Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/469

 DOMESDAY SURVEY mother of Earl Morcar and widow of Earl iElfgar, was ' kept ' by William the Chamberlain, and by that Otto the Goldsmith who also farmed the Crown estates, which had belonged to iElfgar in Essex.''^ The royal manor of Bergholt with its members was in the charge of Aluric ' Wanz,' an Englishman whose estates in Essex had come into the hands of ' Eudo Dapifer.'*'* The lands which fell to the king when Archbishop Stigand was deposed in 1070 were, like his forfeited estates in Norfolk, farmed by William de Noyers. They were both extensive and important, and included three manors in Bungay, in Wangford Hundred, the Samford manor of Bramford,*" and the manor of Mildenhall, which King Edward had given to St. Edmund on his first visit to the abbey in 1044.^'* Stigand held Mildenhall of St. Edmund's Abbey during the lifetime of King Edward, and it passed to the Crown in 1070, and was only recovered by Abbot Samson in 1189, at the cost of 1,000 marks.'" Robert Malet, Roger Bigot, and Roger of Poitou had also profited by the archbishop's fall.*'' The description of the fiefs of eleven lay tenants-in-chief intervenes between the account of the Terra Regis and that of the estates of the Church in Suffolk. ' The land of St. Edmund ' heads the list of the fiefs of the ecclesiastical magnates, and occupies considerably more space in the Survey than the Crown lands. The great abbey, a tenant-in-chief in six counties,"' had vast possessions in Suffolk. Its estates extended into almost every hundred of the county,"" but the chief seat of its power was in the hundreds of Thingoe, Thedwastre, and Blackbourn. The abbot at the time of the Conquest was a Frenchman, Baldwin,'" and in spite of the loss of the manor of Mildenhall, and of occasional encroachments on its rights,'" the abbey seems to have flourished under the Conqueror. On his first visit to St. Edmundsbury King William had granted the Norfolk estate of Brooke to the monks,'" and in Suffolk he gave a freeman and his land at Preston, ' and soke and all customs ' to St. Edmund and Abbot Baldwin, and also land at Somerton, while he confirmed King Edward's grant of sac and soke and commendation over the freemen of Wetherden, Harleston, and Onehouse, in the hundred of Stow.'" The abbot's jurisdictional privileges, the ' six for- feitures of St. Edmund,' and the grant of soke over eight and a half hundreds, have already been mentioned, and the anxious insistence on these privileges in the Suffolk Domesday, especially in connexion with the rights of William, Bishop of Thetford, recalls the earlier rivalry between Abbot Baldwin and William's predecessor Herfast.'" The fiscal privileges of the abbey were "' Dom. Bk. 286^ ; r.C.H. Essex,, 350-1. For William the Chamberlain, cf. F.C.H. Beds, i, 197. "* F.C.H. Essex, I, 355. Mr. Round sees in this 'a suggestive case of an Englishman whose lands had been taken from him actually employed by the Crown in a position of trust.* "' Dom. Bk. 288, 289. "« Ibid. 2883 ; Dugdale, Mm. iii, 100, 138 ; V.C.H. Suff. ii, 58. "" Dom. Bk. 313. ' Sibbetuna,' where a woman is called ' homo Stigandi episcopi'; 321^, 'Soches'; 322^, 3233, 3303, 'Delham'; 349^, ' Resebi.' "' Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire. "" The exceptions are Lothing and Lothingland in the north-east, Samford and Colneis in the south, and the half-hundreds of Parham and Ipswich. "' V.C.H.Suff. ii, 58. '"Dom. Bk. 2843. 'Ex istis habuit sanctus E. commendationem cum omni consuetudine super iiii. integros et iiii. dimidios . . . sed comes R. tenuit eos quando se forisfecit;' cf. 360^. 'Anhus.* 'Mulcefel' ; F.C.H. Norf. ii, 16. '" Dom. Bk. 210 ; V.C.H. Norf. ii, 13. '" Dom. Bk. 359^, 360, 360*. "' Ibid. 379 ; Freeman, Norm. Conj. iv (2nd ed.), 407, 408 ; (ist ed.), 411. 391
 * " Chrm. Joe. de Brakehnda (Camd. Soc), 33, 34, 123, 124.