Page:VCH Suffolk 1.djvu/470

 A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK also exceptional. When Danegeld was levied in the hundred, St. Edmunds- bury paid 25 per cent., or 5J. in the pound, which was appropriated to the use of the monks, while a corresponding sum was apparently laid upon Sudbury, to make up the tax due to the king.'*' Although in 1086 the later ' borough ' of St. Edmund still only ranked as a 'vill ' {villa) the descrip- tion of it in the Domesday Survey is peculiarly interesting, as an illustration of the way in which a town might spring up round a great monastic centre. The ' mensal ' land immediately surrounding the abbey, which was charged with the provision of the monks' food {ad victum monachorum),^*'' was occupied in the days of King Edward by 118 tenants {homines) who could give and sell their land, with fifty-two bordars under them, and by freemen and alms- men {ekmosinarii), also with bordars dependent on them. At the date of the Survey the abbey precincts had extended over land which had been arable before the Conquest, and the terse entry in the Survey is yet full enough to bring up before us a picture of the community, a little world in itself, where the abbot and the brethren formed the nucleus round which gathered a population of clerks, nuns, and poor bedesmen, servants and artisans, bailiffs and soldiers {milites) }*^ The thirteen reeves or praepositi Vfho had houses in the ' vill ' and were set over the land, may have administered the outlying estates of the abbey as well as the demesne.'*' We hear of Orger, the abbot's ' reeve,' who held two freemen at Wickham whom Aluric his predecessor had appropriated,"" of the freeman ' Coding the reeve,' who held 90 acres at Oakley and was commended to the Abbot of St. Edmunds, and of ' Bristric, St. Edmund's reeve.''" At South wold, on the east coast, the abbey held a manor which, like St. Edmundsbury, had to provide food for the monks, in particular, apparently, for their fast-days, since it paid a rent of herrings, which had risen from 20,000 under King Edward to 25,000 in 1086.'" In connexion with this manor occurs the solitary mention in Domesday Book of a heia maris or sea-weir. The only estates held by Archbishop Lanfranc in Suffolk were also ' mensal ' or ' board ' lands for the Canterbury monks. Three out of his four manors had been granted to Stigand or to ' Holy Trinity,' Canterbury, before the Conquest, and the fourth had come to the archbishop through an agree- ment {conventio) with the freewoman Leveva.'" Four bishops held in chief of the Crown in Suffolk, the king's half- brother, Odo of Bayeux, William Bishop of Thetford, Gundulf of Rochester, and Gilbert of Evreux. The Suffolk fief of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent,"* is almost entirely composed of the lands of freemen who before the Conquest had been bound to their over-lords by sac and soke and commendation or by commendation alone. Part of these estates had been held by William victum monachorum' ; Maitland, Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 55, 240 ; RoMndi, Feud. Engl. loi, n. 187 ; Sudbury paid 5/. in the pound and was assessed as 3 leets, or a quarter of a hundred ; above, p. 365. '" Dom. Bk. 372 ; Ellis, Introd. to Dom. ii, 488, seems to have misunderstood this passage. '*" r.C.H. Suf.ii, II. "' Cf. Chaucer's monk, who was an ' out-rydere.' ffWii 0/ Geoffrey Chaucer (ed. Skeat), iv, 6 ; v, 19, 20. ""Dom. Bk. 371. '" Ibid. 170b, 437^ ; cf. 275^ ; a steward {dap'tfer) of the abbot in Norfolk. "' Ibid. 371^. "' Ibid. 372^, 373 ; cf. above p. 383. '" Cf. V.C.H. Essex, i, 342 ; V.C.H. Norf. ii, 17 ; Dom. Bk. 373, et seq. 392
 * " Dom. Bk. 372 ; ' Quando in hundreto solvitur ad geltum i. libra tunc inde exeunt Ix. denarii ad