A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE 
Of other than local religious houses, St. Neots (Hunts) had lost to 
Richard de Clare some of its lands in Eaton Socon across the Bedford- 
shire border, while it still held, as tenant to his wife, some land on the 
Huntingdonshire side of the river. ‘The evidence of Domesday here 
affords an interesting confirmation of the statement in the Liber Ehensis 
that Richard (who is there erroneously styled Gilbert) de Clare took 
advantage of the Ely revolt to despoil the lands of Einulfsbury—as 
St. Neots was then termed—and to expel the Ely monks by whom it 
was then held. These, it alleges, he replaced by foreign monks from 
Bec." 
St. Alban’s again appears to have lost a hide at Stotfold to Hugh 
de Beauchamp. From other sources we learn that it lost more than this. 
Oswulf the son of Frane, a wealthy thegn, had given to Abbot Leofstan 
under the Confessor land at Studham,’ which is found, however, at the 
time of the Survey, with the rest of Oswulfs estates, in the hands of the 
Norman lord of Belvoir. The gift had been witnessed by a neighbour- 
ing lord, Leofwine ‘ Cilt’ of Caddington, who himself held his lands at 
Caddington and Streatley for life only with reversion to St. Alban’s under 
the gift of his father Eadwine.’ Domesday ignores the gift under both 
these places, and shows us his Streatley land in the hands of Nigel ‘de 
Albini.’ 
The cathedral church of London had acquired his estate at Cadding- 
ton ; and the great abbey of St. Edmund at Bury, which flourished under 
the Conqueror’s rule, had received from Earl Waltheof and his wife a 
substantial addition to its endowment. Foreign monks had obtained as 
yet strangely little in the county, Nigel of Albini alone bestowing on 
those of St. Nicholas of Angers a small portion of the manor that he 
held at Henlow. The nunnery of Elstow, however, was an addition 
to the local houses, being founded since the Conquest by Countess 
udith. 
: As to the laymen holding lands, at the time of the survey, in the 
county, we must not expect to find their names or even their descendants 
in the male line among the local landowners of modern times. Even 
of the list of local gentry in the reign of Henry VI., Fuller, its editor, 
wrote in the seventeenth century :— 
Hungry Time hath made a [Gluttons Meal] on this [Catalogue of Gentry] and 
hath left but a very little [morsell for manners] remaining ; so few of these are found 
extant in this [Shire], and fewer continuing in a [Gentile Equipage]. 
The name of one, the Mordaunts of Turvey, is still found in the 
Baronetage (creation of 1611), and, although no longer connected with 
the county, invites mention here on account of the assertion still found 
1 Liber Elensis (Ed. Anglia Christiana Society), pp. 239-40: ‘Quam violenter locus de Enulfes- 
bury abstractus sit Elyensi ecclesiz.’ The Sudbury land in Eaton Socon, which belonged to St. Neots, 
had been wholly annexed by Richard ; while at Wyboston, which the house had formerly held ‘in 
almoin,’ it now held only as Richard’s tenant. 
2 Kemble, Cod. Dipl. iv. 280-1 (No. 945). 
3 Ibid. iv. 259 (No. 920). 
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