THE DOMESDAY SURVEY 



Colchester, a writ of William Rufus directing the sheriff of Essex to 

 give Eudo Dapifer seisin of those manors (' mansiones ') which the wife 

 of Phyn the Dane (' Dani ') had held of his father on the day of the 

 latter's death. 1 It should be added that the manor of Langham was 

 held of Richard by Walter Tirel, whose name is so familiar, and who, 

 like ' Eudo Dapifer,' had married one of his daughters.' 



The bulk of the fief of Peter de Valognes, lay in the south-west of 

 the county, near the border of Hertfordshire, in which county, at Ben- 

 nington, was the caput of his barony. 3 His importance, for Essex, lies 

 in the fact that he was sheriff at the time of the Survey.* He was also 

 then sheriff of Hertfordshire, 6 so that the arrangement of placing these 

 two counties under one sheriff is at least as old as Domesday. Later 

 evidence enables us to say that they were similarly combined under 

 Geoffrey de Mandeville as sheriff, though that great Domesday Baron 

 cannot have acted in that capacity until after the Survey. He appears 

 to have 'farmed' the county of Essex for 300, and that of Hertford 

 for jT6o a year.* Peter, whose fief extended into Norfolk and Suffolk, 

 Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, married a sister of ' Eudo Dapifer.' 

 Domesday mentions as his predecessors in the shrievalty of Essex, since 

 the Conquest, Robert Fitz Wimarc, Suain * of Essex,' and Ralf Bainard, 

 all of them Essex tenants-in-chief. 



Two other fiefs deserve some mention because they both reappear 

 in 1 1 66 among those of which the caput was in Essex. The first is 

 that of Roger de ' Rames,' which lay in the three eastern counties and 

 in Middlesex. Morant confidently asserted that Roger ' took the sur- 

 name of Raines or Ramis ' from Rayne in this county, where the manor 

 of Old Hall was the head of his descendants' barony. But this view is 

 clearly erroneous, and indeed he himself was confused on the subject. 7 As 

 several Essex manors were held by this family, its history is of some 

 importance. I have elsewhere shown in a paper on the subject " that 

 the fief was originally one of twenty knights, but that we find it under 

 Henry II. divided between two members of the family, each of whom 

 owed the service of ten knights. The other fief is that of Walter the 

 Deacon, of which Little Easton was the head, and which was of ten 

 knight's fees ; it is subsequently found in the hands, successively, of the 

 Windsor and the Hastings families. 9 



The Bretons and Flemings, who in some counties are conspicuous 



1 Ed. Roxburghe Club, p. 18. The attestation of 'the bishop of Durham' suggests 1099-1100 

 for the date. Peter de Valognes was sheriff at the time of the writ. 

 See Feudal England, pp. 468 et seq. 

 See the Victoria History of Hertfordshire, i. 176, 282. 

 See, for instance, the entry under Havering (p. 430). 

 Domesday, \. 132, 133. 



This important information is derived from the charters granted by King Stephen in 1141, and 

 by the Empress Maud in 1 142, to his grandson and namesake (see my Geoffrey de Mandeville, pp. 142, 

 166-7). 



7 He went on to say that the name of Raines, or Rennes as it is sometimes written, might arise 

 from this Roger coming from the ' city of Rennes ' (ii. 403). 

 See my Geoffrey de Mandeville, pp. 399-404. 

 9 See my paper in The Ancestor, ii. 91-2, and pp. 393, 547, note 8 below. 



349 



