A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE 



connected with the county, the Chocques family will be dealt with under 

 the ' Feudal Baronage,' as the caput of its barony was within the shire. 

 Walter the Fleming had his at ' Wadehelle ' (now Odell), Beds., whence 

 the great barony of his heirs was known as that of Wahull. He had 

 succeeded there, as in all his Northamptonshire manors, a thegn of king 

 Edward, Leofnoth by name.* It appears to me highly probable that this 

 unfortunate man was he who was allowed to retain, of all his wide estates, 

 a single hide at Plumpton, as an under-tenant of Walter. Such cases were 

 not uncommon, as we are painfully reminded at Stanion (fo. 220*^), where 

 the wealthy thegn Eadwine, whom the bishop of Coutances had suc- 

 ceeded,* retained, as his under-tenant, an insignificant estate. The fief 

 of ' Winemar ' must be dealt with here, because it raises some difficult 

 questions. He is twice termed, in the Domesday Survey (fo. 229), 

 Winemar de Hamslape ('Anslepe,' ' Hanslepe '), from his Bucks manor 

 of that name — adjoining his Northamptonshire manor of Cosgrave — the 

 only part of his fief that was outside our shire, in which, in addition to 

 six estates, he had twelve houses in the county town. Moreover, he was 

 also under-tenant to five Northamptonshire tenants-in-chief, so that, in one 

 capacity or the other, he held a considerable amount of land. It has 

 been alleged that Michael ' de Hamslape,' in whose hands his fief (or 

 most of it) was found in the days of Henry I., was his ' immediate 

 descendant ' ; ' and indeed Lipscomb, in his History of Buckinghamshire, 

 asserted that ' Michael de Hanslape was undoubtedly a son of Winemar, 

 and inherited his father's property in this county, as did Walter Fitz 

 Winemar the portion which was in Northamptonshire.' * Baker also, 

 without hesitation, made Michael the elder son of Winemar, and Walter 

 the younger.* It is quite possible that this was so, but, though I have 

 gone through the evidence on Michael in the Beauchamp cartulary, which 

 was unknown to Lipscomb and Baker, I have found no actual proof of the 

 fact. The difficulty is that Michael and his heirs ought, in that case, to 

 have succeeded also to Winemar's under-tenancies, and that, on the con- 

 trary, those lands at least which Winemar held of countess Judith passed, 

 not to Michael, but to Walter and his heirs. This Walter, thus becom- 

 ing a tenant of the earl's by knight-service, witnessed the foundation charter 

 of St. Andrew's Priory,* and bestowed on it the church of Little Billing, 

 which manor he seems to have obtained with his wife.' The most in- 

 teresting point about him is that I have found his name in that important 

 document known as the Glasgow Inquisition.* For this is a clear instance 

 of that process by which the tenants of the Scottish kings, in their capacity 



' A few scraps of his estates had been secured by others, the count of Mortain, for 

 instance, picking up a ploughland at Croughtotn, and Evesham Abbey, apparently, succeeding 

 him at Lichborough. 



* See p. 287 above. 



^ See Mr. Stuart Moore's edition of the Northamptonshire Domesday. 



* Vol. IV. p. 165. ' History of Northamptonshire, II. 129. 

 « Vesp. E. XVIII. (fo. id). ' Ibid., fo. 57. 



* Registrum Episcopatus Glasguensis (Bannatyne Club), p. 5 ; and compare my Calendar 

 of Documents preserved in France, p. 506. 



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