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 A HISTORY OF LEICESTERSHIRE Melton Mowbray. It is clear that these 102 carucates must have been distributed over an area much wider than that of any single manor, but it is very difficult to discover to what they were really intended to refer. It will, perhaps, be safer here to attempt no guesses on the subject, but merely to remark that the doubtful attribution of this large number of carucates should be taken into account in any statistical study of the Leicester- shire Domesday. 49 At first sight the Leicestershire fief of Geoffrey de Wirce appears to have been composed of the estates of a number of unconnected English- men, but it is really probable that here, as in other counties, he had originally been given the land of a single native landowner, the Leofric son of Leofwine who had possessed Melton Mowbray and its depen- dencies. We are not given the name of the former owner of Geoffrey's manors in the south of the county, but it is noteworthy that he is said to have received his land in Stoney Stanton, East Norton, Newton Burdet, Little Dalby, and Withcote, from King William ' in exchange for the vill which is called Thurcaston.' Thurcaston is duly surveyed under Hugh de Grentemaisnil's fief, and its former owner is given as ' Lewin,' whom we may reasonably identify with the father of the Leofric who had held Melton Mowbray, and we may also assume that Thurcaston had originally been given to Geoffrey with the other possessions of the vanished English family. We do not know why King William should have inter- ested himself to make the exchange in question, nor why he should have bestowed Thurcaston upon Hugh de Grentemaisnil, but the latter grant must have been made before 1081, for the church of Thurcaston is included among the gifts of Hugh de Grentemaisnil, which the Conqueror confirmed to the abbey of St. Evroult in a charter of that year. 60 As Geoffrey is known to have married an English wife 61 it is very probable that the bulk of his lands came to him through inheritance rather than by the dispossession of their native owner, who must, however, have disappeared before 1077 when Geoffrey endowed Monks Kirby Priory out of lands in Leicestershire. In the foundation charter of the latter house there occur several names which we may confidently assume to be those of Geoffrey's undertenants recorded in one portion of the survey, but unfortunately they are not described with sufficient precision for us to locate them accurately among Geoffrey's Leices- tershire manors. We may, however, be reasonably certain that the man who bears the somewhat unusual name of ' Buterus ' in the charter is the same as the tenant of that name who held the important manor of Pickwell in Domesday. The estates which are described upon the succeeding folio of our survey for the most part represent mere fractions of larger possessions outside the county, and do not call for special notice here. These small holdings are, however, immediately followed by another estate of great importance, ' the land of the Countess Judith.' This lady was the daughter of Count Enguer- rand of Ponthieu and Adeliza the Conqueror's sister, and she had married the unfortunate Earl Waltheof, to whom a considerable part of her Leicestershire 49 Allowing 1 5 carucates to Melton Mowbray, the total assessment of Geoffrey's land in Framland wapentake amounts to 1 1 5^f carucates. 50 Ord. Vit. Hist. Eccles. (Soc. de 1'Hist. de France), iii, 19. " V.C.H. Warwick,, 275. 296