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Victoria County History of Kent Vol. 3  1932 - Introduction to the Kent Domesday Survey - Page 186

place of individual rents and services, but sometimes also from lands held by knights and monks. Evidently many Canterbury estates were exploited thus indirectly. In like manner the lands of Rochester show both a very considerable increase in values, and give several instances of the occurrence of a still larger rent. The increase on St. Augustine’s rich lands was even greater. The 50s. value of Sturry increasing to £50 is probably a mistake, but, even so, many other cases of increases from £10 to £23 occur. In ‘Platenovt’ the interesting clause ‘tamen appreciatur quando ad firmam’ is used,40 and in the ‘Domesday Monachorum’ it is constantly made clear that the ‘reddit’ clause denotes land held at farm The lands of Odo bishop of Bayeux were too various and too recently acquired to be perhaps of much significance as illustrating Norman methods of exploitation: they, too, however, show in general the increase in values and an occasional very large rent in excess of the value at the time of the Survey. They do not, however, in spite of his reputation for unjust encroachments, throw on Odo any heavier onus of blame in this respect than that borne by other tenants in chief. In the case of the canons of St. Martin of Dover the reverse process with regard to values is observable.. Alone in Kent their lands show a decrease in value in the time of King William. They were situated in the main in Bewsborough and Cornilo hundreds, and there seems no particular reason evident, on the face of the Survey, for the decline, unless it be in the fact that the prebends of the canons which had heretofore, it is stated, been held in common, were distributed among individual canons by Odo, a change that was taking place about this time in other churches also.41  The total decrease in value was about £16 on some 21 sulungs. The exact computation of the 21 sulungs held by the canons, in addition to the 3 sulungs in ‘Limowarlest’ held in communitate between wood and plain, is difficult, in part because of the 3 virge which appear, and the transference of acres once belonging to the prebends.42  The sum seems to be a little under 21. Larking 43  has devoted some attention in his notes to the peculiar place held by the canons in the Survey, and thinks it possible that the commissioners stayed in their buildings, and received attentions which made them favourable towards their claims. This, however, is mere supposition. Of the first curious mention of the canons at the very beginning of the Survey, Larking says: ‘This statement is not strictly correct, because it appears that a moiety of one of the issues of the town (i.e. the toll) belonged to the canons of St. Martin,’ and throughout the description of their possessions there is little more, Larking continues, than ‘a confused collection of miscellaneous memoranda’ jotted down at intervals and never reduced into systematic form.
   The holders of land in Kent in Norman times were very few in number, especially when compared with the multitudinous small holders of non-ecclesiastical lands in the days preceding the Conquest. The explanation of the difference lies in part at least in the great grants made to the bishop of Bayeux as earl of Kent, comprising much of the land not already in the hands of English churches. Alien churches were represented by St. Peter of Ghent,
   40  See p. 245b.
   41  See p. 204b. Compare Stubbs, Introd. to Chron. of Rich. I, Epistola Cantuar. (Rolls Ser.), p. xvii et seq. It is curious that Domesday should give the names of the Saxon tenants, if before Odo’s day the lands were held in common.
   42  See p. 207a.     43  Larking, op. cit. 161, 187.

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