DOMESDAY SURVEY 



Englishman named Osgot, and the one estate which the king possessed in 

 Guthlaxton wapentake, the 5 carucates which he held in Bittesby close to 

 the Watling Street, had likewise belonged in King Edward's time to an 

 undistinguished native of the common name of Leofwine. 



The main interest of the royal manors in Leicestershire lies in their 

 structure and organization. Rothley and Great Bowden, in particular, are 

 excellent examples of the straggling, incoherent type of manor, held together 

 by jurisdictional rather than by economic ties, which is eminently character- 

 istic of the Danelaw. The manor of Rothley extended over twenty-one 

 dependent vills, that of Bowden extended over ten. This type of estate pro- 

 duced perhaps its finest examples in the neighbouring county of Lincoln, and 

 in Leicestershire itself the only rivals of Bowden and Rothley in this kind 

 are the manors of Melton Mowbray, which possessed at least nine dependent 

 blocks of territory, and Barrow on Soar, the vills connected with which 

 amounted to thirteen. In the cases of Bowden and Rothley, Domesday 

 distinguishes between the payments made to the king by the central manor 

 and by the ' sokeland,' and the result is not uninteresting. Rothley itself 

 brought in yearly 3 2J., but the men of Rothley soke paid altogether 

 3 1 8j. id. ; Great Bowden alone brought in 3 IQJ., of which 2 repre- 

 sented the profits of the demesne, the remaining 30^. coming from the men 

 of the vill, but its sokeland produced 14 iu. 6d. These figures clearly 

 represent the addition of a number of irregular payments, and they are in 

 striking contrast with the round sums rendered by the royal manors of the 

 south of England or even, so far as our information goes, by the royal 

 manors of Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire. 23 They suggest in fact that the 

 sokes of Rothley and Bowden came into existence as the result of gradual 

 accretions from below, and that they do not represent territorial units of any 

 notable antiquity. Individual sokemen and groups of sokemen may have 

 sought the king for purposes of protection and warranty, and thus become 

 gradually incorporated in a manorial group while still retaining a large 

 measure of economic and tenurial freedom. Nor can we doubt that similar 

 forces elsewhere must have contributed largely to produce the heterogeneous, 

 unorganized manors of the type which we are considering. 



The royal manors of Leicestershire afford good examples of the way in 

 which the king would at times let out his estates to be held of him at a 

 money rent. Croxton Kerrial and Nether Broughton were thus ' farmed ' by 

 Hugh fitz Baldric, a great Yorkshire tenant in chief, 24 and it is highly prob- 

 able that the sums of jC 1 / an< ^ >C8, which are set down as the value of these 

 manors respectively, really mean that Hugh paid the king a round sum of 

 25 in return for them. Robert de Todeni, the lord of Belvoir, held 

 2 carucates in Blaston belonging to Bowden soke, the rest of the former 

 vill being sokeland. Of these Humfrey the chamberlain held at farm a small 

 portion of the royal sokeland in Priestgrave ; the manors which had belonged 

 to Queen Edith were held of the king by a certain Godwin, whose name 

 proves him to have been an Englishman. The manner in which Domesday 



** Compare Dunham and Orston, Notts, which had been worth ^30 each, Caistor and Gayton-le-Marsh, 

 Lincoln, valued at 30 and 15 respectively. 



14 It is worth noting that Casterton (Rutland), which, like Croxton Kerrial and Nether Broughton, had 

 belonged to Earl Morcar, was also ' farmed ' by Hugh fitz Baldric, who appears in Domesday as a former 

 sheriff of Notts. 



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