THE DOMESDAY SURVEY 
in Burke’s Peerage and similar works that its founder, ‘ Osbert le Mor- 
daunt,’ obtained a manor at Radwell by the gift of his brother, Eustace 
de St. Gilles, who had received it from King William in return for his 
services in the Conquest. To this tale the Domesday Survey affords no 
support, and I have elsewhere denounced as a mere concoction the charter 
on which it rests.’ It was printed in that curious work, Succinct genealogies 
of the noble and ancient houses of . . . Mordaunt of Turvey (1685), for 
which the eccentric Earl of Peterborough, then head of the Mordaunts, 
and a rector of Turvey appear to have been jointly responsible. The 
family, however, was already seated at least as early as the thirteenth 
century at Turvey. 
The three great local barons whose fiefs had their ‘heads’ in the 
county were Hugh de Beauchamp, Walter the Fleming, and Nigel ‘de 
Albini’—whose name, in French, would be represented by Néel d’Au- 
bigny. All three were succeeded in their lands by lines of heirs longer 
than was usual in the case of Domesday barons. The last of the Beau- 
champs ‘ of Bedford’ fell at the battle of Evesham (1265), his sisters 
succeeding him in his lands; and the lands of Albini ‘ of Cainhoe’ simi- 
larly passed, a generation earlier, to the sisters of the last of the male 
line; but the heirs male of Walter the Fleming continued to hold his 
barony of ‘ Wahull’ (now Odell) down to the days of Henry VIII., 
and the Domesday fief remained afterwards in the hands of the heir- 
general.” Cainhoe and ‘ Wahull’ were from the first part of their respec- 
tive baronies’; but the Domesday account of the town of Bedford is too 
meagre for us to discover what, if any, connection Hugh de Beauchamp 
had with it in 1086. As the Bishop of Coutances had, we have seen, 
brought with him a tenant from the region of his cathedral city, so had 
Nigel ‘de Albini’ brought with him a namesake from what was probably 
the same district, the Cétentin. This was Nigel ‘de Wast,’ who derived, 
I think, his name from Le Vast, east of Cherbourg, as would his lord from 
(St. Martin d’)Aubigny, north-east of Coutances. Under his lord he held 
five estates in Beds and one in Bucks, but these probably escheated after- 
wards, for his adjoining manors of Ampthill and Milbrook are subsequently 
found in the hands of the lords of the fief. A noteworthy entry in its 
Domesday description tells us that Nigel ‘de Albini’ was holding 25 acres 
in Maulden,* which John de Roches had annexed to the wrong of the 
men of that vill (super homines qui villam tenent). Under the holdings of 
Ramsey Abbey we read that at Barton-in-the-Clay the abbot had been 
wrongfully disseised, he claimed, by John de Roches of 12 acres of 
meadow, which were held at the time of the survey by Nigel ‘de Albini’ 
and Walter the Fleming. Thus we have, in two places, incidental men- 
tion of John de Roches as a predecessor of Nigel, together with a hint 
1 See ‘ The Companions of the Conqueror’ in Monthly Review, iii. 107. 
2 Domesday Book, with its entry of this fief, was actually produced in the House of Lords, some 
years ago, in the ‘ Wahull’ peerage case. 
3 For the moated mounds at each, on which stood the barons’ castles, see the section on ‘ Ancient 
Earthworks,’ below. 
4 Maulden lay between his manors of Ampthill and Clophill, 
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