Page:VCH Bedfordshire 1.djvu/257

 THE DOMESDAY SURVEY William Spech who appears as the holder of considerable estates in the county must have been a predecessor of Walter Espec, the famous leader at the Battle of the Standard (1138), for one of the three Cister- cian abbeys founded by the latter was at Warden in this county, a manor which was held by William Spech at the time of the Survey. Two of Walter's sisters and co-heirs married Trailly and Ros, names which ap- pear in the Bedfordshire Domesday as those of under-tenants, and the house of Ros became his heirs in the north. Robert de Toeni (of Belvoir) obtained, here as elsewhere, the lands of Osulf, son of Frane, a wealthy thegn, while the single manor held by Robert Fafiton illustrates the opposite system of devolution ; for the lands of his English predecessor Alwin ' Horim ' (or ' Home ') had been given in the adjoining county of Hertfordshire to Derman, and Robert's lands, which were in four counties, were derived from different owners. Flemings were well represented in this part of England, and the entry of Walter the Fleming's lands is followed by those of estates held by ' Walter brother of Seier,' who may possibly have been his father's brother, for a Seiher — the name is distinctively Flemish — is incidentally alluded to, under Southill, as having been Walter the Fleming's prede- cessor in the course of William's reign. Moreover, both these barons had the same English predecessor, the thegn Leofnoth ; and, lastly, Segen- hoe was afterwards held as part of the ' Wahull ' barony, which is very strong evidence. Fellow-countrymen of theirs soon follow in Hugh the Fleming and in Sigar and Gunfrey de Chocques (' Cioches') from what we call French Flanders, of whom the two latter were Northamptonshire barons. Gilbert of Ghent also held land in the county. It is strange to find Osbern Fitz Richard, the lord of Richard's Castle, Herefordshire, holding estates so far east as this, but he seems to have had a special grant of the lands of Stori, a Bedfordshire 'man' of Earl Tostig. There is nothing to show how Archbishop Stigand had come to hold a considerable estate in Biggleswade (with Stratton and Holme) and Dunton, with some outlying appendages, or why it was divided between Richard Pungiant and Ralf ' de Insula,' neither of whom appears elsewhere as succeeding him. Albert of Lorraine, as I have elsewhere shown, 1 was a ' clerk ' or ' chaplain ' (although there is nothing to show it in the entry of his Bedfordshire estates), who enjoyed the favour alike of Edward the Confessor and of William, and received from them lands and houses. Of Chalgrave, in the south of this county, we read that he had held it in Edward's days. The three columns devoted to the lands of Judith, widow of Earl Waltheof, are of interest for the light they throw on the ' comital ' his- tory of the county. Mr. Freeman, in his special study on ' The great earldoms under Eadward,' arrived at the conclusion that the shires of Huntingdon and Northampton, which were appurtenant to the earldom ' See The Commune of London and other Studies, pp. 36-7. 203