DOMESDAY SURVEY 



abbey by Earl Ralf of Hereford, the Confessor's nephew, who had 

 possessed a considerable estate in Leicestershire; the former, according 

 to Hugh Candidas, the twelfth-century historian of Peterborough, was 

 the gift of a certain ' Frane of Rockingham.' 88 Domesday, however, says 

 of East Langton that ' Ailmar held it freely in King Edward's time.' 

 Either then Frane succeeded Ailmar and made the grant to Peterborough 

 during the short reign of Harold, or we must see in the former an 

 Englishman who retained his land for a short period at least of the Con- 

 queror's reign, but died before Domesday. It may also be noted that the 

 Northamptonshire Domesday makes no mention of Frane of Rockingham, 

 and that, since his name represents the old Norse Frani, he was pre- 

 sumably of Scandinavian descent. 89 



The possessions of Coventry Abbey, which follow in the survey, had 

 all been granted to the abbey by Earl Leofric of Mercia. We have already 

 noted the circumstances under which the abbey obtained a confirmation of 

 its tenure from King William, and the fief does not call for further remark. 

 The small estate of Crowland Abbey in Button Cheney, Stapleton, and Beeby, 

 concludes the list of the church lands of Leicestershire. With the possible 

 exception of the bishop of Lincoln's estate in Leicester and Knighton, there is 

 not a carucate of land in the county which we can assume with the slightest 

 probability to have belonged to an ecclesiastical owner before the beginning 

 of the eleventh century, and the fact itself is significant. It has been well 

 remarked that ' richly endowed churches mean an enslaved peasantry,' so and 

 there are features which we shall remark in the tenurial organization of the 

 county in the period immediately preceding the Conquest which find a partial 

 explanation in the fact that the incipient manorialism developed elsewhere on 

 ecclesiastical lands had no place for its growth in Leicestershire. The same 

 remark applies indeed to the whole Danelaw, but with the exception of 

 Derbyshire to no county in this district with the same force as to the one 

 with which we are here concerned. 



Between the lands of lay and ecclesiastical tenants in chief, the Leicester- 

 shire Domesday inserts a small paragraph devoted to 'the king's alms.' Three 

 priests, Godwine, Ernebern, and Aluric, an Englishman called Ingald and a 

 woman described as ' Quintin's wife,' held in severally estates varying from 

 half a carucate to four carucates, in Peatling, Shearsby, Sutton Cheney, 

 Illston, Swinford, and Wigston Parva. No fact is recorded concerning any 

 of these people which would explain the bounty, small as it was, which they 

 enjoyed at the king's hands, and these humble folk are the nearest represen- 

 tatives, in Leicestershire, of the considerable class of king's thegns which in 

 the counties of Nottingham and Derby continued the tenures of the old 

 English period to the date of the survey and beyond. 



The first lay tenant in chief whose fief is treated in the Leicester Domes- 

 day is Robert count of Meulan, who became in or shortly after 1 101 the first 

 earl of the shire. As yet, however, his estate in the county was but small, 

 and it is made to appear smaller than it really is by being described in two 

 divisions which are separated by nearly the whole of the county survey. The 

 lands which the count held in demesne are entered on folio 231^, those which 



19 Hugpnis Candldi Hist. (ed. Sparke), 43. 



19 Napier and Stevenson, Crawford Charters, 75. See also below p. 293. M Dom. Bk. and Beyond. 

 i 289 37 



