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Victoria County History of Kent Vol. 3  1932 - Introduction to the Kent Domesday Survey - Page 187

whose lands lay in Lewisham and in the district on the north of Andred.44  The great royal manor of Wye with its attendant franchises King William had given to his newly founded church of Battle in Sussex.45  The king himself held only four manors, one of them, however, being the great manor of Milton reckoned as a hundred and a half lest. This manor was assessed at 80 sulungs and valued at £200, and was managed for the king by Hamon the Dapifer. It probably included the great wealdish extension in Marden, later considered as another hundred, in which the Middleton denes lay, and from which ‘the men of the walt’ paid their rents at the royal manor. Milton contributed also a rent of cheese and rent (gablum) to Newington, a manor once Queen Edith’s, now held by Albert the Chaplain.46 It will be noticed from a comparison of the Survey with the Saxon charters that many vills once royal and of great importance, often bearing the names of the hundreds in which they lay and of which they had been the centres, had been conveyed to the churches by the early kings.
   The lands of the great churches were usually held in large manorial units, assessed at considerable numbers of sulungs and of fairly large ploughing capacity and values. The archbishop’s lands appear divided into three parts in the Survey, his own, his monks’, and his knights’, but in the ‘Domesday Monachorum’ they are divided into two parts only, the maneria archiepiscopatus with a total rating of 187½ sulungs, and the maneria monachorum rated at 133½ sulungs. The lands of the monks, which in the ‘Domesday Monachorum’ are listed clearly as either de cibo or de vestitu monachorum, agree in the main, saving the one important exception of Mersham, with the terra monachorum of Domesday, but other lands which are assigned by the Christ Church document to the monks appear in Domesday as held by the archbishop or his knights. We know that Lanfranc made extensive changes in the internal organization of the Canterbury estates, keeping in dominio in the main those that are described in Domesday as the archbishop’s own manors, assigning some to the food and vestments of the monks, and in others enfeoffing knights, who, in accordance with the later story, for a consideration of £200, were to protect the lands of the monks as well as their own.47  It is curious that the ‘Domesday Monachorum’ apparently disregards this threefold division, placing some of the knights’ lands amongst those of the archbishop and some amongst the lands of the monks. An explanation of the apparent confusion may possibly lie in the fact that in the great Survey the holdings listed under the heading terrae militum usually represent whole manors, the sum total of the archbishop’s holdings in the vills in question. Elsewhere, although enfeoffment of knights has apparently occurred, it has occurred within a vill already held in part by some other knight or by some other tenure. It will be noticed that the distinction between land held at farm by a tenant acting as firmarius, a bailiff of the tenant in chief, and land in which a sitting tenant has been enfeoffed and which he holds ‘in fee,’ is often very hard to discover from the words of the Survey. It is only occasionally that the terms of tenure are distinctly stated.
   The most interesting questions with regard to the tenants in chief are probably raised by the holdings of Odo bishop of Bayeux, Hugh de Montfort,
   44  H. W. C. Davis, Reg. Anglo-Norm. No.141.      45  Ibid. Nos. 6o, 61, 62, 113, 260—263.
   46  See p. 252a and b.   47  Compare Stubbs, Chron. of Rich. I, Epistola Cantuar. (Rolls Ser.), 29.

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