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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