DOMESDAY SURVEY 



estates are said to have belonged. The first division of the latter, the lands 

 which the countess had retained in her own hand, had belonged altogether to 

 Earl Waltheof, and to * Sbern a freeman,' who probably held them of the 

 earl, and they are remarkable from the fact that Domesday fails to reveal the 

 existence of any demesne in the entire group in which the proportion of 

 sokemen to the rest of the population reaches the extraordinary figure of 

 eighty-three per cent. Apart from this the countess's fief is chiefly remark- 

 able for the powerful men who held of her as undertenants, Hugh de Grente- 

 maisnil holding five manors, Robert de Buci, whom we have already seen to 

 have been Hugh's own tenant at Thurlaston and Twyford, holding at least 

 seven manors of the countess. Her remaining tenants were mostly men who 

 can be identified as holding of her in other counties, notably the Grimbald of 

 Owston and Allexton, who figures prominently among the countess's men in 

 Northamptonshire. 



Another great lady who is granted a separate rubrication in the Leices- 

 tershire Domesday is Adeliza (de Beaumont), wife of Hugh de Grentemaisnil, 

 who had died about the time of the survey, 63 but is represented as holding 

 land in this and three other counties. Her land in Leicestershire lay 

 in Belgrave, Peatling Parva, and Barkby Thorpe, but it is curious that 

 the above-mentioned charter to St. Evroult speaks of this land in Peatling 

 as being in the possession of Hugh de Grentemaisnil himself, and as 

 held of him by a certain Leofric who appears in Domesday as Adeliza's 

 tenant there. 



It is a mark of inferior workmanship on the part of the compilers of the 

 Leicestershire Domesday that the important fief of Earl Hugh of Chester is 

 entered on the last folio of the county survey. The estate is of great interest, 

 not only on account of its extent, but because the greater part of it had be- 

 longed to King Harold, whose lands elsewhere in the Danelaw had generally 

 been granted by the Conqueror to the earl of Chester. With the exception 

 of five carucates which the earl possessed in Theddingworth on the Avon, and 

 to which the king laid claim, the entire fief lay along the lower Soar and 

 Wreak, centring in the important manor of Barrow on Soar. An obscure 

 question is raised by the rubrication of the estate, which places Barrow on 

 Soar in the distant wapentake of Guthlaxton. If the evidence of Domesday 

 stood alone we should probably consider the rubrication to be a simple error 

 on the part of the scribes, but it so happens that the Leicestershire Survey is 

 complete for Gosecote wapentake, in which Barrow on Soar now stands, and 

 the vill in question is entirely omitted from the latter document. There is 

 therefore a distinct probability that at the date with which we are concerned 

 Barrow on Soar was really annexed, perhaps temporarily, and for fiscal pur- 

 poses only, to Guthlaxton wapentake, although no other traces remain of 

 such an arrangement." It is not easy to account for Harold's possession of so 

 large an estate in a shire with which his family had no official connexion. If 

 we adopt the suggestion of Professor Maitland that Harold's possessions in 

 the north Midlands came to him as the dowry of his wife Ealdgyth, the sister 



"July II, 1086. 



a What is probably a parallel case occurs in Nottinghamshire just over the Leicestershire border, where 

 some five vills seem to have been attached to the wapentake of Broxtow, ten miles away across the Trent. 

 V.C.H. Notts, i, 265. 



I 297 38 



