THE DOMESDAY SURVEY 



distinctive feature of Odo's fief was the number of small estates that it 

 contained, representing, as it did, not the possessions of any great English 

 landowner, but those of a multitude of small ones. 



Of the lay barons, the names perhaps most familiar to our ears are 

 those of Geoffrey de Mandeville and Aubrey de Vere. Their namesakes 

 and heirs, connected by marriage, obtained earldoms in the days of 

 Stephen, and the Vere Earls of Oxford were continuously connected with 

 the county down to the extinction of the title only two centuries ago. 

 The house of Mandeville became extinct in 1189, but its earldom of 

 Essex continued as the style of its descendants in the female line, who 

 also retained down to the year 1 372 Pleshey, the stronghold of the early 

 Mandevilles, together with the bulk of the Domesday fief, the largest, 

 after that of Count Eustace, of any lay baron in the county. As these 

 two families and their fiefs played so large a part in the history of the 

 county, we may deal with their Domesday possessions in some detail 

 and together. Geoffrey was the recognized grantee of the vast but 

 scattered estates of Ansgar (or Esgar) the ' staller,' ' to which he had 

 succeeded in Berkshire, Middlesex, Herts, Oxon, Northants, Warwick- 

 shire, Essex and Suffolk. 1 In Essex the bulk of Ansgar's, and therefore 

 of Geoffrey's, estate lay in the heart of the county, where High Easter 

 (with Pleshey) and Great Waltham formed around his stronghold a 

 compact block of some 12,000 acres, and were in turn surrounded 

 by his lands in Leighs, Terling, Broomfield, the Chignals, Mashbury, 

 the Rodings, and Barnston. It is exceptional in Domesday to find the 

 manors of a tenant-in-chief so compactly grouped as this. But Geoffrey 

 had also succeeded Ansgar at (Saffron) Walden, where, as at Pleshey, 

 existing earthworks bear witness to a stronghold of his house. Another 

 English predecessor of Geoffrey, Friebern, whom he had succeeded fin 

 two Essex manors, was clearly the thegn of that name whom he had 

 succeeded in a Suffolk one (fo. 41 1^). Vast as were Geoffrey's estates 

 in Essex, he did not scruple to add to them, in some places, by aggres- 

 sion. 8 Aubrey de Vere, whose fief in Essex was much smaller than 

 Geoffrey's, owed it almost exclusively to his succession to a certain 

 Wulfwine, who had also been his predecessor in all his Cambridgeshire 

 estates and in four Suffolk manors. (Castle) Hedingham appears to have 

 been the chief seat of his house from the first, but his estates were much 

 scattered. Both he and his wife are charged with a little wrongful 

 increase of their extent.* 



Of the four great escheated ' Honours ' named in Magna Carta, 

 the Honour of Boulogne was one. For the origin of this ' Honour ' 

 we must turn to Domesday Book, where we find Count Eustace of 



1 See for this notable man, a grandson of Tofig the proud (founder, in the first instance, of 

 Waltham Holy Cross), Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. iii. passim. 



* Ellis (Introduction to Domesday, ii. 43) omits Suffolk, but Geoffrey had succeeded Ansgar at Holton 

 and Reydon in that county. Ellis was also gravely in error in stating that in the other counties Geoffrey's 

 lands 'are marked uniformly as having been, in former times, the property of Asgar or his homagers.' 

 This was by no means the case in Essex. 



8 See pp. 568-9 below. 4 See pp. 569-70 below. 



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