Page:VCH Northamptonshire 1.djvu/354

A HISTORY OF NORTHAMPTONSHIRE earls. Last of all, in most cases, we find the small folk, divided into Normans who held by serjeanty and Englishmen styled ' the King's thegns.' In Northamptonshire these last classes are not specially dis- tinguished, being, we shall find, very limited. The lands in the hands of churchmen may at once be broadly divided into two great classes. There were the old endowments of the religious houses which, in theory at least, they continued to hold as before the Conquest ; and there were the lands which, under the Con- fessor, had been held by English laymen, but which the Conqueror had bestowed on churchmen, such as his half-brother Odo, bishop of Bayeux, or his follower and trusted officer Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances, or had given to religious houses, English or Norman. In Northamptonshire the second of these classes was very largely represented. Of parochial endowments in this county there is a singular absence of mention. Of the ancient possessions of the church, the bulk belonged to Peterborough abbey ; indeed, the rest were insignificant as compared with the lands of ' the Golden Borough.' But their condition, as revealed in Domesday Book, raises questions of some importance in the history of the Norman Conquest. The manors which in this county the abbey retained in demesne had risen, in 1086, to the total value of j(^io4 1 3J. 4^'., their value at some previous period, which must be assumed to be the eve of the Conquest, being reckoned as only ^(^30 ijs. But the rise in value was very unequal ; for, while Kettering had only risen from £o to £11, Oundle and Warmington had both risen to >ri i from five shillings. From the figures given it is clear, at least, that some of the abbey's manors had been absolutely laid waste at the earlier period spoken of. Assuming this to be the close of Edward the Confessor's reign, I have connected the devastation of which the traces are thus preserved with the ravages in this county described by the English Chronicle in 1065.* And this conclusion seems to be supported by the fact that in other counties such as Huntingdonshire, the value of the abbey's lands changed little if at all, while in Lincolnshire their tendency on the whole was, it seems, to a decrease. For, if the abbey's manors had been ' wasted ' under the Conqueror, we should expect to find the process more general. Otherwise it might have been supposed that, in this devastation of its lands, the abbey had paid the penalty of its guilt in William's eyes, a guilt incurred since Edward's death in more ways than one. Leofric, its patriotic abbot, had fallen at the battle of Hastings, and when Brand, his elected successor, accepted investiture at the hands of the English /Ethe- ling Eadgar, ' King William,' says the Chronicle, ' was very wroth, and said that the abbot had done despite to him. But " gode men " went ' See p. 263 above. It must be remembered that the Peterborough Chronicle, being composed locally, might be influenced by the losses of its own abbey in its highly-coloured account of these ravages, as (I have suggested in my Geoffrey de MandevilW) may have been the case with its picture of the anarchy under Stephen. The other version, however, of the Chronicle also records the ravages of 1065. 282