'The historical context', Anglo-Saxon settlement on the siltland of Eastern England

'The Historical Context', Anglo-Saxon Settlement on the Siltland of Eastern England,

Lincolnshire Archaeology and Heritage Reports Series, 7 (2005), 264-88.

1

The Historical Context

David Roffe

The fenland of Eastern England has exercised a remarkable influence over the historical

imagination in the last hundred years or so. In the eighteenth century the area was known

to a wider world, if at all, as a country of ague and opium eaters. Fostered by authors as

diverse as P. D. James (1975), Graham Swift (1992), and Philip Pullman (1995), it is now

invested with a dark romance of one kind or another. In large measure Charles Kingsley

must be held responsible for the change in perception. In the depiction of the 'English'

resistance to the Norman Conquest in the fenland, his novel Hereward the Wake

(Kingsley 1889) was perfectly fitted to the Victorians’ image of themselves as a plucky

little nation pitched against the odds in wild places. They came no wilder than the

medieval fenland; it was as fitting a place as India or Afghanistan to defend Englishness.

The scene came with a seemingly impeccable pedigree. Kingsley based his book

on the twelfth-century Gesta Herewardi (Gesta Herewardi), and there is drawn a picture

of marsh, open water, reeds, and witches. Domesday Book apparently adds substance to

the picture of a godforsaken land. The fen was a sparsely populated area, confined to

scattered islands and a thin strip of 'high' land around the Wash, which was still

undeveloped in the eleventh century (Darby 1940, 53-4; Darby 1983, 18; Hallam 1965,

200-5).1 Resources were thin on the ground and values were relatively low.

It is a scene that is immediately recognizable in one of the earliest sources for the

fenland. Writing in the eighth century in his Life of Guthlac, Felix describes the area

thus:-

There is in the midland district of Britain a most dismal fen of immense size,

which begins at the bank of the river Granta not far from the camp which is called

Cambridge, and stretches from the south as far north as the sea. It is a very long

tract, now consisting of marshes, now of bogs, some times of back waters

overhung by fog, sometimes studded with wooded islands and traversed by the

windings of tortuous streams. So when this same man of blessed memory,

Guthlac, has learned about the wild places of this vast desert, he made his way

thither with divine assistance by the most direct route (Felix, 87).

Felix goes on to describe Crowland as:

an island in the middle of the marsh which on account of the wildness of this

remote desert had hitherto remained untilled and known to a very few. No settler

had been able to dwell alone in this place before Guthlac the servant of Christ, on

account of the phantoms of demons that inhabited it (Felix, 89)..

The settlement of the fenland was largely a post-Conquest development that saw a growth

of population and prosperity based upon land reclamation from the sea and the marsh

(Hallam 1954; Hallam 1958).

The progress of man against nature is a theme that complements Kingsley's

romanticism. The picture that it has generated is one that we must treat with caution. The

cardinal points of the argument are all suspect or of uncertain significance. Richard, the

probable author of the Gesta Herewardi (Liber Eliensis, xxxvi, 173n), was no

topographer, but he knew how to tell a story, and he wrote in a chanson tradition that

pandered to its audience. Heroes had to be heroic and they played out their destiny



2

against a heroic scene. Coming from the great fenland abbey of Ely, Richard must have

been more aware than most that the fenland was one of the richest and most exploited

areas of England. Hugh Candidus, his near contemporary from Peterborough eloquently

describes the riches of the area:

[The fen] is very valuable to men because there are obtained in abundance all

things needful for them that dwell nearby, logs and stubble for kindling, hay for

the feeding of their beasts, thatch for the roofing of their houses, and many other

things of use and profit, and moreover it is very full of fish and fowl. There are

divers rivers and many other waters there, and moreover great fishponds. In all

these things the district is very rich. So this Peterborough is built in a fair spot

(Hugh Candidus, 5; trans Mellows 1966, 2).

And Domesday misleads us in this respect only when it is viewed as an actuarian survey.

It was not. Its focus was warland, that is land assessed to the geld, and the profit that the

lord made out of it. Unassessed land is omitted, and villeins and sokemen were all too

often only noticed where they paid the geld (Roffe 2000a, 149-65). Twelfth-century

surveys indicate that a vast number of inhabitants in the Lincolnshire fenland and fen

edge, and their wealth, simply never made it into Domesday Book.

Felix lived in another world. However, although he wrote in a different tradition

from Richard, he too knew how to sing. Of the authenticity of the Life of Guthlac there

can be no doubt, but that is not to say that its purpose was to provide an historical, much

less a topographical, account. Felix was a hagiographer and he brought a programme to

his story. He pointedly contrasts the worldliness of the community at Repton (Derbys),

where Guthlac first assumed the religious life, with the austerity of his hero, and the

wildness of the fenland can be seen as a necessary backdrop to the saint's virtue. This, of

course, is not to say that Crowland was not a desert at the time. Ascetics regularly sought

out uncomfortable places to live. But, by the same token, this topos of the holy man

clearly influenced the description of place. Crowland was not an island but a peninsular

jutting out from the upland. The Life itself provides clues that it was, in fact, not as

deserted as Felix implied. The land may have been untilled, but at least some people had

attempted to live there, if not alone, and food, barley bread, seems to have been available

from somewhere (Felix, 88, 94). Moreover, something of a tenurial context is indicated.

As I have argued elsewhere (Roffe 1994, 83), Tatwine, 'a certain man among those

standing by', who took Guthlac to Crowland must surely have been identified by Felix's

readers with the priest of Breedon on the Hill of the same name and later archbishop of

Canterbury (Felix, 88; Bede, v 23). He presumably represents the community of

Medehamstede (that is, the later Peterborough) to which Breedon belonged, and is

introduced to show that it consented to the foundation of a daughter house in territory that

it claimed as its own.

The historian and administrator tell a different story from the jongleur and

hagiographer. Writing in the early eighth century Bede provides a clear picture of a

peopled landscape. He knew that Ely was an East Anglian regio, a subkingdom no less,

and that the South Gyrwe, 'the people of the marsh', had a ruling family (Bede, iv 19).

However that belief can be reconciled with twelfth-century Ely tradition of a Middle

Anglian context, Bede clearly perceived of a landscape that was differentiated. The

document known as the Tribal Hidage shows to what extent (Brownbill 1925). It is a

Middle Saxon tribute list recording the names and assessments of a series of peoples. The



3

Middle Anglian section is the most detailed of all. Among others it records the Spaldas,

North Gyrwe, South Gyrwe, Wigesta, West Wixna, East Wixna, Sweordora,

Herefinna/Hurstingas, Wideringas, and Bilmingas who all held in or close to the fenland.

The date and provenance of the document are still a matter of debate, but it must indicate

that in the seventh or eighth century the area was organized into communities with

recognizable identities. As Stenton has observed, 'The local names of the Fens are very

difficult, but they do at least show that this whole country had been explored, and was

being exploited, and had been named far back in the Anglo-Saxon period' (cited in Darby

1940, 8).

This is a conclusion that has not always been taken on board. The early fenland

has still all-too-often been characterized as 'a frontier region between East Anglia and

Mercia…the resort of brigands and bandits' (Darby 1940, 9). Notions of colonization and

reclamation have closely followed as self-evident. But this is to embody a misconception.

There remains much to discover about the chronology of construction of sea and fen

defences in the Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt

that 'newlands' were taken in and that settlement often followed (Hallam 1965). What has

become clear from the work of the Fenland Research Project, however, is that this was

not the conquest of uncharted waste. Rather it must be represented as a change in the

mode of settlement and exploitation. The environment was a condition rather than a

determinant of land use throughout the period.

Within a landscape of shifting sands, both physical and metaphorical, such

changes can only be understood in the context of social networks. Explanation ultimately

resides in people rather than environment. Thus it is that most historians of the medieval

fenland have gravitated to the Tribal Hidage to reconstruct its communities (Goodall

1925; Schram, 1950; Hart 1971; Hart 1977; Potts 1974; Davies and Vierck 1978;

Courtney 1981). However, little that is concrete has come out of the numerous studies,

largely because the Tribal Hidage stands on its own. There are a handful of references to

the Gyrwe in other, although later, sources. But most names are otherwise unattested

unless in place-names, and there the referents are not always easy to elucidate. Spalding

is clearly associated with the Spaldas, but equally so is Spaldwick in Huntingdonshire

and Spalding Moor in Yorkshire (Cameron 1998, 114; Ekwall 1959, 432-3). Each has

had its advocates as the centre of the tribe. Again, the Bilmingas are clearly

commemorated in Billingborough, Billinghay, and Horbling on the Lincolnshire fen edge

in Kesteven, and in a dozen other Billing- names through the country (Cameron 1998,

14). Do they all refer to the same tribe, and, if so, which one is primary? The record of

assessments for each tribe might seem to offer some clue as to area and possibly location,

but again the truth is that the significance of the hide as a unit of assessment in the

Middle Saxon period is unknown, and it seems extremely unlikely that there was any

continuity into the tenth century when the Domesday hidage and carucage are first

evidenced.2 The Herefinna/Hurstingas may have given their name to Hurstingstone

Hundred in Huntingdonshire, but it cannot be assumed that their territory was

coterminous with its boundaries.

On its own the Tribal Hidage is just a series of names; it can tell us very little

about the organization of the fenland. Pushing the names around on a map is of little help.

We should take care not to be mesmerized by it. After all, what's in a name? Elsewhere,

the Tribal Hidage has not provided us with what to all appearances is a comprehensive



4

overview of the political topography of an area. In consequence, attempts have been

made to reconstruct early societies from other sources which are more germane to

communities. Hatfield, for example, has been reconstructed through the analysis of later

administrative records (Parker 1992). This is a sound historical approach, and it is one

from which historians of the fenland have been diverted only by the detail of the Middle

Anglian section of the Tribal Hidage. What the document does tell us it that there were

communities there, and that prompts us to identity them in sources that are better able to

afford details. The aim of this study is to examine the communities that can be identified

in the extant documentation of this kind and describe their interrelation and antiquity.

Intercommoning and communities

The fenland silts are largely situated in the three Lincolnshire wapentakes of Skirbeck,

Kirton, and Elloe, the Cambridgeshire hundred or half hundred of Wisbech, and the

Norfolk hundred and a half of Freebridge (Map 1).3 Communal action within the area is

most clearly exemplified by intercommoning practices (that is, the shared use of pasture

by groups of settlements) and the associated provisions for the upkeep of banks and

drains. Much of the evidence was collected by Neilson (1920) for the introduction to her

edition of the Terrier of Fleet. She graphically describes the management of the fen and

the disputes to which it gave rise in the Middle Ages. But surprisingly, neither she nor

later historians of the fenland have examined the information systematically for the light

it casts on the earlier history of the area and its communities. It is a more complex story

than at first appears.

Much of the evidence comes from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when

rights to pasture were largely several, that is appropriated to individual interest whether it

be lords or local communities. Population growth probably played a part in the process of

appropriation, but there is no doubt that the principal pressure had come from changes in

lordship. The peat fen was already succumbing in the tenth century. In the 950s the

bounds of estates in Yaxley, Farcet, and Conington in Huntingdonshire all encompassed

fenland (Sawyer, nos 595, 649). According to the Ramsey Cartulary (CMR, i, 164), the

fen around Sawtry, again in Huntingdonshire, was divided by Thurkil of Harringworth

by order of the king in the reign of Cnut (1016-35). There is no comparable early

evidence for the silts. Marsh attached to manors is recorded widely in the Lincolnshire

Domesday, but most was apparently peat fen.4 According to the Historia Croylandensis

(Riley 1854, 156-7), Richard de Rullos was actively parcelling up Deeping Fen in the

1070s.5 The division of the silts was probably a predominantly twelfth and thirteenth-

century phenomenon. South Holland Fen in Elloe Wapentake seems to have been divided

by the late twelfth or early thirteenth century (Stenton 1964, 154-211), and probably

siltland close to Marshland was appropriated at much the same time.

The process was a function of the territorialization of seigneurial rights. The

pressures were ultimately irresistible. Nevertheless, earlier arrangements were never

entirely superseded. Where lords were jealous of rights, they were less keen to take on

responsibilities. In the fenland maintenance of the infrastructure of banks and drains

devolved upon the communities of the vill, leet, or twelve-carucate hundred (a settlement

or groups of settlements that formed a community for the purposes of local government

and the management of communal resources in Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and

Lincolnshire respectively). Here was a practice that clearly antedates manorialization and



5

preserved a vestige of a more ancient communal regulation of resources.

It is a characteristic of early communities that is well-recognized elsewhere. In

Kent, for example, the community of the lathe jointly managed its own section of the

Weald. Intercommoning networks of this kind have frequently been used to identify such

folks (Jolliffe 1933, 54-6; Everitt 1986). A map of intercommoning in the fenland, then,

might be expected to be illuminating (Map 1). Unfortunately, however, it cannot be read

as a simple representation of communities, for intercommoning was as equally

characteristic of inter-communal resource management as intra-communal. The practice

occurs in frontier zones. There was in Worcestershire, for example, common land

between the territories of the Tomsaetan and Pencersaetan (Hooke 1985, 85-6), and in

Lindsey there was intercommoning in Lissingleys at the point where the three ridings met

(RCHME 1991, 9-10; Roffe 2000c).

How, then, to distinguish communal from marginal intercommoning? Disputes

within groups of vills may reflect uncertainty over rights within a marginal zone.

Wildmore Fen in Lindsey was intercommoned by the sokes of Horncastle, Scrivelsby,

and Bolingbroke. In the mid twelfth century dispute arose between the three parties as to

the amount of pasture that pertained to each soke. An agreement was reached but friction

remained throughout the medieval period (Neilson 1920, xviii-xx). Likewise, the

payment of dues for rights of common suggest the interface between two communities.

The soke of Bolingbroke again had rights of pasture without restriction in East and West

Fens, whereas neighbouring vills in Skirbeck and Candleshoe Wapentakes had to pay a

fine for the privilege (Neilson 1920, viii-xii). Conversely, the inclusion of a vill which did

not abut on the common may suggest a single community. There are many a township in

the fenland that had rights beyond its immediate territory which appear on the modern

map as detached portions. These characteristics may all help in determining the nature of

an area of intercommoning, but none of them is decisive. Patterns of intercommoning can

only be understood in relation to underlying tenurial structures.

Tenurial structures Hitherto the tenurial structures of the siltlands have not been examined as a whole

because they have appeared to have been of completely different characters north and

south of the River Welland. From at least the eleventh century the five counties into

which the fenland extends were perceived as a part of an area with a distinctive identity

characterized by Danish law (Hart 1992, 3-24). Historians, however, have discerned a

pronounced political, economic, and social boundary on the line of the Welland and have

distinguished the Northern Danelaw from the Southern Danelaw. The institutions of the

North were first examined by Stenton in Types of Manorial Structure in the Northern

Danelaw (1910). Drawing on Domesday Book, predominantly the Lincolnshire folios,

and twelfth-century charters he described a highly structured society. Free sokemen

holding sokeland were to be found throughout the region. Indeed, it was far more

extensive than demesne and inland. But there was hardly a single parcel of land that

could not be assigned to a manor of one kind or another: the north was a landscape of

territorial sokes. Lordship might not approximate to thirteenth-century norms, but there

could be no doubt that it was a significant organizing force in the eleventh century.

Stenton saw the origins of sokes as largely a function of the settlement of a free

Danish army in the ninth century. The Dane also features in Douglas's account of the



6

Southern Danelaw, but here was an altogether different type of society. Drawing

primarily on the LDB account of Norfolk and Suffolk, he paints a picture of an

essentially unmanorialized landscape in The Social History of Medieval East Anglia

(1927). The manor was not unknown in the region. There were estates consisting of a

small demesne and a dependent peasantry with a penumbra of sokemen that parallel the

predominant form in the Northern Danelaw. The extensive soke was also known. But

what characterized East Anglia above all was a mass of free men who were at liberty to

choose what lord they wished and were therefore behoven to none. In place of the strong

bonds of lordship as exemplified by the manor was the contractual relationship

represented by commendation. This was an early feature of East Anglian society, and the

Danes found in it fertile ground for their own social norms. The distinctive features of the

region are testimony to the hegemony that they exercised (Douglas 1927, 213-16).

Following Maitland’s advice, the historian is now more careful with his or her

Dane. That there was a sizeable Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw in the ninth

century cannot be doubted. The footprints of a Danish army are, however, no longer seen

in the distinctive features of the region (Stafford 1985; Hadley 2000). Soke was a

universal characteristic of Old English societies and its articulation in the south and west

was often directly comparable to the forms of the Danelaw. The manor of Leominster in

Herefordshire, for example, consisted of a demesne, admittedly large, to which was

attached two dozen or so 'members'. Villeins there were aplenty, but radknights, directly

comparable to sokemen, were also numerous (GDB 180-180v). In form the estate is little

different from the soke of the Danelaw. The tenurial forms of eastern England are now

seen as a variation on a model found throughout the country and indeed in Western

Europe generally. Historians are now more ready, sometimes too ready, to concede that

Domesday estate forms in the Northern Danelaw may have origins before the Danes

(Hadley 2000). By contrast, the tenurial structures of the Southern Danelaw have not

been extensively reviewed until recently (Roffe 2000b, 9-41). The possibility that some

estate centres were ancient has been canvassed (Williamson 1993, 73-104), but Douglas'

understanding of the nature of East Anglian society has not been generally challenged. Its

forms have therefore appeared to offer few clues to the organization of society at an

earlier period.

That there are real differences between the Northern and Southern Danelaw

cannot be denied, but they should not be exaggerated. Norfolk was conquered by Wessex

in the early tenth century, and its structure of hundreds, although no doubt incorporating

earlier features, seems to date from this period (Williamson 1993, 126-33). Lincolnshire,

by contrast, was probably not fully absorbed into the kingdom of England until the later

tenth century (Roffe 1992, 33-9). The network of wapentakes, the local equivalent of the

hundred, embodies legal concepts, notably warranty by the community rather than the

kin, that indicate that it is no earlier than the 970s and could conceivably be even later

(Sawyer 1998, 139). Both Norfolk and Lincolnshire, however, were carucated and there

are indications that local government operated in much the same way in both counties.

Although similarities between the leet of the one and the twelve-carucate hundred of the

other have been noticed (Douglas 1927, 55-8, 214), they have been treated as essentially

separate institutions (Welldon Finn 1967, 105-21). In LDB there is a statement of how

much each vill paid in geld for each pound paid by the hundred and this has been seen as

a peculiar method of assessment, based on the leet, that is not paralleled in the twelve-



7

carucate hundred. In reality, however, the formula must be taken as a statement of geld

payment, and there are indications that the twelve-carucate hundred paid in much the

same way (Roffe 2000b, 17-8). Both institutions were essentially independent of estate

structures and their primary function seems to have been to act as tithings, that is a

system of policing whereby groups of people were mutually responsible for each other’s

behaviour (Roffe 2000b, 36). They were the local equivalent of the vill elsewhere.

The twelve-carucate hundred was never called a leet, but the leet first makes its

appearance in the sources as a hundred, and both were known in the thirteenth century as

the villa integra, ‘the whole vill’ (Douglas 1928; Davis, xv-xxx; Lees 1926, 98-103). The

two institutions were emphatically communal, as opposed to seigneurial, that is, they

were unrelated to manors. With the assumption of view of frankpledge by lords, that is

the oversight of tithings formerly the preserve of the sheriff, both had disappeared in most

areas within a hundred years of the Domesday inquest. Significantly, however, they

continued to flourish in the silt fens. In the wapentake of Kirton the hundreds of Drayton,

Riche, and Riskenton, all attested in GDB, survived into the later Middle Ages (Roffe

1981, 36), while the leet of Marshland in Freebridge continued in operation almost as

long. A very similar social structure would seem to underlie the whole area.

Why, then, the apparent differences in tenure? In large measure it seems to be a

function of the way in which Domesday Book was compiled. A document from

Peterborough Abbey known as the Descriptio Terrarum and almost certainly emanating

from the Domesday process, contains a list of the abbey's lands in Lincolnshire that gives

no hint of a manorial structure (Roffe 1992b). It affords few more details than assessment

to the geld, but nevertheless, it is very similar in form to the Norfolk text in LDB. Were it

not for Domesday we would not be aware of the links between various parcels of land.

There are indications that in Norfolk that such links were there but were generally not

recorded by the compilers.

They had no problems with demesne lands and dues. The connections between

manorial centres and berewicks appear to be more or less consistently noted in the text.

The bishop of Bayeux's manor of Snettisham, for example, had berewicks in Harpley,

Flitcham, West Newton, Castle Rising, and Weston Longville (LDB 142-3). Sokeland is

often less explicitly associated with a caput, but its dependence is usually clear from its

position in the text: it is either entered with the demesne or in close proximity to it. Free

men are usually enrolled in separate entries. Nevertheless, it is clear that they belonged to

tenants-in-chief in 1086 for the text indicates that they were often 'delivered' to them 'to

make up manors'. It is equally clear that they were in some sense dependent in 1066.

Fourteen free men held land in Docking, Stanhoe, and Bircham Tofts 'under Stigand' and

they were valued in Stigand's manor of Snettisham (LDB, 143). Explicit statements of

this kind are rare, but the relationships they imply were evidently the norm. Free men are

regularly said to have rendered customs (consuetudines) to a manor in 1066 which were

distinct from the dues paid in recognition of commendatio (commendation). For example,

five sokemen rendered all customs to the manor of Stow Bardolph (LDB 206-206v).

From Bury sources it would appear that such customs included labour dues and a render

called foddercorn. The most substantial render, however, was hidagium, in origin a food

rent that was rendered to a central manor, which is represented by Domesday values, the

valet and valuit figures (Roffe 2000b, 27). All free men had a value in 1066 and it is



8

therefore clear that they were attached to a manor in the same way as Stigand's free men

to Snettisham.

To which manor will almost always remain uncertain.6 As in the North, however,

it is clear that right to land was not always vested in the named holders of manors. The

manor can be best defined as a nexus of customs. Land in the modern sense was normally

held by the sitting tenant. What was land to the lord in the eleventh century was the right

to the customs from such land. Those who are said to have been free men, or to have held

freely, received those dues from their tenants, but in their turn rendered dues to their lord.

These latter, identified by various devices in Domesday Book (Roffe 2000a, 34),7 were

king's thegns and held the customs in return for personal service to the king. It was

largely from them that title was derived in 1086, and their holdings represent extended

bookland estates (Roffe 2000b, 31-4). Once land that was illicitly seized or delivered by

the king is identified, the extent of those estates can be perceived by the clustering of free

men around the king's thegns.

In the North customs were more regularly known as soke. In East Anglia that term

is usually confined to the more limited right to fines and forfeitures and was a correlative

of jurisdiction (Roffe 2000b, 26). Stigand held extensive soke in Freebridge, but his right

to the dues that it entailed were derived from a grant of the hundred. Nevertheless, in

reality there was very little difference in kind between the manorial structures of the

Northern and Southern Danelaw. If both exhibit a hierarchy of land, there remains the

possibility of discerning earlier tenurial structures and communities.

Many pre-Conquest tenurial relationships were themselves of long standing, but

not all. Customs and soke were still the main interest that lords had in land in 1066 and

they were therefore the principal medium of patronage. Lands were granted and regranted

to suit the needs of the lord and so pre-Conquest patterns of soke recorded in Domesday

Book were not necessarily ancient in 1066. Right to territorial soke in itself is no

indicator of an ancient relationship. What can be perceived as of greater antiquity are the

patterns of tenure that are common to different estates.

Patterns of tenure

Stenton and Douglas reached their conclusions about the origins and nature of the

Danelaw manor largely because they focused their attention almost exclusively on

individual estates. Both recognized the possibility of booking, the grant of an estate by a

royal charter, but considered the device of only limited importance in the creation of the

tenurial landscape. Taken in isolation the extended manors of the area all appear to be a

more or less random collection of elements, and the widespread record of the delivery of

men in Domesday Book reinforced their notion that there was little rhyme or reason in

the organization of land beyond the personal. A wider focus, however, often reveals

underlying structures. The wapentake of Aswardhurn on the Kesteven fen edge provides

an example (Table 1). The principal estate in the area was the manor of Sleaford. In 1086

it enjoyed the soke of tenements in the settlements of Ewerby, Howell, Heckington,

Quarrington, Laythorpe, and Evedon (GDB 344v). Set out thus, the soke looks decidedly

ad hoc. But its form takes on significance when it is perceived that the structure is

substantially reproduced in the king's manor of Kirkby La Thorpe (GDB 337v),

Colsuain's manors of Ewerby Thorpe, Heckington, and Laythorpe (GDB 357, 357v), and



9

Colegrim's extended group of manors and sokelands in Aswardhurn (GDB 370), and

vestigially in two other estates (GDB 341, 355).

Table 1: the soke of Sleaford and related estates.

1 7 26 67

Sleaford 1

Kirkby La Thorpe 1

Burg8 3

5

Ewerby 2 1

Ewerby Thorpe 3a 1

Howell 3b 3 3 2

Heckington 3c 4 2 6

Quarrington 3d 5

Laythorpe 6 4

Evedon 2 7 5 4 Numbers in bold at the head of columns refer to

chapters in the Lincs section of GDB. The

remaining numbers refer to the order of entries

within each chapter

These are patterns that are ubiquitous in the North. They are also not unknown in

East Anglia. For example, the structure of the manors of Shotesham (LDB 123v-124),

Framingham (LDB 176), and Alpington (LDB 203), in the Norfolk hundred of Henstead,

along with free men’s lands held by Roger Bigod in the same (LDB 185v), is virtually

identical (Table 2). There seems no doubt that in these contexts manors had been created

by the ordered division of large estates element by element (Roffe 1992a, 11). Indeed, the

mechanism is occasionally documented. The archbishop of York's Nottinghamshire

manor of Laneham possessed appurtenances in the same vills as the king's soke of

Oswaldbeck in 1086 and, according to a thirteenth-century source, had formerly belonged

to the larger estate (GDB 281-281v, 283; RH, ii, 25). The rights of the crown were

probably finally relinquished by a writ of 1065 whereby Edward the Confessor granted

all the soke to the archbishop (AS Writs, no 119). Again, the abbot of Crowland's

holdings in Elloe Wapentake in Lincolnshire interlock with Earl Algar's holdings, and

according to a charter preserved in the Historia Croylandensis, they had been granted to

the abbey in one transaction by the same earl sometime in the 1050s or early 1060s (Riley

1856, 196). Although the document is clearly a forgery in the form in which it survives, it

evidently records an authentic tradition, for the transaction is noted in the twelfth-century

patronage list known as the Guthlac Roll (BL Harleian MS Y 6).

Table 2: interlocking manors in Henstead Hundred

1 9 9 12

Shotesham 1,8 6

Stoke Holy Cross 2 7 1

Bramerton 1f 7



10

Surlingham 3 8 1e 8

Rockland St Mary 4 9 1d 6

Shotesham (other) 5

Yelverton 6 4 1c 4

Poringland 7 5 2

Framingham 1 1b 3

Kirby Bedon 2 9

Holverston 3 5

Fritton 1a

Alpington 10

Numbers in bold at the head of columns refer to chapters in the

Norfolk section of LDB. The remaining numbers refer to the order of

entries within each chapter.

By 1066 the interlocking elements were generally held with full rights: each

manor or group of manors rendered dues to a single king's thegn. In origin, however, it

seems likely that, as in Oswaldbeck, rights were limited to certain renders and they were

collected in a central court. Thus it is that ecclesiastical dues are rarely appurtenant to the

subsidiary elements in the later Middle Ages. Churches, as evidenced by Domesday Book

or subsequent records of rights of presentation, were usually vested in the fee of the main

soke lord, suggesting that tithes had been reserved (Roffe 1996). This characteristic is in

marked contrast to estates that were booked. There the lord seems to have been granted

unequivocal right, and typically he had his own church within a smaller, discrete

territory.

It cannot be claimed that these two processes account for all the manors that are

described in Domesday Book. There are numerous manorial relationships that are

unlikely to have had their origin in either. Land in Coteland on the Kesteven fen edge, for

example, was attached not only to the nearby manor of Ruskington but also to the more

remote Cranwell (GDB 346v, 369v). Both parcels are described, all-but-uniquely, as

carucates of meadow, and it would therefore seem likely that the lord of Cranwell, an

upland settlement, had acquired it as a valuable economic resource lacking within his

own manor. The most likely means was purchase. Bishop Æthelwold bought estates

widely in the Danelaw and beyond to endow the fenland monasteries. He was, for

example, instrumental in providing regular supplies of fish for Crowland, Thorney,

Ramsey, and Ely from Whittlesey Mere, Upwell, and Outwell (Hart 1966, 177, 182-3).

There were numerous upland manors in Norfolk with salterns that were probably also

acquired in this way (Table 3).9 Again, in the wooded areas of Kesteven the fragmented

estate structure can perhaps best be interpreted as a function of more or less free

enterprise assarting (Owen 1976, 68; Platt 1985, 88, 118). Nevertheless, the regular

occurrence of interlocking patterns of tenure suggests that the ordered division of sokes

was a significant mechanism of estate formation. The phenomenon can be used to

reconstruct groupings of estates that precede those of Domesday Book.

Table 3: upland manors with salt workings in north Norfolk

Manor Folio Salt workings

Acre, Castle or West 236 5

Acre, Castle 160v ½



11

Anmer 151,151v 1½

Ashwicken/Bawsey 149v ½

Bawsey 153v 1½

Congham 161 1

Gayton 160v 1½

Harpley 161v ½

Hillington 267v 1

Middleton 209 2

Middleton 222 8

Middleton 238 8

Necton 235 1

Rising, Castle 142v 13

Roydon 142v 3½

Runcton, North 207 4 1/3

Winch, East 126 1½

How ancient such groupings were will often remain conjectural. The creation of

Crowland's fee just before the Conquest indicates that it was not necessarily in the distant

past. Other divisions can be dated to the tenth century. A memorandum of c.972 indicates

that the soke of Helperby in the East Riding of Yorkshire had been created out of the soke

of Ripon at some point prior to that date (EHD, i, no 114). In the Peak of Derbyshire the

manors of Matlock, Darley, Hope, Ashford, and Longdendale had been created sometime

between 926 when the whole area was granted to Uhtred and 1066 (Sawyer, no 397;

Roffe 1991, 52-3). Here there are elements that can probably be related to the Tribal

Tribage assessment of the Peacsetan (Roffe 1986, 27), but not all aggregates will be

necessarily early. Various pre-Domesday structures can be identified in the wapentake of

Gartree in Leicestershire, but it has been suggested that the underlying soke does not pre-

date the shiring of the Midlands in the early tenth century or later (Roffe 1996). Even

within primary units, soke was administered to suit the needs of the time. Nevertheless, as

structures anterior to Domesday estates, interlocking patterns can aid the interpretation of

vestiges of communal organization.

Territories and boundaries

In the following four sections the siltlands are subject to an examination of this kind. In

reconstructing the extent of communities, a number of criteria have been employed. The

analysis is largely based upon the information contained in GDB and LDB. Where

possible, TRE (‘in the time of King Edward’, ie before 1066) information is used to

reconstruct estates, thereby excluding changes to manorial structures that followed the

Conquest. In the Lincolnshire folios of GDB the earlier tenurial context of disputed lands

is usually explicitly stated. In those of Norfolk in LDB, by contrast, the fact of invasion

only is as a rule noted. In such cases, barring the notice of a pre-Conquest lord, it is

normally assumed that the land cannot be assigned to a context. However, where there

was a succession of invasions in the same area by the same individual it can sometimes

be suspected that the tenements had a discrete identity where they interlock with more

securely identified complexes.



12

Capital manors, that is those which were held by king's thegns, alone are

indicated. Barring explicit livery of seisin, in 1086 title was derived almost exclusively

from them (Roffe 1992a, 35-46; Roffe 2000b, 31-4), and it can therefore be assumed that

other manors were subordinate to them; what evidence there exists for dependence is

outlined. Generally speaking, care has to be taken with manors held by the same king's

thegn. In some instances it may be suspected that they formed wider extended groups of

estates that were, or had formerly been, part of a single community. But this is not

invariable. By 1066 there were a large number of thegns whose interests were regional

rather than local. Eleventh-century society was characterized by an increasing degree of

militarization with a concomitant concentration of resources in the hands of a relatively

small group of individuals (Fleming 2001). There were several thegns in Cambridgeshire,

Lincolnshire, and Norfolk who had fingers in many pies, and the distribution of their

estates attests political rather than communal relationships. These are also considerations

that applied in some lands at an earlier period. Ealdormen and earls held many estates ex

officio, and acquired or granted many others in the course of their duties. In the one

complexes of land may be ancient, but it is not always possible to perceive how they were

organized: the fact that an earl held adjacent estates does not mean they were constituted

as a unity. In the other they may be purely fortuitous. Soke dues provide the only firm

basis for analysis.

The determination of extent presents its own problems. Domesday Book is often a

poor guide to settlement. All sorts of different tenements and parts of tenements were

aggregated in the formation of Domesday Book entries: settlement, vill, and estate were

all variously employed either in the same area or from area to area as the organizing

principle (Roffe 1991). The place-name Drayton, now a hamlet in Swineshead parish,

illustrates the range of possibilities. In successive entries Drayton Hundred, the vill name,

is contrasted with Drayton the estate and 'Drayton itself' the settlement (GDB 348). The

physical extent of a fee can only be suggested from its later history. This is usually a

reliable indicator of eleventh-century settlement patterns. Guy de Craon's Domesday

manor is identified as Wyberton, but subsequent documentation indicates that it is

situated in Tytton, a vill in the hundred of Wyberton (GDB 367v). It also extended into

Boston West and it seems clear that manor encompassed the area in 1086. But here it

must remain less certain that it was developed at that time (Owen 1984, 42). From this type of analysis, it is clear that settlement was more diffuse than the

Domesday place-name map would suggest. As a rule each manor had its own nucleus and

its lord may well have had more or less exclusive right to the land that surrounded it. To

what extent groups of free men or sokemen were dispersed it more difficult to determine.

There is abundant evidence in later medieval sources of scattered tofts (Platt 1985, 88).

Some undoubtedly attest colonization in the wake of sea and fen defence construction.

Others, however, may represent early settlement nuclei. The earthwork known as

Wybert's Castle in Wyberton was the manor house of the Wells family in the fourteenth

century, and it was held by socage of a type that may well date from the eleventh century

or earlier (Earthworks Survey). Many sites of this type probably remain to be identified,

but they are only likely to come to light from the remains that they have left.

In the fenland the record of the extent of appurtenances is richer. With the

quickening of the pace of division of pasture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,

bounds are recorded with increasing frequency. Those between different communities



13

and interests are often said to be ancient, but the high incidence of dispute and ignorance

of bounds must suggest that much was vague or undefined at an earlier period. Indeed,

the handful of pre-Conquest boundary clauses that are known are largely confined to

delimiting cardinal points. Thus, probably the earliest defines a large territory to the east

of Peterborough in the following terms:

From Medehamstede to Northborough and so to a place called Follies, and so all

the fen straight to Asendyke, and from Asendyke to the place called Feðermude,

and so along the main road for ten miles to Cuggedic, and so to Raggewilh, and

from Raggewilh five miles to the main stream that goes to Elm and Wisbech, and

so three miles to about to Throckenholt, and from Throckenholt straight through

all the fen to Dereword, a distance of twenty miles and so to Great Cross, and so

from Great Cross through a clear stream that is called Bradney, and from thence

to Paccelad, and so through all the meres and fens towards the town of huntingdon

and those meres and lakes Scaelfremere and Whittlesey Mere and with all the

others that lie thereabout, with the land and houses that are on the east side of

Scaelfremere, and from thence all the fens to Medehamstede (Garmonsway 1953,

30-1).

This clause comes from a twelfth-century Peterborough forgery claiming to document the

endowment of Medehamstede by King Wulfhere of Mercia in the seventh century, and

Potts (1974) has argued that it is substantially authentic on the grounds that it does not

describe a patrimony either held or claimed by Peterborough after its tenth-century

refoundation. The description of the fen, largely peat, is drawn with a broad brush.

A similar pattern emerges from Crowland sources. The Historia Croylandensis

contains an impressive sequence of forged charters which contain detailed boundaries of

the fens around Crowland. In their present form all of these are probably twelfth century

in date, but the earliest stratum of pre-Conquest material in them preserves the simplest

boundaries (Roffe 1994, 82). Frontier zones only become truly so when communities

come into contact with each other. It was probably only with the pressures to divide that

serious thought was given to boundaries. By the late tenth century Yaxley and Farcet had

both defined their own areas of peat fen in relation to each other and neighbouring

communities (Sawyer, no 595). The bounds are described in some detail, although they

have still defied solution (Hart 1966, 164-5). Although some boundaries will often

embody the approximate area of an earlier community they will most immediately be a

function of the circumstances that initiated their definition.

Freebridge Hundred and a Half According to Blomefield (1808, vii, 327) the fenland in the west of Freebridge was

constituted as the half hundred and Freebridge citra Lynn the whole. No early

documentation of this division has been found, but it is probably ancient. LDB refers to

Freebridge hundred and a half a number of times, and the order of vills that can be

identified in the text falls into two distinct sequences (Table 4).10

The first starts with

Lynn and proceeds clockwise from east to west through Marshland (Walsoken, and

Walpole cannot be placed since they occur only once). The second begins with Middleton

and, by contrast, proceeds anticlockwise north and east. Villar sequences are derived

from geographically arranged sources that precede the Domesday text, and so it would

seem that the fenland settlements were distinguished from the rest of Freebridge in LDB's



14

exemplar (Dodwell 1969; Roffe 2000b, 19-21). The boundary between the two groups

runs south from Lynn and would appear to conform to Blomefield's description of

Freebridge Half Hundred and Freebridge Hundred.

Table 4: order of entries in the LDB account of Freebridge.

1 2 4 5 7 8 9 10 13 14 15 16 18 19 20 21 22 23 29 31 34 35 49 51 66 66

Freebridge Half Hundred

Lynn 4 19 32 17 55

Winch, West 9 18

Wiggenhall 24 19

Walton, West 21 4 4

Terrington 12 31

Walsoken 3

Walpole 9

Islington 44 13 4 6 1 10 56

Clenchwarton 2

Freebridge Hundred Middleton 45 5 4 11

Runcton, North 14 5

Bilney, West 12

Pentney 2

Walton, East 45 2 15 21

Acre, Castle 22 5 16

Gayton Thorpe 1 3 17 22

Winch, East 131 3 20 20

Gayton 23 7 13 23

Ashwicken 45 10

Glosthorpe 1

Bawsey 45 2

Well 1

Leziate 58

Gaywood 1

Mintlyn 50

Wootton 132

Grimston 2 25 116 1

Congham 26 2

Hillington 28 1 3

Massingham 1 1 29 5 8 11 2

Babingley 3 1

Dersingham 4 2

Sandringham 1

Harpley 3 30

Anmer 2 31

Snettisham 4

Flitcham 4 32 4, 6

Appleton 7 3

Newton, West 4

Rising, Castle 4



15

Roydon 4

Numbers in bold at the head of columns refer to chapters in the Norfolk section of LDB. The

remaining numbers refer to the order of entries within each chapter; those in bold indicate holdings of

king’s thegns, those in italics, lands acquired by invasion, exchange, purchase etc after 1066.

The rights of Stigand and of his manor of Snettisham extended throughout the

whole hundred and half and might appear to the unwary to indicate an underlying tenurial

unity to the whole complex. In reality Stigand’s soke in Mintlyn, Islington, Middleton,

Lynn, West Winch, Wiggenhall, East Winch, West Walton, Gayton Thorpe, Gayton, and

Lynn (LDB 197v, 207, 222, 238, 251v, 274v, 276, 277, 278v) was almost certainly

related to the jurisdiction of the hundred and thus independent of tenure. In the south

manor and hundred were often coterminous (Cam 1932). But, with the late imposition of

the hundredal system in East Anglia, this equation did not apply (Williamson 1993, 126-

33), and the hundred was essentially independent of tenure. Snettisham’s tenurial (as

opposed to jurisdictional) relationships were confined to the area immediately

surrounding it. The manor consisted of a group of berewicks and sokeland in the vicinity

of the estate centre in Harpley, Flitcham, Shembourne, Appleton, West Newton, Castle

Rising, and Roydon,11

and freely held land in the neighbouring hundred of Docking in

Docking, Bircham Tofts, and Stanhoe (LDB 142-143).

Interspersed with these elements were two further blocks of estates which may

have originally belonged to Snettisham. Like Snettisham, part of Grimston was also held

by Stigand (LDB 142), but in two other fees it is grouped with Congham and Hillingdon

(LDB 267v-268, 161). Wulfrun, apparently holding by book, held in the three places as

did free men and a free woman who were succeeded by William de Warenne (albeit by

exchange). Eudo son of Spirewic's manor of Hillingdon extended into Congham in the

later Middle Ages (Blomefield 1808, viii, 386). The pattern is suggestive of a threefold

division of a single unit. Babingley, Dersingham, and Sandringham were more clearly

one estate sometime before 1066. Free men again held in 1066 to be succeeded by Eudo

son of Spirewic, Peter of Valognes, and Robert son of Corbucion (LDB 245v, 256, 258v).

From whom they derived title cannot be determined with any degree of confidence, but it

is clear from the later history of the fees that they all three interlocked in such a way as to

indicate a threefold division of a single estate. Both of the fees in Babingley subsequently

extended into Sandringham and Wolferton (Blomefield 1808, ix, 69, 195), and the manor

of Sandringham itself had a third share of Wolferton (Blomefield 1808, 195).

Dersingham and Sandringham, 'Sand Dersingham', of course, have a common name

(Ekwall 1959, 404). Stigand’s soke over Babingley and Dersingham may be merely

hundredal jurisdiction, but William de Warenne's lands extended into Harpley, Anmer,

and Flitcham (LDB 256, 278v, 161v), and it is therefore possible that the two blocks of

lands had been constituted with Snettisham as a single entity at sometime before 1066.

The Woottons, Gaywood, and Mintlyn are topographically a part of the complex, but no

further specifically tenurial relationships are apparent.

The fenland, largely confined to the Half Hundred, has other tenurial affinities.

The area displays two distinct types of tenurial structure. To the east Islington,

Clenchwarton, and South Lynn form a group of estates with Middleton, North Runcton,

and possibly Bilney in Freebridge Hundred. The king's thegn Bondi held in four of the

five settlements (his Islington fee extended into Clenchwarton), as did Thorkell (LDB



16

238-238v, 221v-222). Bury only held in Lynn, Islington, and Middleton (LDB 209), and

Earl Ralf12

in Islington and Middleton (LDB 149-149v), but the repeated association of

these two settlements with each other and the other three indicates that they were all

formerly closely connected.

The complex may have formerly been more extensive. Middleton is situated on

the eastern edge, but the place-name, 'the middle settlement', suggests that it had been

central to a larger whole. To the east, north of the River Nar, was a group of closely

related estates that likewise had links with the fen. Earl Harold's manor of Necton in

South Greenhoe Hundred had a berewick in Acre, and freely held land and sokeland in

East Winch, Gayton Thorpe, Lynn, and East Walton (LDB 236). This structure is

reflected in the manor of Pentney which was held by Hagni, a king's thegn: there was a

berewick in East Walton, and probably free men in Gayton Thorpe and East Winch (LDB

173). The record of a third of a saltern in the Pentney entry suggests that the fee also had

appurtenances on the seaward side of the silt fen, probably at Lynn.13

In 1086 Hermer of

Ferrers held land illicitly in Lynn, Gayton Thorpe, East Winch, and East Walton (LDB

274v)14

which may have belonged to what had formerly been a single estate.15

However,

no tenurial links with the Middleton complex are evident.

To the west Freebridge Half Hundred displays simpler estate structures. West

Walton was divided into three fees (LDB 160-160v, 213, 226), Terrington into two (LDB

206v-207, 251v), but Wiggenhall, Walpole, West Winch, and Walsoken were undivided

(LDB 251, 266, 231v, 215v), and no underlying patterns are discernible. The area is

characterized by a high concentration of king's thegns, with Bondi and Thorketel among

others represented, and it would seem that rights to soke had become or always had been

localized in a way that was distinct from the rest of the hundred and a half. This

characteristic invites comparison with the fenland to the west. Ely had acquired rights to

the Isle of Ely by piecemeal purchase, and the high incidence of bookright in Freebridge

Half Hundred may attest a similar process of estate formation.

Such a process may have destroyed earlier tenurial links between the estates of the

half hundred. All its vills, with the sole exception of West Winch, intercommoned in the

Smeeth and the peat of Marshland throughout the Middle Ages (Neilson 1920, xliii-xlvi),

and it is possible that the community that this practice defined had its origins in an early

territorial organization. It is more likely, however, that the common rights attest a frontier

of interests. The links between Lynn, Islington and Clenchwarton on the one hand, and

the fen edge on the other, look as ancient as the contrasting structures to the west and

there are indications that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they functioned as a

separate community. The vills were outside the 'leta integra' of Marshland, consisting of

West Walton, Walsoken, Terrington, and Walpole (Wiggenhall was also outside the leet

although it is not explicitly grouped with the vills to the east), and from time to time as a

group they came into conflict over rights in the fen with these their neighbours. In the

early thirteenth century, for example, the abbot of Bury and his partners of Tilney and

Islington on the one hand reached an agreement with the bishop of Ely and his partners of

the leet of Marshland on the other (Douglas 1927, 195-98, 250-2).

Marshland was also a common resource for at least one community outside of

Marshland. Stow Bardolph in Clackclose Hundred intercommoned there (Neilson 1920,

xxxix), and its affinities were more definitely with upland estates south of the Nar. It was

bookland held by Thorketel in 1066 who held further estates by book in Marham,



17

Fincham, Barton Bendish, Wormegay, West Briggs, and Thorpelands (LDB 205v-206v),

all likewise in Clackclose Hundred. Although the pre-Conquest lord Thorketel is the only

tenurial link, the propinquity of all the various manors may suggest an earlier estate.

However, situated south of the Podike (the southern boundary of Marshland), Stoke

Bardolph stood outside of Marshland. Emneth and Outwell, linked to Wisbech, also

intercommoned in Marshland. Marshland, then, was evidently a frontier zone.

Wisbech Half Hundred

Only Wisbech itself is noticed in Domesday Book (GDB 192). Like almost all of the Isle

of Ely, the manor was held by the abbot of Ely. There is no indication in the account of

the extent of settlement, but there is no reason to doubt that it was not substantially the

same as in the thirteenth century.16

It then comprised all the vills of the half hundred,

namely Upwell, Tydd St Giles, Newton, Outwell, Elm, and Leverington, with the hamlets

of Dowsdale, Watersey, and Parson Drove. The only other interests in Wisbech in 1086

were fishing rights, probably enjoyed in Outwell and Upwell (Hart 1966, 182), of the

abbeys of Bury St Edmund's, Ramsey, and Crowland, and of William de Warenne (GDB

192, 192v, 193, 196v).

The whole of the half hundred intercommoned in Heyefen to the west where it

seems to have had undisputed right (Neilson 1920, xlvii-xlix). The boundary of the fen

with Thorney was, however, vague, and various attempts were made in the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries to define it (Neilson 1920, xxxv-xxxvii). Despite the uncertainty over

the exact line, here, then, was probably a pronounced frontier of interests of long

standing. It is clearly indicated in the forged Wulfhere charter: the boundary clause shows

that the eastern limit of Medehamstede’s lands, which encompassed Thorney, was

understood to have extended from somewhere in the vicinity of Throckenholt, to the

north-west of Heyefen, southwards.

The limits of Wisbech to the north were also disputed in the Middle Ages (Owen

1982). In 1274 the bishop of Ely claimed that it extended as far as Langreche, an ancient

waterway running roughly east-west between Dowsdale and the Shire Drain. This,

however, was not a contention that was supported by local juries and the Old Eau was

fixed as the line which also doubled as the boundary between Lincolnshire and

Cambridgeshire (Owen 1982, 42-3). The need to define was probably a function of the

division of the waste in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but there seems to have been

little of substance to guide the process. The place-name Tydd links the two areas, but

there are no signs that Tydd St Giles was ever connected with Tydd St Mary. The name

means 'teat' in the transferred topographical sense of a slight hill (Cameron 1998, 130),

and the association is probably little more than that. There is no sign of any

intercommoning at an earlier period, and it would seem that the area had always been a

frontier zone.

Wisbech's affinities seem to have lain to the east and Norfolk. The half hundred

had its own court and, in common with the leet of East Anglia, was often referred to as a

ferding (Miller 1951, 32).17

More pointedly, it was granted to the abbey by Bishop

Ælfwine of Elmham along with Walpole in the early eleventh century (Liber Eliensis,

144). There are no explicit links with the Marshland estates in Domesday Book, but it

might be suspected that some of the fishery rights were appurtenant to them. Thus, it was

alleged that Ramsey was granted both Walsoken and fishermen in Upwell and Outwell by



18

Ealdorman Æthelwine in the late tenth century (Chron Rams, 52-5); the six fisherman

that William de Warenne is said to have held in Wisbech in the Cambridgeshire

Domesday may well be equivalent to the six bordars that he held in Outwell in the

Norfolk folios (GDB 196v; LDB 160). Subsequently there were close ties. In the mid

thirteenth century it was determined that the lands of the bishop of Ely in Outwell and

Upwell were divided from those of the abbot of Ramsey in the same vills by the

Wellstream which was also the boundary between Cambridgeshire and Norfolk

(Monasticon, ii, 590). Nevertheless, the bishop's church of Outwell was situated on the

Norfolk side and its parish encompassed the whole area of Outwell, while conversely

Ramsey Abbey's church of Upwell was also in Norfolk and its parish extended into

Cambridgeshire (Blomefield 1808, vii, 455). Again, the later manor of Elm extended into

Emneth in Norfolk which was in the parish of Elm (VCH Cambs, iv, 183). Both Outwell

and Emneth intercommoned in Marshland with the Marshland vills (Neilson 1920, xliv).

Elloe Wapentake

The tenurial structures of Elloe were simpler than those of Freebridge. Almost in its

entirety the wapentake was constituted as a single estate at some period prior to the

Conquest. In the reign of King Edward the Confessor much of it was still in the hands of

a single lord (Table 5). Earl Algar held manors in Tydd, Lutton, and Fleet with various

attached berewicks and sokelands in Gedney and Holbeach and Whaplode which were in

the hands of the king in 1086 (GDB 338), and the manor of Spalding with appurtenances

in Tydd, Pinchbeck, and Holbeach and Moulton which had passed to Ivo Taillebois by

the time of the Domesday inquest (GDB 351v). The two remaining interests in the

wapentake interlock with this extended group and were clearly derived from it. Crowland

Abbey held a manor in Holbeach and Whaplode with a berewick in Spalding, and

probably sokeland in Pinchbeck, which, as we have seen, was granted by Earl Algar

(GDB 346v). Æthelstan held manors in Holbeach. Whaplode and Spalding with

appurtenances in Tydd, Weston/Moulton, and Pinchbeck in an extended estate that was

evidently created in much the same way (GDB 368).

Table 5: estates in Elloe Wapentake

1 11 12 14 57

Tydd St Mary 28, 30 97 51

Lutton 29

Gedney 31

Holbeach/Whaplode 32, 33 1 83, 84 50

Fleet 34

Spalding 2 96 54

Pinchbeck 98 52

Weston/Moulton 99 53

Numbers in bold at the head of columns refer to chapters in the

Lincs section of GDB. The remaining numbers refer to the order

of entries within each chapter.

Sutton, named in the Lincolnshire clamores but absent from the body of the text

(GDB 377v), also belonged to this complex - it was parcel of the king's manor of Tydd -

and all of the settlements intercommoned as a community in South Holland Fen as far



19

south as the Old Eau until 1229-30 (Hallam 1965, 31). In the twelfth century 'the men of

Holland also claimed the fen to the west as common to the wapentake. On the death of

King Henry II in 1189 they invaded Great Postland Fen, which the abbey of Crowland

claimed as part of its patrimony, and began to divide it up between them. The long and

inconclusive dispute that followed shows that their case was perhaps dubious (Stenton

1964, 154-211), but by the same token it stands to demonstrate that South Holland Fen

was the undisputed right of the Elloe communities.

The point is an important one. At first sight Crowland Abbey's liberties and

pretensions within a common community might seem to have prompted the dispute. In

reality, however, it was not a simple squabble between neighbours. It was more a clash of

communities. There is no notice of Crowland in Domesday Book: the whole of the island

was the geld-free precinct of the abbey, and, like Ramsey and Thorney, it was therefore

not surveyed. There is, however, a considerable body of evidence to show that it was in a

frontier zone (Roffe 1994). Throughout the later Middle Ages the county boundary

between Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire bisected the settlement (VCH Northants, ii,

422) and there are hints that the same was true in the eleventh century: in the Crowland

Domesday, a compilation from Domesday Book and a geographically arranged source

derived from the Domesday inquest, the island of Crowland is described in different

terms in both the Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire sections (Riley 1854, 160-1, 162).

Peterborough Abbey was to claim and by 1206 make good its right to Alderland to the

south (Riley 1854, 311-15). Here seems to have been an echo of earlier rights. The forged

Wulfhere charter designates the Asendyke, that divides Great Postland Fen from South

Holland Fen to the north, as the northern boundary of Medehamstede's lands, and Felix

seems to have understood that Crowland lay within its territory. Over what was probably

a similar boundary, Crowland came into conflict with the lords of Deeping in its fen of

Goggisland (Riley 1854, 311-15, 319-20). The abbey was clearly a frontier foundation.

The Elloe community also had a defined limit to the west. Deeping Fen to the

north and west, straddling the boundary between Holland and Kesteven, was common to

Spalding and Pinchbeck on the one side and Deeping, Baston, Langtoft, and probably

Uffington, Casewick, and Tallington on the other. There were no tenurial links between

these two groups of estates and continual disputes probably again signify a frontier of

interest (Neilson 1920, xxvi-xxxiii). The equivocal status of the area was probably a

reason why the peat fen here between the Car Dyke and Midfendyke was afforested in the

reign of Henry I (Dugdale 1772, 194-5; Hallam 1965, 63-8). Neither are there any

explicit tenurial links to the north with Kirton Wapentake, but here are attested rights that

probably pertain to a single community. Pinchbeck intercommoned with Gosberton and

Surfleet, and in 1250 it was claimed by the men of Pinchbeck that the fen between the

two wapentakes had formerly been common to the patria, that is community (Neilson

1920, appendix, no II). As Hallam has observed (1951, 3), the sea and fen defences of

Pinchbeck are an integral part of those of Kirton and contrast with the piecemeal work of

Elloe.18

.

Kirton and Skirbeck Wapentakes The tenurial structures of Kirton and Skirbeck are inter-linked and so the two wapentakes

must be considered together (Table 6). Unlike Elloe, the area was not completely isolated

from the surrounding upland. There were, however, no structural links like those between



20

Freebridge Half Hundred and the Nar valley. The manors of Dowsby and North Witham

to the west in Kesteven had elements in Bicker (GDB 340, 367), but the relationship

seems to have been economic rather than tributary. Both holdings were largely confined

to salt workings and had presumably been acquired to provide the remote estates with a

vital commodity: in a late twelfth-century charter land in Donington and Bicker that

belonged to Witham was apparently given over to salt production (Danelaw Charters, no

433). Sokeland in Skirbeck belonged to the manor of Tatteshall (GDB 360) and here the

relationship was probably economic too. From twelfth- and thirteenth-century sources the

land can be identified with that part of Boston to the west of the Witham known as

Skirbeck Quarter (Dover 1972, 6-7), and it would seem likely that its acquisition by the

lord of Tatteshall was closely related to the rapid development of the town as a major

entrepôt in the mid eleventh century (Owen 1984). Structural tenurial relationships in the

two wapentakes were confined to the silts.

Table 6: Kirton Wapentake and Skirbeck Wapentake

2 7 8 11 12 29 37 56 57 61 67

Kirton Wapentake

Dowdyke 5

Skirbeck Qr 33

Drayton 6 58-60 56 18

Donington 31 [61], 62

Wyberton 68, 69 27

Frampton 70 28

Kirton 71, 88 29

Riskenton 72

Algarkirk 7 73

Riche 74

Bicker 30 75 22 44 19

Cheal 34

Gosberton 36 76

Stenning 89 8

Quadring 35, 37 90

Burtoft 8

Surfleet 5

Skirbeck Wapentake

Wrangle 63 36

Leake 64

Leverton 65

Fishtoft 66 37

Skirbeck 67

Butterwick 38

Frieston 39

Candleshoe Wapentake

Tric 77

Burgh le Marsh 78

Addlethorpe 79

Numbers in bold at the head of columns refer to chapters in the Lincs section of GDB. The remaining

numbers refer to the order of entries within each chapter.



21

The area was dominated by Earl Ralf the staller's manor of Drayton in the parish

of Swineshead (GDB 348-348v). It held land, often more than half of that available, in

twelve of the seventeen Domesday vills of Kirton and five out of seven of those in

Skirbeck; if the evidence of thirteenth-century inquests represents an earlier reality, then

the manor of Drayton's holdings were even wider (Book of Fees, 194, 1004-7). Three of

the remaining four estates interlock with this complex. Æthelstan, or his tenant Alestan of

Frampton, held land in five vills in Kirton and two in Skirbeck with sake and soke in a

series of manors (GDB 367v-368v). Crowland Abbey held the whole of the vill of

Dowdyke and a share of Drayton and Algarkirk (GDB 346v), and, finally, the bishop of

Lincoln in succession to Asli held Gosberton and its dependent manor of Cheal with

appurtenances in Quadring (GDB 344v).19

All of this looks as if it had been a single complex at some period before 1066: it

was only the manor of Frieston and its sokeland of Butterwick, constituted as a discrete

block of land held by Wulfward Wite, which stands outside of it (GDB 367v).20

It was a

complex that was largely confined to the two wapentakes. The manor of Drayton had

sokeland in Tric, Burgh le Marsh, and Addlethorpe (GDB 348v), but it is less likely that

this had ever been an integral element. The coastal marsh in Candleshoe Wapentake was

minutely divided, presumably through competition for the resources in the salt marsh

there. Indeed, rights of common in East Fen and West Fen suggests that the area was a

frontier zone (Neilson 1920, viii-xii). The vills of Skirbeck intercommoned there with the

vills of the soke of Bolingbroke, but these were no common rights. Where the latter

commoned freely, Wrangle and part of Leake paid a fine to the lord of Bolingbroke for

the use of both fens, and East Boston, Skirbeck, Fishtoft, Frieston, Butterwick, and

Leverton rendered fenfare, a render of 2d per household, to the same for use of West Fen.

Skirbeck was clearly constituted as a community distinct from the settlements to north

and east.

There are no signs that the vills of Kirton ever intercommoned with this group of

vills; the Witham represents a distinct boundary within the Kirton/Skirbeck complex. To

the west Boston West, Skirbeck Quarter, Brothertoft, Wyberton, Frampton, Kirton,

Swineshead (probably omitted from GDB or represented by Drayton), Wigtoft (Burtoft),

Algarkirk, Sutterton (Dowdyke), and Fosdyke intercommoned in Eight Hundred Fen as

of right in the same way that Bolingbroke did in East and West Fens (Neilson 1920, xx-

xxiii). There are no records of the fen edge vills of Kesteven making any claims thereto,21

and significantly not all of the intercommoning vills abutted on the fen. Its western

boundary, the Oldhee, possibly the Midfendic, would seem to have the western limit of a

fen common to a single community. Donington, Bicker, and Quadring likewise seem to

have intercommoned in the fen to the west between Eight Hundred Fen and the

Gosberton, Surfleet, and Pinchbeck group (Neilson 1920, xxii).

The economy of the siltlands

The various communities of the silt fens are outlined in Map 2. As a type they are

evidenced in one form or another throughout pre-Conquest England. All are usually

subsumed in a type of territorial organization known to historians as ’the multiple estate’

(Jones 1976). This was a form of pre-feudal lordship in which a number of vills were

grouped together to provide for the needs of the lord entitled to the tribute from his

dependencies. It is characterized by the localization of function. So, typically each



22

element of the estate has a specialized role. Thus, there is a demesne vill, a church vill,

bondmen’s vills, and so on. Defining elements are churches with large parishes, for the

church served the whole estate, and place-names that betray relationships to a larger

whole.

Although this is an idealized model ultimately derived from thirteenth-century

Welsh law codes of questionable relevance to Anglo-Saxon England, there can be no

doubt that some groupings of vills approximated to this model. But it does not describe

all communities. Those of the fenland do indeed share some of its characteristics, but

there are more divergences than parallels. There are of course demesnes in the eleventh-

century siltlands. In the Norfolk silts they seem to have been created by booking, but

those of Wisbech, Spalding, Fleet, and Drayton could be of a more ancient type.

However, none obviously fits into a wider framework of co-ordinated exploitation. They

are associated with no churches with wide parochial rights. The name Kirton indicates the

church settlement, but probably only in relation to Drayton. On the contrary, names like

Algarkirk, ‘Ælfgar’s church’, and Gosberton, ‘Gosbert’s church’ (Cameron 1998, 2, 51)

suggest no overarching ecclesiastical foundation. There are, moreover, few names that

indicate an identity in relation to a larger whole. Spalding can be associated with the

Spaldas of the Tribal Hidage. Clenchwarton, ‘the settlement of the people of the clenc

(mass, hill)’, and Quadring, ‘the people of Haefer dwelling on the mud’, have also been

canvassed as ‘tribal names’ (Ekwall 1960, 111; Cameron 1998, 99), but there is nothing

to suggest that they were anything other than names of local kins like that of the

eponymous Leofhere of Leverington in Wisbech Half Hundred. Sutton, ‘the southern

settlement’ was presumably named in relation to Gedney or Lutton, and Weston, ‘western

settlement’ (Cameron 1998, 137) in relation to Moulton, but both were probably purely

directional since neither of the referents was a manorial centre. Winch connnotes ‘farm

with meadow’ (Ekwall 1960, 522) which may indicate a specialized function, but only

Butterwick, ‘butter farm’ (Cameron 1998, 24) does so explicitly and here in relation to

the bookland estate of Frieston. Many of the remaining place-names incorporate personal

names. But what above all characterizes the toponymy of the whole area is the large

number that refer to natural features (Table 7).

Table 7: the referents of the place-names of the silts (Cameron 1998; Ekwall 1960)

Referent Place-names

Tribal Clenchwarton, Quadring, Spalding

Kinship/groups Islington, Frieston, Leverington, Terrington

Function Butterwick, ?Kirton, ?Winch

Position Sutton, Weston

Ownership Algarkirk, Donington, Gedney, Frampton,

Gosberton, Moulton, Wiggenhall, Wyberton

Natural features Bicker, Cheal, Dowdyke, Elm, Fleet, Hobeach,

Leake, Leverton, Lutton, Lynn, Pinchbeck, Outwell,

Skirbeck, Surfleet, Tydd, Upwell, Walpole, Walton,

Walsoken, Whaplode, Wrangle

Miscellaneous Burtoft, Drayton, Fishtoft, Newton



23

It was place rather than person, power, or function that dominated the mental

landscape in the naming of the major settlements of the silts. Geography was the

overriding condition of life in the fens. The Fenland Survey has shown that stock rearing

and salt production were the predominant activities of the economy from the settlement

of the area in the Middle Saxon period. At Gosberton both were on an almost industrial

scale, with the slaughter and salting of meat and possibly tanning on site, until rising

water levels necessitated a retreat to higher ground after c.900. Thereafter, there was a

more mixed economy with the cultivation of salt tolerant crops as well as ranching.

This is the economy that is described in action in Domesday Book. Ploughs are

recorded in every entry, but it is difficult to quantify the importance of arable since there

is no obviously common datum; the rate of carucation varied from hundred to hundred

and wapentake to wapentake, while ploughland figures are not found in Norfolk and are

clearly estimates rather than measurements in Lincolnshire. But, the number of ploughs,

both in demesne and of the men, is not markedly different from the surrounding fen edge

and uplands. However, data on demesne stocking in LDB does suggest that pastoral

activities were of more importance in the manorial economy. Only modest numbers of

cattle are recorded, but there are a greater number of pigs and, above all, large flocks of

sheep on almost every demesne (Table 8).22

There is no comparable contemporary

evidence for Wisbech or Holland (the data are not recorded in GDB), but there is no

reason to believe that ranching was not equally important there as it was in the later

Middle Ages.

Table 8: demesne stocking in Freebridge Half Hundred

Manor Cattle Pigs Sheep

Lynn 4 80

Winch, West 10 19 80

Wiggenhall 5/4 20/20 400/160

Walton, West I 24/23 100/114 700/800

Walton, West II 18/16 22/23 1300/1300

Terrington I 6/6 16/7 310/315

Terrington II 7 7 15/200

Walsoken 7

Islington I 4/4 20/3 120/100

Islington II 4 80

Islington III 30/16 100

Middleton I 3 4 24

Middleton II 2/? 16/10 80/70

Middleton III 3/5 10/6 40/35

The figures are probably those of 1086; where TRE

totals are given, they precede those of 1086 thus

22/24.

Salt production is also highlighted. Salt workings are recorded for just about every

demesne in the Norfolk silts and for most in Lincolnshire: the record there is incomplete,



24

for few salterns are noticed on the lands of Guy de Craon or in Elloe and Skirbeck

Wapentakes generally (Table 9).23

Table 9: salt workings in the siltlands

Folio Settlement Tenure Salt workings

Norfolk Freebridge Half Hundred

213 Islington M 2

222 Islington M ½

209 Islington F 1

149 Islington F 4½

207 Islington M ½

274v Lynn F 1

276 Lynn F 1

251v Lynn F 2½

236 Lynn, South S 5

209 Middleton M 2

222 Middleton M 8

238 Middleton M 10/8

206v Terrington M 7

251v Terrington M 5½

160v Walton, West M+F 1½/7+7

213 Walton, West M 22/24

231v Winch, West M 2

Lincolnshire: Elloe Wapentake

338 Fleet M 2

351v Spalding M saltpans

368 Spalding M a plot for

workings

Lincolnshire: Kirton Wapentake

340 Bicker M 1

348v Bicker S 20

367 Bicker M 1

368 Bicker M 1

244v Cheal M 1

345v Donington M 16

348 Donington M 2

348 Donington M 9

346v Drayon M 4

348 Drayton M 1

348 Drayton S 4½

348 Frampton M 15

344v Gosberton M 1

348v Gosberton M 2



25

348v Kirton S 2

348v Quadring M 2

348v Stenning M 6

363 Stenning M 2

Lincolnshire: Skirbeck Wapentake

348 Leake ?S 15

M=manorial lord, F=free man, S=sokemen. The

number of salt workings is probably those of 1086;

where TRE figures are given, they precede those of

1086 thus 22/24.

This economy was a seigneurial one, but it would be a mistake to assume that it

represented all economic activity in the area. The focus of the Domesday inquest was the

economic underpinning of lordship. Free men and sokemen were only relevant in so far

as they contributed to the lord’s income, and thus it is that Domesday Book is a poor

guide to the economy of siltland communities as opposed to siltland lords. The record of

livestock is the most pointed in this respect. The plough teams of the peasants are noted

after a fashion but no interest was taken in their other animals. Only the cattle, pigs, and

sheep of the lord’s demesne are recorded. The record of salt workings is more revealing

of the balance of economic resources. By the far the majority of salterns recorded in

Domesday belonged to lords (although it should be noted that the Lincolnshire evidence

indicates that their interest was apparently confined to rent); the acquisition of salterns by

upland manors indicates that there was competition for the commodity. However, a not

insignificant number, some 30%, were also held by free men and sokemen (Table 9).

These workings were presumably recorded because they rendered dues, and it must be

suspected that free men and sokemen held many others that were not geldable and

therefore escaped notice in Domesday Book. Indeed, the increase in numbers between

1066 and 1086 in West Walton may indicate encroachment on the free men’s workings

rather than an increase in production. A seigneurial monopoly on the means of production

throughout the fenland cannot be deduced from Domesday and, by the same token,

certainly cannot be projected into the past.

Siltland communities and their boundaries The foregoing discussion allows some generalizations to be made. First and foremost,

what is striking about the communities that have been identified is the remarkable degree

to which they can be characterized as specifically siltland. In Norfolk the links between

the Nar valley estates and Lynn, Islington, Clenchwarton, and probably Wiggenhall

indicate a close contact between the fen edge and fen. Otherwise, however, there are no

structural contacts between the silts and the surrounding land: tenurial ties are non-

existent, and such communal interactions as there are attest frontier zones. Marshland and

Wisbech, Elloe, and Kirton and Skirbeck were siltland communities.

What is also remarkable is that by and large they were exclusively so. West Fen in

Freebridge Half Hundred was mostly peat fen, and the Wisbech community certainly had

rights in the Upwell and Outwell peat fens in Norfolk, and part of the area may have been

appurtenant to it. Likewise Gosberton, Quadring, and the South Holland vills may have

intercommoned in the Holland peats. But these were all frontier zones and were



26

otherwise exceptional. The communal and tenurial ties of the peat fens were

predominantly with the surrounding upland or the islands. In part this is, of course, a

function of geography: the peats are situated on the landward edge of the fens. In

Huntingdonshire intercommoning on the fen edge appears to have been the norm before

the eleventh century. Walton, Glatton, Conington, and Sawtrey formed one group, and

Great Raveley, Upwood, and Walton formed another; both seem to have had common

rights in Uggmere (Neilson 1920, xxxviii-ix). Again, the soke of Somersham

intercommoned with Warboys, Caldecote, and Woodhurst (Neilson 1920, xlii). In

Norfolk the soke of Feltwell in Grimshoe Hundred intercommoned with Methwold,

Wilton, and Hockwold in Le Reg, with Dereham in Suthfen, and with Methwold in

Northfen; Suthfen was common to the soke of Northwold and Methwold (Neilson 1920,

xliii). Nevertheless, what evidence there is suggests that the islands were also exploited

from the upland. The settlement of Crowland from Medehamstede has already been

noted. Ramsey, too, was probably originally attached to an upland estate. According to

the Ramsey Chronicle, the isle was granted to the abbey on its foundation by Æthelwine

and his principal estate, 'where he had his hall and kept his court', was at Upwood (Chron

Rams, 52-5).

The peculiar history of the Isle of Ely has obscured other tenurial relationship (if

they ever existed). It remains clear, however, that the interface between the silts and the

peats marks a well-defined boundary of exploitation. This was a reality that the

administrative geography of the area seems to have recognized in the eleventh century.

As has already been seen, Freebridge Half Hundred seems to have been largely confined

to the silts as, more explicitly, were the wapentakes of Kirton and Skirbeck. If the extent

of Wisbech Half Hundred in the thirteenth century represents that of the eleventh, then its

area too was defined by the silts, here almost to its very junction with the wetland. Only

Elloe Wapentake took in a sizeable area of peat, the land around Crowland, but even

there it is doubtful whether it was fully part of the wapentake in 1086.

This suggests that units of local government of the siltlands are more likely to

represent communities predating the introduction of the shrieval system than those of the

uplands. Freebridge Half Hundred defines two and Wisbech Half Hundred one. Whether

they were originally two halves of a single whole is an intriguing but open question. The

three Lincolnshire wapentakes were subdivisions of the larger administrative and political

division of Holland, and this certainly appears to have been a wider community of long

standing. In the Domesday clamores 'the men of Holland' speak for the whole area (GDB

377v). The soke of Drayton links Kirton and Skirbeck, although the Witham seems to

have marked a significant boundary of some kind, and, apart from the common waste

between Surfleet and Pinchbeck, Elloe appears to have stood on its own. However, the

division of each area element by element probably took place at the same time and was

effected by the same agent. In 1066 Athelstan or his tenant Alstan had roughly the same

share of the vills in the Kirton complex as he did in the Elloe (only in Skirbeck did he

have more than half of a vill). The main portions were held by Earl Ralf the staller and

Earl Algar respectively, but it will be noted that they were successive earls of East

Anglia.

Despite this tenurial connection, the silts probably had no communal identity as a

whole. Hart (1974,138-43) has argued that the association of Holland with the earldom of

East Anglia was at least a hundred years old in 1086. The first recension of the Thorney



27

foundation charter, a forgery that probably incorporates some authentic material, asserts

that Bishop Æthelwold bought Tydd St Mary, Lutton, Gedney, and Angarhala 'in

Holland' from Ealdorman Æthelwine of East Anglia in the 970s (Sawyer, no 792). If

substantially reliable, this source would indeed indicate that the Lincolnshire fenland was

part of East Anglia until the 1070s. A number of caveats must, however, be voiced here.

It is doubtful that this charter is entirely uninfluenced by the Domesday account of Elloe,

and that on its own cannot sustain the argument, for the entries for Holland do not state in

what capacity the earls held. Why Algar, who died in 1062, appears at all is far from

clear; he makes no further appearances in the Lincolnshire folios and only three

incidental ones in the Norfolk text: as the lord of a free man and in the history of two fees

held by the bishop of Thetford (LDB 176, 194v, 195). Earl Ralf the staller, by contrast,

held a number of Lincolnshire comital estates in Kesteven and Lindsey which cannot

have been part of the earldom of East Anglia (GDB 337v, 347v, 348, 348v, 377v; Roffe

1993). For whatever reason, he enjoyed part of the fisc of the earl of the Five Boroughs.

It cannot be assumed therefore that Holland was not part of it.

The evidence is equivocal. Nevertheless, it is clear that the two areas experienced

divergent development which stemmed from their distinctive characters. The Norfolk

silts had probably always been closely associated with the upland. There they bordered

on the fen edge and it is therefore perhaps not surprising that the Nar valley estates had

forged links with the silts which had already undergone developments by 1066 (that is,

the earlier complex had been divided). Marshland and Wisbech represent more discrete

siltland entities, but there was a high degree of manorialization, with more king's thegns

than elsewhere on the silts. Domesday Book and later surveys indicate that there were

only modest numbers of free men in Marshland. Wisbech was even more demesnal,

looking like a typical ecclesiastical estate with the associated low levels of freedom. In

1086 there were fifteen sokemen, as opposed to thirteen villeins, but they were not free to

go with their lands. In extents of the constituent vills of Wisbech Half Hundred in 1221

and 1251, free men typically accounted for less than ten percent of the recorded

population (VCH Cambs iv, 180-244).24

Marshland and Wisbech were intensely exploited

by lords. The numerous thegns who held land there probably acquired their estates to

benefit from the extensive pastures and resources like salterns that they afforded.

Marshland was never a name that characterized a defined region: it was merely the name

of a leet that encompassed some of its vills.25

The area was integrated in a wider

economic and tenurial landscape.

Whether part of East Anglia or not in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Holland

was a more discrete entity. It had no pronounced links with the Lincolnshire fen edge and

upland and was separated from the silts to the south and east by a well-defined early

boundary. If authentic, the earliest reference to Holland is in the Thorney foundation

charter, but there it only serves to indicate that Lutton, Gedney, Angarhala, and Tydd

were situated in Holland in contradistinction to the lands noticed before that were

elsewhere in the country. A further reference in the late tenth- or early eleventh-century

Vita Neoti is more informative. In a complex and involuted passage the author describes

the river systems of the fenland, stating that the Ouse flows from Cambridge past Ely to

Outwell, 'which it waters as it cuts through to the right into the sea under Holland' (Vita

Neoti, 139; trans. Hart 1992, 609). The translation here is approximate - the exact

meaning is elusive - but it seems plain that the author perceived of Holland as an entity



28

distinct from the Ouse outfall. Up until the thirteenth century that outfall was at Wisbech.

It would therefore seem that Holland was distinct from the Wisbech community in the

late tenth or early eleventh century. As we have seen, a frontier zone is indicated by

patterns of tenure and intercommoning, and part of an early boundary is described by

Peterborough's Wulfhere charter. Its line from Asendyke the north of Crowland to

Throckenholt (where it turns south) cannot be reconstructed. However, it defines a limit

somewhere to the north of the Old South Eau, possibly on the line of Langreche, the

earlier course of the river (Owen 1982, 42-3).

Holland was also socially distinctive. In form its tenurial structures are little

different from those of the surrounding fen edge. The sokes of Drayton and Spalding are

paralleled by a string of similar estates: from the south, Folkingham, Sleaford,

Ruskington, Branston, Horncastle, Tattershall, and Bolingbroke. All exhibit ancient

characteristics, but the Holland sokes were probably less manorialized in 1086, for they

persisted longer as communities of free men. Little of this is apparent from Domesday:

there are relatively fewer sokemen recorded than elsewhere in the county. But later

documentation indicates that they were not systematically recorded. Surveys from

Spalding Priory show that there were vast numbers of sokemen in Elloe in the twelfth

century where Domesday Book records none (Hallam 1954; Hallam 1958, 340-61), and

in the thirteenth century no less that 135 carucates of land out of a Domesday total of 207

in Kirton and Skirbeck were held by sokemen (Book of Fees, 194-5).

Sokemen survived in scattered farmsteads to emerge in the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries as yeomen farmers in most vills in Kirton and Skirbeck. Fewer weathered the

aggressive high demesne farming of Spalding Priory in Elloe, and there characteristically

the communal twelve-carucate hundred had disappeared by the thirteenth century. At an

earlier period, however, the whole of Holland seems to have been characterized by a high

degree of freedom with the rights of lordship largely confined to the receipt of tribute.

More intensive lordship was not unknown. Medehamstede leased ten manentes of land in

Swineshead and probably more in Cheal to lessees in the eighth and ninth centuries (there

was apparently no demesne there) in return for tribute (Sawyer, 1412, 1440). Since both

estates are omitted from Domesday Book, their pre-Conquest tenurial forms cannot be

examined.26

However, judging from the ‘primitive’ estate structure that is portrayed,

Medehamstede’s interest was exceptional. Most tribute was probably enjoyed at arms

length by kings and subsequently ealdormen and earls. The sokes of Holland were less

early estates than a later rationalization of a largley unregulated community.

From the Middle Saxon period the silts of Holland were clearly part of a larger

network of exchange which was probably centred on major upland and fen edge centres

like the fenland monasteries. However, the distinctive identity of the siltland communities

would appear to attest the separate development of a society that was largely cut off from

the forces that were beginning to change the neighbouring uplands. The name Holland

means 'high land', and the people who settled it were isolated by marsh and peat fen from

the upland. Before the two settlement zones could interact that waste had to be tamed.

The settlement of Crowland from the upland represents an early breech of the peats, and

the refounded Peterborough and Ramsey established footholds in the tenth or eleventh

century. But it was probably not until after the Conquest that wholesale contact was

possible as reclamation of the wastes from the fen edge and the silts gathered pace.

Before that date the communities were probably masters of their own destiny, and the



29

ranching and salt production which characterized their economy was largely undirected

by outside interests.

The Middle Saxon fenland

With the distinguishing of pre-Conquest siltland communities and their characteristics,

what then of the folks of the Tribal Hidage? It can now be suggested with more

confidence that they were in all likelihood exclusively fenland peoples. Wisbech and

Marshland have been identified variously as the area of the Wigesta (Goodall 1925; Potts

1974, 23-4), the Willa (Courtney 1981, 92), and the West Wixna and Wigesta (Hart 1976,

51). They can now probably be identified with a single people, possibly the Wissa. In

Felix' Life of Guthlac, a blind man is said to have come to Crowland by boat from that

province to recover his sight (Felix, 169). The name is cognate with Wissey, now

confined to the river in Clackclose Hundred, but the name was evidently applied to the

Wellstream/Old Croft River that flowed through Wisbech Half Hundred in the Middle

Ages since the place-name Wisbech connotes 'the valley of the Wissey' (Ekwall 1959,

526).27

The Wissa do not appear in the Tribal Hidage, and it remains possible that the

eastern and western elements of the community are represented there by the East and

West Wixna or the East and West Willa. Elloe Wapentake in which Spalding is situated

has usually been identified as the territory of the Spaldas. The Domesday account of the

wapentake does indeed suggest a distinct identity, but, as we have seen, this is probably

an artefact. The land of the Spaldas can in all likelihood be identified with the whole of

Holland.

By contrast, it might be expected that the peat fenlands were attached to upland

peoples. Significantly, this is true of the one folk that can be firmly identified in this

context. Bede attests that Medehamstede was situated in the territory of the Gyrwe (Bede,

iv, 6) and the earliest section of the document known as the Resting Places of the Saints,

probably dating from the late ninth century, indicates that St Guthlac was buried 'in

myddan gyrwan fenne' (Rollason 1978, 89). If the territory of the Spaldas is correctly

identified, then this was the North Gyrwe, and Potts (1974) has plausibly argued that the

bounds of the Wulfhere charter describe the people. It encompassed Medehamstede,

Crowland, Thorney, and the fen southwards towards the old course of the Nene as far as

Whittlesey Mere. The Sweordora are apparently commemorated in Sword Point, on the

south of this mere, and so their territory must have extended westwards from the Gyrwe

onto the upland too. It has generally been identified with Normancross Hundred in

Huntingdonshire (Potts 1974, 23). The Herefinna/Hurstingas, if preserved in the later

hundred name of Hurstingstone, probably extended from the wooded upland around

Huntingdon out into the fen around Ramsey. Although there are numerous

intercommoning links that may be relevant to these early communities, there are

correspondingly few tenurial links that can be used to evaluate them.

The Isle of Ely has usually been identified with the South Gyrwe. Bede asserted

that Ely was a regio that was assessed at 600 hides (Bede, iv, 19), and later Ely tradition

has maintained that it was given to St Æthelthryth by Tonbert a prince of the South

Gyrwe on their marriage (Liber Eliensis, 4). The early forms of the place-name Ely

connoting 'eel district' suggest that it was indeed a central place of some kind (Ekwall

1959, 166), and in the twelfth century it was believed that the Grywe were 'all those

southern Angles living on the great fen on which the island of Ely is situated' (Miller



30

1951, 12). At Peterborough, however, it was maintained that the Gyrwe were men 'who

dwelt in the fen or hard by' (Hugh Candidus, 2). Ely was clearly an ancient community

with common rights in the fen, but there is little to indicate its extent. The peat fen

adjacent to the Norfolk hundreds of Clackclose and Grimshoe was more clearly exploited

from the fen margin, but it is probable that they were part of East Anglia at the time of

the Tribal Hidage and therefore no names survive for the peoples who inhabited them.

The Tribal Hidage remains an intractable document. But we do not need it to

conclude that the silts of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, on the one hand, and Lincolnshire

on the other had always formed separate zones of settlement. Their different

characteristics suggests that they had different origins. The integration of the southern

silts into a wider landscape raises the possibility that the Norfolk and Cambridgeshire

fens had originally been colonized by communities on the fen edge and upland and

subsequently controlled by them. There is little evidence of extensive Early Saxon

occupation, and it has been observed that the regular distribution of the Middle Saxon

settlements in Marshland might suggest some degree of planning (although it should be

noted that this study suggests that there were in fact two communities represented in the

area). The agency responsible can no longer be identified, but the process was probably

not unconnected with foundation of the fenland monasteries, and Ely in particular, in the

seventh and eighth centuries. It is only from the late tenth century that active intervention

zcan be observed. The purchases of land by Bishop Æthelwold for the refounded

communities of Ely, Peterborough, and Thorney, and the new foundation of Ramsey

defined the pattern of tenure for the next five hundred years, but they may have been in a

long tradition of monastic intervention and control in the area.

Holland was probably a different story. As in Norfolk, there was apparently a

settlement hiatus between the Roman and Middle Saxon periods. It is therefore not

impossible that there was likewise a conscious colonization and that the inexorable

growth of the peats in the west, which led to a subsequent retreat of settlement to the high

silts further east, accounts for the social isolation of Holland evidenced in Domesday

Book. However, it is probably more likely that area had always been a marginal zone free

from the forces that constrained society on the upland. Owen (1984) has suggested that

the market at Boston has its origins in the seasonal comings and goings of locals and

sailors. Nearby the place-name Frieston, ‘the settlement of the Frisians’ (Cameron 1998,

47) attests probably sea-born settlers in the wake of traders. Lordship does not make the

world the go round. The economy of the silts could and did do without strong lords; salt

production was seasonal and stock rearing a labour unintensive activity and neither

required massive capital accumulation. The entrepreneurial peasant has ever been jealous

of his rights and dues; there is no reason to doubt that he was capable of underpinning the

economy of the silts the while resisting seigneurial encroachment.

The popular notions of the fenland, then, may be not so entirely wrong-headed.

Kingsley, following Richard of Ely and ultimately Felix, chose to exaggerate the

wildness of the peats. In reality the wetlands were fully exploited from the fen edge, and

we can now perceive that the silts of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire were likewise part of a

larger tenurial landscape. But Kingsley’s sense of a world apart fits the Holland silts very

well. Philip Pullman has intuitively developed the perception. The gyptians of Northern

Lights saw the fastnesses of the fen, in a different world in the same place, as their home

and their fortress. From there they travelled freely and widely in their boats to ply their



31

wares and trade, but the police interfered with them in their homeland at their peril.

Gyptians were probably not so very different from the Middle Saxon Saxon inhabitants of

Holland.



32

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36

Notes

1 There have been dissenting voices. See, for example, Silvester 1987, 109-11.

2 For discussion of the problem, see Roffe 1986. The carucate, based on the plough, is self-evidently

different from the hide which was notionally a measure of the total resources of a family. 3 The coastal salt marshes of both Lincolnshire and Norfolk have formed no part of this study since they

were appurtenant to the adjacent upland. For examinations of the chronology of settlement in these areas

see Owen 1954, idem 1984. 4 There are four parcels of marsh on the coastal silts of Lindsey (GDB 348v, 355, .

5 For the sources and authenticity of the ‘Pseudo-Ingulph’, see Roffe 1995.

6 A manorial structure is occasionally manifest in other documents. Ixworth (Suff), for example, belonged

to the manor of Pakenham, but the fact is only known from a near contemporary note on estate

management (EHD, ii, 883). 7 Those who are called taini regis in Domesday Book are usually minor thegns holding by ministerial

tenures of one kind or anther. Pre-Conquest king's thegns are indicated either by their right to sake and soke

or the simple tenuit formula: those who 'held freely' and the like are said to do so because they rendered

their soke to another lord. 8 Burg was the northern part of the settlement of Kirkby (http://www.roffe.freeserve.co.uk/burg.htm).

9 Babingley, Dersingham, and Sandringham, where later manorial history indicates that the manors

extended to the sea in Wolfterton, have been omitted. 10

For underlying geographical structures in LDB, see Dodwell 1969 and Roffe 2000b,. The sequence in

Table 3 was reconstructed from the order in which entries for Freebridge occur in each chapter of the text.

It will be noted that, apart from chapters in which there were two sequences (1,9), there is only one conflict

of order (22). 11

Appleton and Flitcham were held by Algar and Abba from Stigand (LDB 173). 12

The free man Rolf who held in Islington formerly belonged to Odo of Bayeux and was delivered to

Count Alan. A further free man, however, seems to have been part of Alan's fee (LDB, 149). 13

[Check on Owen to see if successors held in Lynn. ]. 14

So Blomefield 1808, ix, 145. DB Norfolk, 66,21, has West Walton, but there is no sign of the fee there in

the later history of the vill. There is no reason to believe that the fee was absorbed into Ely's West Walton

manor after the Domesday inquest (Silvester 1987, 109). 15

To this group can, perhaps, be added Great and Little Massingham. Various interests were represented

there in 1086, but almost all seem to have been derived in one way or another from Earl Harold who held

the principal manor (LDB 109v). Its close proximity to Necton may suggest that it too was in reality a

berewick. 16

VCH Cambs, iv, 180ff asserts that most of the vills of the hundred were reclaimed in the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries because they are not noticed in GDB. This is an assumption, however, that is not

warranted. Outwell and Upwell are known to have been settled (in some form) before the Conquest from

numerous references to land and rights there; Elm is noticed in the 'Wulfhere' charter. There are no early

sources for the other vills, but most were probably in existence in 1086 and were simply described in the

account of Wisbech in Domesday: large estates were often enrolled in single entries especially when

demesne. Newton, however, may have been a later settlement, for no notice is found of it in the Ely extent

of 1221 and only a cursory notice in that of 1251 (VCH Cambs, iv, 202). 17

Despite Miller's assumption that the ferding was an exclusively East Anglian beast, it is in fact found

elsewhere. There were, for example, four ferlingi in the borough of Huntingdon (GDB 203). The meaning

here was presumably 'ward', and the association underlines the idea of police duties that were fundamental

to both the leet and the twelve-carucate hundred. 18

Common works do not necessarily imply a single community, for defences still had to be maintained for

areas shared by groups of communities. There, however, work was usually apportioned separately. 19

The king probably also had land in Swineshead and Gosberton which was omitted from the survey, for in

the thirteenth century there were fees there that belonged to the honour of Lancaster. The king's Elloe lands,

granted to the same honour after the Domesday inquest, appear to have had their origin in the fee of Roger

the Poitevin. It is possible that the Kirton fees had also belonged to him in succession to Earl Algar. There

are two erased entries, no longer legible, at GDB 338 where a description of the land might be expected. 20

It was probably held of Queen Edith (Hart 1992, 185).



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21

There were, however, frequent disputes about the scouring of the drain. 22

The Middleton manors have been included since they were part of the eastern group of siltland estates. 23

The Middleton salt workings have been included since the manors to which they belonged were attached

to the silts. 24

To what extent these figures represent tenants on the demesne is unclear. 25

Pace Douglas 1927, 195. He cites Placitorum Abbrevatio, 363 (recte 352), but it is not clear from the

printed text that Marshland included all the vills of the half hundred. In a fourteenth-century account the

Wisbech manors are said to be situated in the bailiwick of Marshland (Douglas 1927, 196), but this hardly

proves that the whole area was known as Marshland. In all the other sources consulted, it consists of the

four vills of West Walton, Walpole, Terrington, and Walsoken. [Check on Dugdale's use of the term. Is it a

post-medieval usage?] 26

Swineshead subsequently became the caput of the Greslley fee in Lincolnshire and a castle was built

there. Little is known about its social structure in the Middle Ages. 27

Mill (1995, 364) suggests wisc or *wise + bece or bæc, 'marshy-meadow valley', but notes that this is

what Wissey connotes.

'The historical context', Anglo-Saxon settlement on the siltland of Eastern England

Documents

Transcript of 'The historical context', Anglo-Saxon settlement on the siltland of Eastern England