William the Conqueror divided such parts of England as did not belong to the Church and were not reserved for himself into seven hundred baronies or great fiefs, which he bestowed upon his particular friends, and on those who had most assisted him in his work of conquest. These baronies were subdivided into upwards of sixty thousand knight's fees, which usually consisted of about two carucates of land, and which were held from the King's immediate tenants on specified conditions of homage, fealty, &c.
In the first year after the Conquest, the Manor of Cawthorne passed from the hands of the Saxon Ailric into those of the Norman Ilbert de Laci, who held a hundred and sixty-four manors in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Nottinghamshire, and whose lands in Yorkshire alone fill no less than seven pages of the Domesday Book. His estates formed what was known in later times as the "Honour of Pontefract," and included about one hundred and fifty-six townships. There is what Hunter calls "a beautiful history" of this de Laci family in Dr. Whittaker's "History of Whalley:" and, in that marvellous monument of human industry, the Dodsworth manuscripts, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, there is a history of this family's Religious Foundations, which Dodsworth, who died in 1654, has marked as having been given to him by a John Stanhope, Esq. "Historia Fundationum diversorum Monasteriorum et ecclesiarum per nobilissimam Laceiorum Familiam: Ex dono Johis Stanhope, Armi." These six pages (Dodsw. MSS.157) are somewhat mutilated, and are continued in another handwriting, to show the connection of the de Laci family in later times with Henry VI. (See Dodsw. MSS., vol. II., p. 52 also Rawlinson MSS. (Bodleian) Libr. C., "4, 5," or 57, 8).
The Saxon resident at Cawthorne, with all his surrounding dependents, was not otherwise interfered with at the Norman Conquest of 1066 than by a change of tenure, which substituted for the freedom of an independence, which only acknowledged the sovereignty of the King, the new obligations of a feudal lord's tenant, which would not press upon him with any great severity. As the tenant of Ilbert de Laci, Ailric would still be, to use the expression of much
