the Isle of Wight, discussed above. The second was at Upton Scudamore in Wiltshire, where 3 hides held TRE by Toli passed to William d’Eu and 2½ hides held TRE by Tous were in the hands in 1086 of Ernulf de Hesdin.189 The final letter of Tous’s name was printed as a short s in Farley’s great edition of 1783, but the form 201 of the manuscript letter is not clear-cut; rather, its appearance is intermediate between a long s without the normal bulge at mid-point on the left side of the ascender, and an f with a tiny and faint cross-bar instead of the usual bold stroke of the pen. It is as if the Great Domesday scribe was not himself sure whether he should be writing Tous or Touf. The division of this part of Upton Scudamore between William d’Eu and Ernulf de Hesdin left a fragment of it claimed by both men in 1086. Domesday says that Ernulf ’s manor included ½ hide of William d’Eu’s land; the ½ hide appears again in William d’Eu’s fief as held wrongfully by Ernulf. The implication is that Upton Scudamore was supposed to be divided in a certain way between William d’Eu and Ernulf de Hesdin, and that Ernulf had occupied more than his share. A division of Tholf ’s property in the vill may date from some arrangement made between Ernulf and William d’Eu, or earlier between Ernulf and Ralph de Limésy. Ernulf ’s and William’s fiefs overlapped in the west country, especially in Wiltshire, and such exchanges by neighbouring Norman lords were not uncommon in the interests of efficient estate management. Thirdly, Tholf ’s Wiltshire manor of Bincknoll, as indicated above, passed to Gilbert de Breteuil rather than William d’Eu. Gilbert has generally been supposed a man of Earl William fitzOsbern who stayed loyal to the king when fitzOsbern’s son rebelled in 1075. He had two other manors at Bincknoll,190 and probably acquired Tholf ’s smaller share of the vill from William d’Eu (or earlier from Ralph de Limésy) to round off his property there. Finally, Shepton Montague in Somerset passed from Tholf (Toli) to Robert, count of Mortain, rather than William d’Eu. Count Robert’s extensive estates in south Somerset appear to have been put together on a geographical basis, as a castlery centred on Montacute, gathering in the estates of different pre-Conquest landholders because of their location, irrespective of who had held them TRE.191 If all the identifications of Tholf the Dane’s manors proposed here hold good, then something 202 C. P. Lewis can be said about the shape of his landed estate as it existed in 1066, and perhaps even about its development to that point (Table 11.16; Figure 11.2). Tholf ’s most important shire was Dorset, though Hampshire ran close. His small manors in adjoining shires were really outliers, amounting to no more than 10 per cent of his holdings by value or assessment, though they extended his influence north of Salisbury Plain, north-west to the Bristol Channel, and south-west as far as the Exe estuary. In Dorset, his estates spread across all parts of the shire without any significant concentration, and were valuable enough to make him one of the leading thegns in a shire dominated by the estates of the king, Earl Harold, and the local religious houses. One notable feature of the estate is an association with towns. Domesday’s Circuit II has little information about the urban property of preConquest landowners, but there are some stray references. Tholf ’s manor of Lytchett Matravers included property in Wareham (Dors.);192 and his manor of Somborne (Hants) included nine burgesses’ houses193 which must have been in Winchester.194 Perhaps as significant is the location of Tholf ’s furthest flung properties: Tickenham was only 5 miles from Bristol, and neither of his Devon manors stood much further from Exeter, by far the two largest towns west of Winchester. Tholf ’s acquisition of interests near Bristol and Exeter may well have been deliberate policy, and the manors may have been associated with urban property which was simply not recorded in Domesday Book. 2. John the Dane The second case study is John the Dane, long identified as a pre-Conquest landowner of substance, with an estate scattered across Wessex between the Severn estuary, the Cotswolds, the rolling chalk uplands and infertile heaths of mid and east Dorset, the edge of Dartmoor, and the South Hams of Devon (Table 11.17; Figure 11.2).195 His byname was rendered in Domesday Book by the other adjective which meant ‘the Dane’, danus rather than dacus; it appears once in Great Domesday and once in Exon, but other manors can be attributed to the same person even when the byname is absent. A confident identification is based on two factors. The first is succession to much of his property after the Conquest by the Norman Matthew de Mortagne,196 though Matthew failed to secure one of his manors in Somerset, which instead passed to the bishop of Wells (it is assigned explicitly to John the Dane),197 and two in Devon which fell within Judhael of Totnes’s geographically determined fief.198 The second factor is at least as important: the extreme rarity of the name John in late AngloSaxon England. John is the medieval and modern form of the biblical name rendered Johannes or Iohannes in Anglo-Latin and Franco-Latin texts. It was introduced to England by the Gregorian mission at the end of the sixth century,199 and was used in clerical circles in the pre-Viking period to a limited extent, probably as a name taken in religion by men christened with OE names drawn from the usual repertoire.200 In the tenth and eleventh centuries it was reintroduced from the Continent as the name of several moneyers, but still did not take hold.201 The name John was not used among the English laity before 1066, with one possible but rather uncertain exception: a slave at Faccombe (Hants) freed by his owner in the late tenth or early eleventh century was called Johannan.202 If the name John was rare or unprecedented in English families, it is almost as surprising to find it in use among the Danes in the eleventh century, where it was one of a tiny number of biblical names in limited use.203 As it happens we can identify as a landowner someone who was almost certainly a close relative of John the Dane and who also bore an unusual name. At Shipton Moyne in the Cotswolds, there was a second manor which mirrored John’s and was held TRE by Strang the Dane: each was assessed at 10 hides and worth £15 TRE and £8 in 1086, with an additional 2s. from pasture. In 1086, the two manors had identical numbers of tenant ploughs, villans, and slaves; other details of their resources differed, though not by much. Strang’s manor, like John’s, passed 203 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 Table 11.16. TRE holdings of Tholf the Dane. Shire Devon Dorset Hampshire Somerset Wiltshire Total Manors 2 7 4 2 3 18 Hides 0.75 50.00 38.00 9.25 8.25 106.25 Proportion of total (%) 1 47 36 9 8 100 Value (£) 6.30 38.65 36.00 9.50 4.65 95.10 Proportion of total (%) 7 41 38 10 5 100 Table 11.17. TRE holdings of John the Dane. Shire Devon Dorset Gloucestershire Somerset Total Manors Hides 2 2 1 2 7 3.50 14.75 10.00 20.63 48.88 to Matthew de Mortagne.204 There were two other much smaller holdings in the vill,205 but it looks as if the bulk of Shipton Moyne, accounting for 20 hides, had been divided quite recently between John and Strang. Strang’s name was formed as a byname from the ON adjective strangr, meaning ‘strong’;206 there is no other recorded instance from Anglo-Saxon England. The suggestion that Strang and John were the same person has nothing to recommend it, but the idea that they were kinsmen is attractive.207 If so, they may have divided what had recently belonged to a single holder. (Their father? A man with interesting ideas about suitable names for his sons?) The essential unity of the two main parts of Shipton is emphasized by the fact that it was clearly unitary as a territory, with a single set of open fields. Its manorial history later in the Middle Ages followed the arrangements of 1086, when Matthew de Mortagne held Strang’s part in demesne but had subinfeudated John’s part.208 The rarity of John’s forename recommends the idea that he was the father of the Northmann son of John who witnessed a purchase of land in Proportion of total (%) 7 30 20 42 100 Value (£) 6.00 15.00 15.00 18.00 54.00 Proportion of total (%) 11 28 28 33 100 Somerset by Bishop Giso of Wells in 1072; that Northmann has, in turn, been identified with the man of the same name who witnessed Edward the Confessor’s confirmation charter of 1065 in Bishop Giso’s favour.209 A link between the family and Giso might explain how John the Dane’s most valuable manor, Yatton, found its way into the bishop’s hands between 1066 and 1086. The acquisition is not documented in Wells’s copious archive, but the main source, Giso’s so-called Autobiography, has been shown to be far from a full and dispassionate account of Giso’s activities.210 Notes 1. I use the term Danish (denoting culture and society) rather than Old Norse (the name of a group of languages and dialects) because my focus is on social history rather than linguistics, and in preference to ‘Scandinavian’ because the great majority of all personal names of Scandinavian geographical and Old Norse linguistic origin that were used in England must have come from Denmark. 2. Recent treatments of Cnut’s reign pay little attention to the topic: M. K. Lawson, Cnut: The Danes in 204 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. C. P. Lewis England in the Early Eleventh Century (London, 1993), pp. 163–74; new edn published as Cnut: England’s Viking King (Stroud, 2004); T. Bolton, The Empire of Cnut the Great: Conquest and the Consolidation of Power in Northern Europe in the Early Eleventh Century (Leiden, 2009), pp. 45–60. C. P. Lewis, ‘Joining the Dots: a Methodology for Identifying the English in Domesday Book’, in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 69–87. PASE is at <http://www.pase.ac.uk>. Thanks are due to the Leverhulme Trust, which provided funding for PDE; King’s College London, which hosted it; Stephen Baxter as the Principal Investigator; my fellow researcher Duncan Probert, who also drew the maps which accompany this paper; and colleagues in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s, who developed the website. Coded on the database that underlies PASE Domesday as A (beyond reasonable doubt), B (very probable), C (probable), D (more likely than not), and E (balance of probability just in favour); F is used occasionally to mean Failed to identify, exactly balanced between likely and not likely to be the same person. In what follows Scandinavian names generally are given in spellings which acknowledge how they were used in England, rather than in standardized Old Norse forms. In discussing names, ON means Old Norse, OE Old English, and CG Continental Germanic. Where PDE profiles have been written already, I have normally cited the full discussion under the appropriate PASE reference. PASE, ‘Gunnhild 4’. PASE, ‘Stigand 1’. O. von Feilitzen, The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book, Nomina Germanica 3 (Uppsala, 1937), pp. 361–63. G. Tengvik, Old English Bynames, Nomina Germanica 4 (Uppsala, 1938), p. 237. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names. G. Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, Navnestudier udgivet af Institut for Navneforskning 7 (Copenhagen, 1968); J. Insley, Scandinavian Personal Names in Norfolk: A Survey Based on Medieval Records and PlaceNames, Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi 62 (Uppsala, 1994). J. Insley, ‘Some Scandinavian Personal Names from South-West England’, Namn och Bygd 70 (1982), pp. 77–93; ‘Some Scandinavian Personal Names in 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. South-West England from Post-Conquest Records’, Studia Anthroponymica Scandinavica 3 (1985), pp. 23–58. PASE, ‘Manni 4’; L. Marten, ‘Meet the Swarts: Tracing a Thegnly Family in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in The English and their Legacy, 900–1200: Essays in Honour of Ann Williams, ed. D. Roffe (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 17–32, at pp. 23–26. The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, 940–1216, ed. D. Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke and V. C. M. London (Cambridge, 1972), p. 47; PASE, ‘Manni 1’. GDB fols 41r. line 8, 48r. Dene (DB: Hants 3:1; 45:5). GDB fol. 96r. Wochetreu (DB: Som. 25:22); Exon 359b4; contra Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 324. GDB fol. 74r. Lavertestoche (DB: Wilts. 67:96); contra Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 260; E. Björkman, Nordische Personennamen in England in alt- und frühmittel-englischer Zeit, Studien zur englischen Philologie 37 (Halle an der Saale, 1910; repr. Tübingen, 1973), pp. 47–48. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 200; GDB fol. 82v. Cnolle (DB: Dors. 41:2). Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 279; GDB fols 73r. lines 7–6 up (DB: Wilts. 65:2), 82r. Sudtone, 84r. Mideltone (DB: Dors. 40:3; 56:1). GDB fol. 94r. Bagelie (DB: Som. 21:61); PASE, ‘Cæfel 1’: a moneyer at Ilchester (Som.) for the issue dated 1029–36: On-line Early Medieval Corpus of Coin Finds/Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles, no. 1013.0952 <http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ dept/coins/emc> (accessed 28 Apr. 2014); Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 301. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 165, 338–39; GDB fol. 122r. Lanlaron (DB: Cornw. 5.2:10); Exon 252a1. GDB fol. 123v. Bellesdone (DB: Cornw. 5.7:5). GDB fol. 112v. Chetelescote (DB: Devon 24:27); discussed in Domesday Book: Devon, ed. C. and F. Thorn (Chichester, 2 parts, 1985), Part 2, note 24,27. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 306– 307. Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names, pp. 105–107 and 276–82. Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names, pp. 178 and 179–80. PASE, ‘Cola 2’, witness of a lease by the New Minster, Winchester, c.930 (Sawyer, Charters, no. 1417). 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 29. PASE, ‘Cola 1’, ‘Cola 3’, ‘Cola 4’, ‘Cola 5’, ‘Colo 1’, and ‘Kola 1’; the last two should be normalized as Cola. 30. PASE, ‘Coling 1–2’ (the same person), ‘Coling 3’, ‘Colling 1–2’ (the same person), and ‘Colthegn 1’; the forms in Coling should be normalized as Colling. 31. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 217–19, 306–307 discussed them under the head-forms unattributed Cola, CG Colbert, CG Colman, unattributed Coluin, ON Kolbeinn, ON Kolbrandr, and ON Kollungr. 32. PASE, ‘Cola 2’, ‘Cola 3’, and ‘Colswein 1’. 33. PASE, ‘Kola 1’. 34. PASE, ‘Colbeinn 1’ (Chester 1040–2), ‘Colbeinn 2’ (Derby 1059–62), ‘Colbrand 1’ (Chester 1046–59), ‘Colgrim 1’ (Lincoln 979–97), ‘Colgrim 2–5’ (Lincoln 1023–56), ‘Colgrim 7’ (York 985–1003), ‘Colgrim 8’ (York 1017–36), ‘Coling 1–2’ (Stafford and Tamworth 1056–66), ‘Coling 3’ (Lewes 1023–9), ‘Colman 4–7’ (Oxford and Wallingford 1003–40), ‘Colswegen 1–2’ (Hastings 1059–66), ‘Colswegen 3’ (Lincoln 1009–17), and ‘Colthegn 1’ (Chester 1042–4). 35. GDB fol. 51r. Trucham (DB: Hants NF 3:7), ‘notionally’ because he held 2½ hides worth 60s. jointly (in paragio) with Eadwig; in this and similar cases, PDE divides the hidage and value equally between the TRE holders. 36. GDB fol. 93r. Terracolgrin (DB: Som. 21:16). 37. PASE, ‘Colswein 11’. 38. PASE, ‘Colswein 10’. 39. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 296–97. 40. PASE, ‘Huscarl 2–3’. 41. GDB fols 95v. Strate, 99r. Estrope (DB: Som. 25:6; 47:24); PASE, ‘Huscarl 6’ and ‘Huscarl 9’. 42. PASE, ‘Huscarl 7’. 43. D. A. E. Pelteret, Catalogue of English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents (Woodbridge, 1990), nos 112, 114. 44. PASE, ‘Huscarl 4’, ‘Huscarl 5’. 45. Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names, pp. 146–7, where there is only one local example, the other being Roger Huscarl, a justice in eyre in the 1210s who was actually a descendant of the Huscarl who held Eastrip (Som.) in 1066 and 1086: evident from VCH: Som. 7, p. 17; VCH: Mdx 11, pp. 32–33. 46. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 331–32; Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names, does not treat it as a Scandinavian name. 47. GDB fol. 373r. col. 1 line 11 up, 373r. col. 2 line 33 (DB: Yorks. CE:13, 23). 205 48. Below, Appendix (John the Dane). 49. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 214, citing T. Forssner, Continental-Germanic Personal Names in England in Old and Middle English Times (Uppsala, 1916), p. 54. 50. GDB fol. 70v. Clive 2nd entry (DB: Wilts. 26:17); the connection is inferred from the structure of Alfred of Marlborough’s fief in 1086, in which a constellation of small holdings (including Carlmann’s) had been added to a core formed from Carl’s pre-Conquest estate: GDB fol. 70r.–v. (DB: Wilts. 26:1–23). 51. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 390–91. 52. D. N. Parsons, ‘Anna, Dot, Thorir … Counting Domesday Personal Names’, Nomina 25 (2002), pp. 29–52. 53. Parsons, ‘Anna, Dot, Thorir…’, pp. 32–33; Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names; Insley, Scandinavian Personal Names. 54. A. Williams, ‘A Vice-Comital Family in PreConquest Warwickshire’, ANS 11 (1988), pp. 279–95. 55. M. Townend, ‘Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur: Skaldic Praise-Poetry at the Court of Cnut’, ASE 30 (2001), pp. 145–79. 56. M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Danish Royal Burials in Winchester: Cnut and his Family’, below, pp. 215–17. 57. GDB fol. 56r. lines 20–22 (DB: Berks. B:1). 58. N. Hooper, ‘The Housecarls in England in the Eleventh Century’, ANS 7 (1984), pp. 161–76, at pp. 171–72; R. P. Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (Berkeley CA, 1988), p. 169; R. Lavelle, Alfred’s Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the Viking Age (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 107–10. 59. GDB fol. 56r. line 3 (DB: Berks. B:1). 60. 15 acres was probably not a measurement on the ground but a fiscal assessment equivalent to 3¾ virgates, given that elsewhere in Berkshire 1 acre was evidently a quarter of a fiscal virgate: DB: Berks. 17:10–13; 21:19; 52:1 (one assessment of 30 acres, one of 6 acres, and four of 2 acres). They can hardly be fiscal acres of the size in other shires (where 120 acres = 1 hide) because ¼ hide would be expressed as 1 virgate, not as 30 acres; the Berks. folios never use an assessment of ½ virgate, unlike many other shires, and that would be because ½ virgate was expressed as 2 acres. 61. GDB fol. 60r. Witeham (DB: Berks. 20:3). 62. Cf. D. Roffe, ‘Wallingford in Domesday Book and Beyond’, in The Origins of the Borough of Wallingford: 206 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. C. P. Lewis Archaeological and Historical Perspectives, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan and D. Roffe, BAR British Ser. 494 (2009), pp. 27–51, at p. 41; in the same vol., K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, ‘The Genesis of the Honour of Wallingford’, pp. 52–67, at p. 56; N. Christie and O. Creighton with M. Edgeworth and H. Hamerow, Transforming Townscapes: From Burh to Borough: The Archaeology of Wallingford, AD 800–1400, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 35 (2013), pp. 148–50. S. Keynes, ‘Cnut’s Earls’, in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway, ed. A. R. Rumble (London, 1994), pp. 43–88, at pp. 70–74. F. Barlow, The Godwins: The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty (London, 2002), pp. 27–50; E. Mason, The House of Godwine: The History of a Dynasty (London, 2004), pp. 31–81. Sawyer, Charters, no. 970. Sawyer, Charters, no. 960. For the byname, Tengvik, Old English Bynames, p. 151. Sawyer, Charters, nos 963, 971. Sawyer, Charters, nos 955, 961, 969. As does Bolton, Empire of Cnut, pp. 51–55. GDB fol. 79r. Cerne 2nd entry (DB: Dors. 26:9). GDB fol. 58v. lines 6–11 (DB: Berks. 7:11). GDB fol. 52v. Gatecome (DB: Hants IoW 6:4). GDB fol. 274v. Sudberie 2nd part (DB: Derb. 6:28). ‘5 hides makes a thegn’ on Archbishop Wulfstan’s tract on status (Geþyncðu), widely but wrongly taken to be socially descriptive and current in the eleventh century rather than normative and nostalgic: P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, Volume 1: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1999), pp. 391–94; ‘40 hides makes a noble’ on an incidental comment in Liber Eliensis, ed. E. O. Blake, Camden 3rd Ser. 92 (London, 1962), p. 167, translated in Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth, Compiled by a Monk of Ely in the Twelfth Century, trans. J. Fairweather (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 198–99; both discussed by A. Williams, The World before Domesday: The English Aristocracy, 900–1066 (London, 2008), pp. 1–10. P. A. Clarke, The English Nobility under Edward the Confessor (Oxford, 1994), p. 253. PASE, ‘Azur 8’ (forthcoming). Sawyer, Charters, no. 1010; GDB fols 66r. Dechementune, 68r. lines 20–22 (DB: Wilts. 4:4; 13:21), the latter anonymous entry identified as Ditchampton by VCH: Wilts. 2, pp. 80, 130 note 4; the small part of Ditchampton retained by the nuns is at GDB fol. 68r. Dicehantone (DB: Wilts. 13:15). 78. S. Keynes, An Atlas of Attestations in Anglo-Saxon Charters, c.670–1066, ASNC [Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic] Guides, Texts, and Studies 5 (Cambridge, 2002), Tables 70 and 75. 79. As Azur son of Toti: Sawyer, Charters, no. 1425; Charters of St Albans, ed. J. Crick, Anglo-Saxon Charters 12 (Oxford, 2007), nos 16 and 16A (pp. 215–20); also discussed by J. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Stroud and Oxford, 1994), p. 107; S. Baxter, ‘The Earls of Mercia and their Commended Men in the Mid Eleventh Century’, ANS 23 (2000), pp. 23–46, at pp. 25–29 and 35–37. 80. GDB fol. 164r. Udecestre (DB: Glos. 1:63). 81. GDB fols 7r. Sentlinge (DB: Kent 5:38), 48r. Aclei, Stradfelle, Wergeborne (DB: Hants 44:2–4), 60r. Assedone, 60v. Bistesham (DB: Berks. 21:3, 7), 72v. Fisertone (DB: Wilts. 44:1), 83r. Contone, 85r. Windesore (DB: Dors. 51:1; 57:15), 92v. Sutone (DB: Som. 19:56), 151r. Grennedone, Sibdone (DB: Bucks. 27:1–2), 154v. lines 3–2 up, 157v. Dene ⁊ Celford (DB: Oxon. 1:6; 24:5), 166v. Alvredestone (DB: Glos. 31:2), 225r. Ticemerse, Echentone (DB: Northants 25:2–3); LDB fol. 57r. Cingam (DB: Essex 29:5). This identification differs at several points from that of Clarke, English Nobility, pp. 266–67. 82. The question is whether the plural in the phrase ‘Bondi held these lands freely TRE’ referred only to the two parts of the entry in which it occurs or also to the two preceding entries: GDB fol. 157v. Scipforde, Fifhide, Dene ⁊ Celford (DB: Oxon. 24:3–5). 83. Itchen Abbas was held by the nuns TRE and Hugh fitzBaldric in 1086, when the nuns claimed it; the hundred and shire testified to the nuns’ ownership, and King William restored it to the church: GDB fol. 48r. Icene (DB: Hants 44:1). Hugh fitzBaldric’s other manors in Hampshire had come from Bondi, and it is likely that his illegal possession of Itchen came about by appropriating a manor which Bondi had held from the nuns on a lease for lives. 84. GDB fols 49r. Colemere (DB: Hants 57:2), 60v. Borgefelle (DB: Berks. 21:20), 146v. Mersa, 148v. Hochestone (DB: Bucks. 12:29; 17:9). 85. Keynes, Atlas of Attestations, Table 75; Sawyer, Charters, nos 1033–34, 1036, and 1041–42. 86. GDB fols 36v. Sande (DB: Surr. 33:1), 47v. Sceptune, Estrope (DB: Hants 36:1–2), 70r. Adelingtone, Rode, Tefonte, Crostone, Newentone, Wintreburne, Lediar, 70v. Suindone, Mordone, Wildehille, Opetone, Nortone, Rochelie, Fifhide, Lacoc (DB: Wilts. 26:1–15), 97r. Cellewert (DB: Som. 34:1). 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 87. GDB fol. 63r. Spone (DB: Berks. 54:1). 88. GDB fol. 28r. Wapingetorne (DB: Suss. 13:14); VCH: Suss. 6(1), p. 229; Carl’s smaller holdings may represent outliers detached after the Conquest because they lay in a different rape: GDB fols 21v. Hertevel, 22v. Bercheham 1st entry (DB: Suss. 10:60, 114). Clarke, English Nobility, pp. 317–18, assigns it to the same Carl. 89. PASE, ‘Mærleswein 1’ (forthcoming). Clarke, English Nobility, pp. 322–24, is inaccurate in detail. 90. A. Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 22–23. 91. Björkman, Nordische Personennamen, pp. 93–94; Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 326; Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names, p. 196; Insley, Scandinavian Personal Names, pp. 300–301 is unconvincing. 92. J. McN. Dodgson, The Place-Names of Cheshire, 5 vols in 7 parts, English Place-Name Society 44–48, 54, 74 (1970–97), 4, p. 163. 93. GDB fols 38v. Cladford, 48v. Clere, 49r. Anne, Hibesete (DB: Hants 1:25; 50:1; 61:1; 62:1), 57r. Soanesfelt, Selingefelle, 58r. Solafel (DB: Berks. 1:17–18, 46), 138r. Wesmele (DB: Herts. 22:2), 151r. Harduic (DB: Bucks. 35:2), 197v. Stantone (DB: Cambs. 24:1), 205v. Waltune, 207r. Westune, Sutham, 208r. col. 1 last 3 lines, 208r. col. 2 lines 6–7 (DB: Hunts. 14:1; 25:1–2; D:10, 13); LDB fols 88v.–89r. Mortuna, 91r. Laghefara, 93r. Wicam (DB: Essex 45:1; 51:2; 58:1). 94. Clarke, English Nobility, p. 337, includes only the first group, neglecting one small manor. 95. C. P. Lewis, ‘The Norman Settlement of Herefordshire under William I’, ANS 7 (1984), pp. 195–213, at pp. 205–209; for Jocelin: L. C. Loyd, The Origins of Some Anglo-Norman Families, ed. C. T. Clay and D. C. Douglas, Harleian Society 103 (1951), pp. 33–34. 96. C. P. Lewis, ‘The Earldom of Surrey and the Date of Domesday Book’, Historical Research, 63 (1990), pp. 329–36, at p. 335. 97. GDB fol. 150r. Sobintone, Chentone (DB: Bucks. 23:7, 12); Sawyer, Charters, no. 1148: printed, translated, and discussed by F. E. Harmer, AngloSaxon Writs (Manchester, 1952), no. 104 (pp. 368–70, 522–23). 98. GDB fol. 56r.–v. (DB: Berks. B:1–9). 99. GDB fols 23v. Babintone, 26v. Eldretune 2nd entry, 28v. Bradewatre (DB: Suss. 11:15; 12:21; 13:30), 62r. Ledecumbe (DB: Berks. 41:2), 71r. Redborne, Manetune (DB: Wilts. 28:9, 12), 129r. Herdintone, Coleham (DB: Mdx 7:4–5), 150r. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 207 Sobintone, Chentone (DB: Bucks. 23:7, 12), 158r. Garinges, 159r. Gadintone, 159v. Cestretone, 159v. Cuchesham (DB: Oxon. 28:2; 35:1, 18, 31), 169v. Bruurne, Alrelie (DB: Glos. 64:1, 3), 239r. Witelauesford (DB: Warws. 11:1); Clarke, English Nobility, pp. 356–57 includes a Devon manor which belonged to a different Wigot, omits Wigot’s Warwickshire manor, and has two erroneous figures. GDB fol. 65v. Ocheborne (DB: Wilts. 1:22); VCH: Wilts. 2, pp. 199–200; the Terra Regis in Wiltshire is carefully arranged to record in succession seven manors once held by King Edward, twelve by the family of Earl Godwine, two after the Conquest by Earl William fitzOsbern, and Ogbourne (evidently therefore from a source different from any of the foregoing), followed by a list of churches: GDB fol. 64v.–65v. (DB: Wilts. 1:1–23). Williams, English and the Norman Conquest, pp. 100–102. GDB fol. 158r.–v. (DB: Oxon. 28:1, 3–5, 7–15, 17–18, 20–22, 25–29). Sawyer, Charters, nos 1030, 1036, 1041–3. Historia Ecclesie Abbendonensis: The History of the Church of Abingdon, ed. and trans. J. Hudson (Oxford, 2 vols, 2002–7), Vol. 1, pp. 212–15. Clarke, English Nobility, pp. 243–49, reckons £448 but includes some holdings in the hands of Esgar’s sokemen, and has one omission and one mistake. GDB fol. 62r. Lamborne, Herlei, Estralei (DB: Berks. 38:3, 5–6). Taking in all the manors held by the antecessor of Henry de Ferrers, with six more of Henry’s manors lacking any statement about TRE tenure, and another four explicitly attributed to Siward Barn which passed to other Normans: GDB fols 60v. Greneham, Lachinge, Stanford (DB: Berks. 21:5, 11, 18), 157v. Begeurde, Scipforde, Fifhide (DB: Oxon. 24:1, 3–4), 169r. Lecelade (DB: Glos. 59:1), 242r. Grendone, Bortone, Erburberie, Etendone, Cestedone, Aldulvestreu (DB: Warws. 19:1–6), 274r. Branzinctun, Crocheshalle, Chetun, 275r. Cobelei, Nortberie, Duvelle, 275v. Braideshale, Wruenele, 276r. Morelei (DB: Derb. 6:5, 14–15, 17, 54, 57, 66, 69–70, 79, 100), 280v. col. 1 line 23, 291v. Lecche, Bonniton (DB: Notts. S:5; 24:1–2), 326r. Adelingesfluet (DB: Yorks. 17:W1), 337r. col. 1 line 6 up, 353v. Witenai, 369r. Acheseia (DB: Lincs. T:5; 21:1–2; 63:7); LDB fols 56v.–57r. Stibinga (DB: Essex 29:2), 223v. Silingeham, Salthus (DB: Norf. 19:18–19); Clarke, English Nobility, pp. 338–9 is not altogether satisfactory; cf. C. Hart, ‘Hereward “the Wake” and his Companions’, in his 208 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. C. P. Lewis The Danelaw (London, 1992), pp. 625–48, at pp. 640–4. PASE, ‘Aki 4’. GDB fols 31r.–v. Fernecome (DB: Surr. 5:3), 61r. Coleshalle, Celrea, Ordegeston (DB: Berks. 28:1–3), 72v. Coleselle (DB: Wilts. 49:1a), 144r. Thapeslau (DB: Bucks. 4:15), 160r. col. 2 1st entry (DB: Oxon. 46:1), 167v. Lechantone, Heile, Witetune, Scipetune, Turghedene, 169r. Chenemeresforde (DB: Glos. 38:1–5; 60:1), 175r. Cumbrintune (DB: Worcs. 8:23), 182v. Lecce (DB: Herefs. 5:2); LDB fol. 93r. Scilcheham (DB: Essex 59:1). Clarke, English Nobility, pp. 249–51 is incomplete. Sawyer, Charters, no. 1408; the charter is regarded as not authentic in its present form, though there is no reason to suspect the witness list. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 164–65. A. Williams, ‘An Introduction to the Gloucestershire Domesday’, in The Gloucestershire Domesday, ed. A. Williams and R. W. H. Erskine (London, 1989), pp. 1–39, at pp. 24–25. Clarke, English Nobility, pp. 351–53. GDB fol. 159v. Lauuelme (DB: Oxon. 38:2); Whichford was mistakenly written up in the folios for Northants: GDB fol. 227v. Wicford (DB: Northants 46:7). GDB fols 33v. Tepestede, 36v. Beddintone (DB: Surr. 8:27; 29:1), 129r. Haneworde, Hillendone (DB: Mdx 7:2, 6), 149r. Stanes (DB: Bucks. 18:1), 168r. Risendone, Horedone, Sapletorne ⁊ Frantone (DB: Glos. 46:1–3), 196v. Dochesuuorde (DB: Cambs. 20:1); LDB fol. 429r.–v. Bradeleia, Seilam (DB: Suff. 44:1–2); Marten, ‘Meet the Swarts’, pp. 24–28. Clarke, English Nobility, pp. 355–56, gives an incomplete list confined to the manors which passed to Tosny. GDB fols 82v. Pouertone (DB: Dors. 47:8), 93v. Ulwardestone, Ichetoche, 96r. Maneworde, 99r. Havechewelle (DB: Som. 21:18, 32; 25:44; 47:13), 102v. Wedicheswelle, Norcote, Bocheland 2nd entry, 106r. Porrige, Oueltone, 106v. Haintone, 108r. Hacome, Taigne, 108v. Stotecome, 109r. Briseham, Cercetone, Corneorde, 110v. Bocheland, 114r. Hantone, 115r. Hancheford, Lobe, 116r. Lavrochebere, 117r. Hela, Hoche, 118v. Wadeham (DB: Devon 3:39, 46, 55; 16:36, 44, 70, 152–3, 169; 17:29–30, 48; 19:13; 34:16; 35:20–1; 39:10; 47:1–2; 52:40). GDB fols 95r. Worle (DB: Som. 24:1), 100v. Ermentone, Auetone, 111v. Sutreworde, 112r. Godrintone, Stoch, Dunestal and next entry (DB: Devon 1:23–4; 23:15–16, 22, 26–7), 122r. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. Calestoch (DB: Cornw. 5.2:12); Esgar’s byname was given at Exon 85b1–7. Clarke, English Nobility, omits him from his account of men with lands worth over £40 a year, presumably because he failed to identify the Esgar whose two manors passed by exchange to the king with Walter de Douai’s antecessor. GDB fols 43r. Warneford, 44v. Avere, Bichetone, 47r. Frodintone, 51v. Depedene, Utefel, 52r. col. 1 line 7, 52v. Side, Cela, Apleford, 53r. Witesfel 1st entry (DB: Hants 6:6; 21:4; 22:1; 34:1; NF 9:2, 42; S:2; IoW 1:10; IoW 6:1, 3, 14), 68v. Langeford (DB: Wilts. 20:5), 95r. Almundesford, 97v. Witeham (DB: Som. 24:19; 36:2). Clarke, English Nobility, omits him. Taking the predecessor of Robert fitzGerald in Hants and Wilts. as the same Tovi whose other manors near by in those shires and W. Berks. were dispersed to other Normans: GDB fols 45v. Snodintone, 46r. Rodbrige, 46v. Aclei, Copenore, Bosintone, Sudtune, Funtelei, 49r. Olvestune, 53r. Benestede, Prestetone, Alvrestone (DB: Hants 23:39, 66; 28:1– 2, 5, 7–8; 59:1; IoW 6:17, 19, 22), 60v. Cerletone, 61r. Taneburne, Mortune, Cerletone (DB: Berks. 21:10; 27:1–3), 71r. Poltone, 72v. Wiflesford (DB: Wilts. 27:19; 42:7). North Moreton (DB: Berks. 27:2) is attributed to an unnamed ‘certain free man’, but William fitzCorbucion’s only other manors outside his Warwickshire group were the other two Berks. manors listed here, both of which came from Tovi. PASE, ‘Esbern 3’. PASE, ‘Fulki 2’. GDB fols 1v. col. 1 line 3, 6v. Hou, Witenemers, 7r. Bacheham, 8v. Stoches (DB: Kent D:25; 5:20, 31, 39, 92), 31r. Brunlege 1st entry, 36r. Belgeham (DB: Surr. 5:1c; 26:1), 46v. Mapledrewelle (DB: Hants 24:1). GDB fols 38v. Esseham (DB: Hants 1:18), 71r. Bechenhalle (DB: Wilts. 29:2), 159r. Neuham, Secendene, Foxcote, 160r. Meretone, Petintone (DB: Oxon. 32:1–3; 53:1–2); this includes two Oxfordshire manors of Richard de Courcy for which no TRE holder is named, as well as the one held explicitly by Hacon. GDB fols 61v. Apletune, Eltune (DB: Berks. 33:6–7), 141r.–v. Teuuinge (DB: Herts. 36:19), 150r. Cerdeslai, 152r. Hammescle (DB: Bucks. 23:10; 46:1), 167v. Iccumbe (DB: Glos. 39:4), 226v. Covesgrave, Asce (DB: Northants 40:1, 4–5); LDB fols 78v.–79r. Hecham (DB: Essex 36:6). GDB fols 62r. col. 1 lines 17–23 (DB: Berks. 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 37:1), 159v. Haneberge (DB: Oxon. 38:1), 227v. Ceselingeberie, Haiforde, Stowe, Epingeham both entries, Estone (DB: Northants 46:1–6), 238v. Caldecote (DB: Warws. 2:2), 354r. col. 1 lines 2–4, 7–9, 17–18, 355r. Torp, 355r. Wilgebi, Clachesbi, 355v. Welle, Chime, 375v. col. 1 lines 20–8, 32–5 (DB: Lincs. 22:17, 19, 23; 24:24, 37–44, 54–71, 76–7; CS:30–1, 33). Addressee of Somerset writs issued by Edward the Confessor, Queen Eadgyth, King Harold, and King William: Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs, nos 68–71 (pp. 281–85, 489–91) and p. 575; Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I (1066–1087), ed. D. Bates (Oxford, 1998), nos 11, 287 (pp. 126–27, 866); witness of Wells charters of 1065 and 1068: Sawyer, Charters, no. 1042; Regesta: William I, ed. Bates, no. 286 (pp. 863–65). There is no reason to think that the same Tovi witnessed royal charters in the period 1042–50 as a thegn (minister), or was the comes (also meaning ‘thegn’?) to whom the king gave 2 hides at an unidentified Berghe in 1048, contra the implication of Keynes, Atlas of Attestations, Table 75. PASE, ‘Wicing 1’. Sawyer, Charters, no. 1474; Pelteret, Catalogue, no. 138. GDB fol. 44v. Seneorde (DB: Hants 21:7); VCH: Hants 3, pp. 91 and 93. Charters of Abingdon Abbey, ed. S. E. Kelly, AngloSaxon Charters 7 and 8 (Oxford, 2 parts, 2000–1), Part 2, no. 115; nos 114 and 116–17 are also relevant; GDB fol. 59r. Draicote (DB: Berks. 7:26). GDB fols 60v. Chingestune, 61r. Chingestune (DB: Berks. 21:14; 22:12). Hist. Abingdon, ed. Hudson, Vol. 1, pp. 222–25. Hist. Abingdon, ed. Hudson, Vol. 1, p. clvii. Hist. Abingdon, ed. Hudson, Vol. 1, p. 224 n. 511; J. Hudson, ‘The Abbey of Abingdon, its Chronicle and the Norman Conquest’, ANS 19 (1995), pp. 181–202, at p. 190. GDB fols 60v. Wibalditone (DB: Berks. 21:8), 159r. Celgrave (DB: Oxon. 35:6). It is not out of the question that he held other manors further afield, but more research is needed. GDB fols 88r. Temesbare, 99r. Timesberie (DB: Som. 5:15; 45:6). The calculation depends on amending Sibbi’s 16 acres (in roman numerals .XVI.) to 13 acres (.XIII.), correcting a confusion in reading the minims used to form the two numerals. Exon 140b1, 140b2, 464b2. PASE, ‘Gunward 2’, ‘Sibbi 3’. 209 140. PASE, ‘Api 2’. 141. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 358; Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names, p. 230. 142. Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names, pp. 1, 11. 143. GDB fol. 117v. Lege (DB: Devon 48:12); Domesday Book: Devon, ed. Thorn and Thorn, Part 2, note 48, 12. 144. Domesday Book: Devon, ed. Thorn and Thorn, Part 2, note 1,7. 145. GDB fol. 52r. col. 1 lines 6–10 (DB: Hants S:2). 146. ‘The Winton Domesday’, ed. and trans. F. Barlow, in Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, ed. M. Biddle, Winchester Studies 1 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 1–141, at pp. 32–68 (Survey I, nos 20, 37, 102, 108, 185, 231, 234, and 264); in the same volume, O. von Feilitzen, ‘The Personal Names and Bynames of the Winton Domesday’, pp. 143–229, at pp. 180 and 184–85, reckoned ten Scandinavian names but mistakenly included two from the later survey (Þorsteinn, nos 75, 180, and 289; and Ulfr, nos 131 and 229) and counted 311 persons altogether by reckoning each occurrence of a name as standing for a separate person; because the later survey records many more bynames it shows that burgesses often had multiple holdings, and there is no reason to suppose that the same was not already true in 1066. 147. Based on an analysis of On-line Early Medieval Corpus of Coin Finds/Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles <http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/ dept/coins/emc> (Dec. 2013). 148. J. Insley, ‘Regional Variation in Scandinavian Personal Nomenclature in England’, Nomina 3 (1979), pp. 52–60. 149. Williams, World before Domesday, pp. 28–29. 150. Sawyer, Charters, no. 960. 151. ‘Winton Domesday’, ed. Barlow, p. 48 (I, no. 92). 152. The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, based on the collections of the English Place-Name Society, ed. V. Watts, (with) J. Insley and M. Gelling (Cambridge, 2005), p. 204; M. Gelling, Signposts to the Past: Place-Names and the History of England (Chichester, 2nd edn, 1988), p. 124. 153. PASE, ‘Stigand 1’; M. F. Smith, ‘Archbishop Stigand and the Eye of the Needle’, ANS 16 (1993), pp. 199–219. 154. S. Baxter and C. P. Lewis, ‘Comment identifier les propriétaires fonciers du Domesday Book en Angleterre et en Normandie? Le cas d’Osbern fitzOsbern’, Penser les mondes normands médiévaux, ed. D. Bates and P. Bauduin (Caen, forthcoming 2015). 210 C. P. Lewis 155. C. P. Lewis, ‘The French in England before the Norman Conquest’, ANS 17 (1994), pp. 123–44. 156. PASE, ‘Tholf 2–7’ (Tholf 2 is the subject of discussion here). 157. GDB fol. 47r. Sumburne (DB: Hants 32:1). 158. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 389–90; Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Personal Names, pp. 295 and 317. 159. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 382–83, 388, 389–90, and 397. 160. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 220, 386. For some of the complexities involved in unravelling the Domesday forms of personal names see esp. C. Clark, ‘Domesday Book – a Great RedHerring: Thoughts on Some Late-Eleventh-Century Orthographies’, in England in the Eleventh Century: Proceedings of the 1990 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. C. Hicks, Harlaxton Medieval Studies 2 (Stamford, 1992), pp. 317–31. 161. R. Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 109–14. 162. Clarke, English Nobility, p. 350 (‘Toli the Dane’), is wholly inadequate. 163. GDB fols 80v. Bradeford, Bleneford, Suere, Terente, 82r. Stoches, Candel (DB: Dors. 34:2, 6 (twice), 8, 12, 14–15). 164. GDB fol. 80v. Lichet (DB: Dors. 34:5). 165. GDB fol. 47r. Sumburne, Dene (DB: Hants 32:1–2). 166. GDB fol. 51r. Rodedic (DB: Hants NF 4:1). 167. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 220. 168. PASE, ‘Cuthwulf 14’, ‘Cuthwulf 15’, ‘Cuthwulf 16’. 169. GDB fol. 52r. Welige (DB: Hants IoW 1:4). 170. B. J. Golding, ‘An Introduction to the Hampshire Domesday’, in The Hampshire Domesday, ed. A. Williams and R. W. H. Erskine (London, 1989), pp. 1–27, at pp. 18–19. 171. GDB fol. 71v. Tollard, Opetone (DB: Wilts. 32:16– 17). 172. PASE, ‘Toli 2’, ‘Toli 4–13’. 173. GDB fol. 96v. Ticheham (DB: Som. 26:8). 174. Exon 438b1. 175. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, pp. 382–83. 176. The only Theodulfs currently (June 2015) in PASE are the archbishop of Orléans, d. 821 (‘Theodulf 1’); a moneyer in the period 939–55 (‘Theodulf 3+5+6’); a moneyer at Lincoln in the period 1003–9 (‘Theodulf 4’); and the recipient of a grant of 5 hides from King Æthelred II in 1012 (‘Theodulf 2’). The moneyers probably had the CG name (Veronica Smart, ‘Economic Migrants? Continental Moneyers’ Names on the Tenth-Century English Coinage’, Nomina 32 (2009), pp. 113–56, at p. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 154); Æthelred’s man (fidelis homo: Sawyer, Charters, no. 929; Charters of Burton Abbey, ed. P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters 2 (Oxford, 1979), no. 36) is more likely to have had the Scandinavian name. GDB fol. 71r. Bechenhalle and two following entries (DB: Wilts. 29:2–4). If the division was based on hidage, then there was no closer way of sharing out the ploughlands. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 355. GDB fol. 111v. Witestan (DB: Devon 22:2). Exon 459a2. LDB fol. 59r. Keventuna (DB: Essex 30:17). GDB fol. 111v. Poldreham (DB: Devon 22:1); Exon 457a1. Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 397; M. Redin, Studies on Uncompounded Personal Names in Old English, Inaugural Dissertation (Uppsala, 1919), 37. J. A. Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 28, 31, 93, 149, 274. When he first appears in royal charters: Regesta: William I, ed. Bates, nos 21, 123, 146, 156. GDB fol. 166v. Alvredestone (DB: Glos. 31:2). GDB fols 80v. Bleneford (DB: Dors. 34:6), 162r. col. 2 lines 27–33, 166v. Wigheiete, 167r. Sciptone, Culcortorne (DB: Glos. W:16; 31:4, 9–10). GDB fol. 70r. Opetone (DB: Wilts. 25:23). GDB fol.71r. Bechenhalle and two following entries (DB: Wilts. 29:2–4). GDB fol. 93r. Biscopestone (DB: Som. 19:86); G. A. Loud, ‘An Introduction to the Somerset Domesday’, in The Somerset Domesday, ed. A. Williams and R. W. H. Erskine (London, 1989), pp. 1–31, at p. 23. GDB fol. 80v. Lichet (DB: Dors. 34:5). GDB fol. 47r. Sumburne (DB: Hants 32:1). Rather than some nascent borough at Stockbridge, especially since the manor seems to have been Upper Somborne (in King’s Somborne), not Stockbridge itself: VCH: Hants 4, p. 474, contra Domesday Book: Hampshire, ed. J. Munby (Chichester, 1982), note 32,1. A. Williams, ‘Introduction to the Dorset Domesday’, VCH: Dors. 3, pp. 1–60, at p. 32; Williams, ‘Introduction to Gloucestershire Domesday’, p. 26; PASE, ‘John 37’. The list of his estates provided by Clarke, English Nobility, p. 316, omits those in Devon, does not separate his tenants’ holdings, and has three errors in the figures. GDB fols 82v. Meleburne, Ogre (DB: Dors. 46:1–2), 98r. Clivedone (DB: Som. 44:1), 170r. Scipetone 2nd entry (DB: Glos. 73:2). GDB fol. 89v. Latune (DB: Som. 6:14). 11. Danish Landowners in Wessex in 1066 198. GDB fol. 109r. Bovi, Torlestan (DB: Devon 17:22, 33). 199. PASE, ‘John 5’, one of the monks who travelled with Augustine. 200. E.g. PASE, ‘John 18’ (John of Beverley, bishop of York, d. 721) and ‘John 19’ (the priest to whom Bede dedicated his metrical Life of Cuthbert); most of the other Johns currently in PASE were not native Englishmen. 201. Currently entered in PASE as ‘Iohan 1–7’; Smart, ‘Economic Migrants?’, pp. 145–46. 202. PASE, ‘Johanna 1’; Sawyer, Charters, no. 1539; Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. and trans. D. Whitelock (Cambridge, 1930), no. 3 (pp. 10–15, at p. 12): the spelling is eccentric if the name was intended as Iohannes. 203. Nordiskt runnamslexicon, s.n. Iōhan (Iōn) <http:// www.sofi.se/SOFIU/runlex>, consulted 24 Nov. 2013; L. Peterson, ‘Research Report: Dictionary of Proper Names in Scandinavian Viking Age Runic Inscriptions’, in Viking and Norse in the North Atlantic: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Fourteenth Viking Congress, Tórshavn, 19–30 July 2001, ed. A. Mortensen and S. V. Arge, Annales 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211 Societatis Scientiarium Færoensis Supplementum 14 (Tórshavn, 2005), pp. 371–74, at p. 372. GDB fol. 170r. Scipetone 1st entry (DB: Glos. 73:1). GDB fols 167r. Sciptone, 170r. Scipetone 3rd entry (DB: Glos. 31:9; 73:3). Feilitzen, Pre-Conquest Personal Names, p. 376; Strang and the cognate OE adjective strenge appear used as personal names in the placenames Strensham (Worcs.) and Stringston (Som.): Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, ed. Watts, pp. 586 and 587. Williams, ‘Introduction to Gloucestershire Domesday’, p. 26. VCH: Glos. 9, pp. 249–55. S. Keynes, ‘Giso, Bishop of Wells (1061–88)’, ANS 19 (1996), pp. 203–71, at p. 247; 1065 charter is Sawyer, Charters, no. 1042; 1072 charter printed and translated by F. H. Dickinson, ‘The Sale of Combe’, Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 22 part II (1876), pp. 106–13, calendared by Pelteret, Catalogue, no. 56. Keynes, ‘Giso’, pp. 221–26 and 254–68.