POLITICAL HISTORY 



worth £S, and Cheselbourne, worth >Ci6/ and from a certain priest 2 hides 

 in Ilsington, valued at 20s. It must, however, be remembered that 



such charges were almost matters of course after his death, for all churchmen whose 

 lands had come into his hands, whether rightly or wrongly, would naturally try to get 

 them back, and the Normans would put the worst construction on all his actions.^ 



This body of public opinion must have assisted the feudal tendencies already 

 at work, the greater since the proportion of Danes among the holders of 

 land T.R.E. was small. Of ninety-eight names of those holding T.R.E. only 

 seven are pure Danish, though others with West Saxon names may possibly, 

 like Gytha herself, have had a Danish descent. Of the twenty who, holding 

 before 1066, were still holding in 1087, only two have Danish names. 



The Conquest undoubtedly accelerated the concentration of estates in a 

 small number of hands. The Dorset tenants m capite, at the date of the 

 survey, were 146.' To the king, either in demesne or by escheat, belonged 

 in 1087 rather more than one-seventh of the county; to the greater feuda- 

 tories taken conjointly rather more than one-third ; to the lesser feudatories, 

 king's thegns, king's Serjeants, the four boroughs and a few unclassified land- 

 holders, about one-ninth. The various ecclesiastical persons and bodies, 

 headed by the bishop of Salisbury, held little short of a third.* 



This was the great era of castle-building.' William had obtained the 

 land for his ' castellum de Warham ' by exchange with the abbess of Shaftes- 

 bury for the advowson of Gillingham. It is now generally held that this 

 castle, referred to in Domesday,* is Corfe. It was almost certainly not only a 

 new building, but new on that site. For if ' the religious woman Alfthrith ' 

 to whom Edred granted Purbeck^ was indeed abbess of St. Edward,^ the 

 abbey at Shaftesbury would seem to have held this land since 948. It is not 

 easy to account for Elfrida's palace at Corfe,'* for Edgar's grant to his queen 

 was at Buckland.^" The chronicle states that Edward was killed at ' Corf- 

 geat,' ^' which may possibly have been Coryates ; a charter of Canute to 

 Abbotsbury mentions ' Corfgeat ' near Portisham.^^ There is also a Corfe, 

 anciently a member of the manor of West Milton, now a hamlet in the parish 

 of Powerstock.'^ Camden thought there was a Saxon castle at Corfe, and that 

 it must have been built after 941,'* citing an inquisition of the time of 

 Henry III ' before the building of the castle of Corfe, the abbess and nuns of 

 S. Edward at Shasten had the wreck of the sea within their manor of 

 Kingston.' He gives 941 as the date of the foundation of this abbey by 

 Edmund, but Dugdale considers it to have been founded, perhaps by Alfred, 

 at any rate before 900." Research goes to show that there was no castle at 

 Corfe before the Conquest.'* 



' Dom. Bk. i, 78. ' Article ' Harold,' in Diet. Nat. Biog. xxiv, 418. 



' Ellis,/n/;W. to Dom. ii, 438. * See Eyton, op. cit. i 56. 



' G. T. Clarke, Mediaeval Milit. Anhit. i, 23. 



* Dom. Bk. \, 78, b. 2. See also Testa de Nevill (Rcc. Com.), 164^. 



' Birch, Cartul. Sax. iii, 12, No. 868. * Dugdale, Mon. Angl. ii, 473. 



' Sec Bond, Corfe Castle, 9. '° Birch, Cartul. Sa.v. iii, 436, No. 1 177. 



" Jngl.-Sax. Chron. (Rolls Set.), i, 232-3. " Mon. Angl. ii, 55, charter ii. 



" Hutchins, Dorset, ii, 319. '* Camden, Britannia (ed. Gibson, 1 721), i, 57. 



" Mon. Angl. ii, 47 1 . 



'° Round, in Archaeologia, LVIII, i, 313 sqq. and Quart. Rev. July, 1894 ; Mrs. Armitage, in Engl. Hist. 

 Rev. 1904, pp. 227, 450, and I905,p.7ii ; and in Proc. of Scottish Antij.-nyixvr, lij . See also Round, Geoffrey 

 de Mandeville, 328 ; Arfh. Journ. Ix, and Antij. xiii, 241. 



