Lanc 2

Lanc Dealer, fl. 1066
Male
DWP
4 of 5

Name

Lanc

Summary

Lanc 2 was a substantial landholder with seven estates in central-southern England TRE assessed for a total of 51 hides and with a value of nearly £50; he also had six houses in the capital, Winchester, and his wife held a large estate in Berkshire assessed for 15 hides and with a value of £15. Many of these estates were held from King Edward (Edward 15) and it is likely that Lanc 2 was a royal official; his byname is most probably from Old English dælere ‘dealer, distributor, agent’.

Distribution map of property and lordships associated with this name in DB

List of property and lordships associated with this name in DB

Holder 1066

Shire Phil. ref. Vill DB Spelling Holder 1066 Lord 1066 Tenant-in-Chief 1086 1086 Subtenant Fiscal Value 1066 Value 1086 Value Conf. Show on Map
Berkshire 1,47 Winterbourne Lanc Lanc the dealer Eadgyth, queen William, king Theodric the goldsmith 5.00 6.00 4.00 C Map
Berkshire 63,2 Hampstead Norreys Lanc Lanc the dealer Edward, king Theodric the goldsmith - 17.00 12.00 10.00 B Map
Hampshire 1,46 Faccombe Lang Lanc the dealer Edward, king William, king Roger de Poitou 13.00 13.00 16.00 B Map
Hampshire 1,46 Winchester Lang Lanc the dealer Edward, king William, king Roger de Poitou 0.00 0.00 0.00 B Map
Hampshire 1,6 Chiltlee Lanch Lanc the dealer Edward, king William, king - 2.00 2.65 2.65 B Map
Surrey 21,1 Whitford Lanch Lanc the dealer Edward, king William fitzAnsculf William the chamberlain 2.00 2.50 3.00 C Map
Wiltshire 67,100 Blunsdon Lanch Lanc the dealer Edward, king Edward of Salisbury - 2.00 1.00 0.35 C Map
Wiltshire 67,44 Stanton Fitzwarren Lange Lanc the dealer - Grimbald the goldsmith - 10.00 12.00 12.00 C Map
Totals

Profile

Spellings that appear to represent the Old English name Lanc occur at least seven and probably nine times in DB and Winton Domesday. All of these relate to holdings in the central-southern shires of Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Surrey. Of these, three were large estates of 10 hides or more, a fourth was one of similar size in the hands of Lanc’s wife, and none of the others had assessments of less than 2 hides. In six instances the TRE holder was in the lordship of King Edward and a seventh was in the queen’s lordship. Given the extreme rarity of the name, the relatively close proximity of the estates and the high instance of explicitly royal lordship there is a prima facie case for assuming that all of these references are to a single substantial TRE landholder, Lanc 2.

The two largest of these estates were in Berkshire, with one of 17 hides on the Berkshire Downs at Hampstead Norreys being held by Lanc 2 and another of 15 hides at Aston Tirrold, 6 miles to the north, being held by his wife, who is unnamed in DB; both estates were held under the lordship of King Edward. By 1086 Lanc’s estate was held by Theodric the goldsmith (Theodric 6) and his wife’s estate was in the hands of King William. A third estate in Berkshire held TRE by Lanc – albeit under the lordship of Queen Eadgyth (Eadgyth 3) rather than the king – comprised 5 hides at Winterbourne, only 5 miles south-west of Hampstead Norreys; in 1086 this estate was held at farm from King William by a Theodric, presumably the same man as the goldsmith who had acquired Lanc 2’s estate at Hampstead.

Attributable with only slightly less certainty to Lanc 2 is another large estate held by a goldsmith after the Conquest, in this instance the successor being another goldsmith named Grimbald (Grimbald 4). The estate was of 10 hides at ‘Stanton’ and the Exon geld accounts for Wiltshire suggest that this was Stanton Fitzwarren (Pugh and Crittall 1955: 211), on a minor tributary of the Thames in north Wiltshire and about 23 miles to the north-west of Hampstead Norreys. The slight doubt as to the TRE holder arises because his name is spelt Lange in DB, which with philological but perhaps misguided correctness von Feilitzen (1937: 308) interpreted as OE Langa and would be the only instance of that name in DB. However, it is also possible that the rare name Lanc was mistaken for the familiar word lang(a) (see discussion of the name Lanc). This latter possibility is rendered probable because an estate of 2 hides held by a Lanc TRE under King Edward’s lordship lay at Blunsdon, less than 2 miles from Stanton Fitzwarren. Although this estate was held ‘in the king’s hand’ by Edward of Salisbury (Edward 26), the sheriff of Wiltshire, rather than by Grimbald  (or Theodric) in 1086 it is far more likely that Stanton and Blunsdon had the same TRE holder, Lanc 2, than that two different people with similar and extremely rare names should have held moderate or large estates adjacent to each other and relatively close to Lanc 2’s estates in Berkshire.

A similar argument underlies the attribution of another large estate to Lanc 2, albeit with evidence external to DB to support the interpretation. The estate was at Faccombe, in the hills of north-west Hampshire, and the TRE holder was given as Lang, the only instance of this form as a personal name in DB. Since this 13-hide estate was held under King Edward’s lordship and lay less than 15 miles to the south-west of Lanc 2’s estate at Hampstead (and only 10 miles from that at Winterbourne), there is again the possibility that DB’s Lang represents a mishearing of Lanc. Furthermore, the DB entry for Faccombe records six houses in Winchester associated with the estate in 1086; and according to the Winton Domesday, property in Gere Street (now Trafalgar Street) in Winchester was held TRE (probably c.1057) by Lancdelere, for which he rendered 30d (Barlow 1976: 9-10, 67). Given the extreme rarity of the names *Lanc and *Lang, this is pushing coincidence too far. This simplest solution is to equate the Lanc of Winchester with the Lang of Faccombe and both of them with Lanc 2, whose byname of delere will be discussed below.

Given the picture that is emerging of Lanc 2’s probable wealth and estates, the two remaining estates can be dealt with rather more briefly. The first was at Chiltlee, on the boundary between Hampshire and Sussex 23 miles to the east of Winchester and 35 miles from Hampstead Norreys, which was held by a Lanc under King Edward’s lordship and in allodium; the implication is that he had the power of alienation over this estate and the king was his lord by commendation rather than dependent tenure. The second was at Whitford by the River Wandle in north-east Surrey 47 miles east of Hampstead Norreys and 35 miles from Chiltlee, the nearest of Lanc 2’s other estates; this too was held by a Lanc under the king’s lordship TRE, although in this instance the type of lordship is not clear. Although in both cases, and particularly with regard to Whitford, the distances from Lanc 2’s other estates allow some room for doubt, the rare name and presence of King Edward as lord render it probable that we are again dealing with one and the same man.

The entry in Winton Domesday (Barlow 1976: 67) gives Lanc’s name as Lancdelere, incorporating a byname for which von Feilitzen (1976: 164) offered two interpretations. The first was that it was a toponymic byname de Lere and represented an abbreviated form of Le(g)recestre, Leicester; but although Lera, Lehr and similar forms of the place-name do occur in the eleventh century they do so only in coin legends and there is no evidence that they were used in normal records or speech (Cox 1998: 1-3). Instead, von Feilitzen’s alternative suggestion of Old English dælere ‘dealer’ seems the more likely, a word developed from OE dæl ‘a part, portion’ and with the senses of ‘distributor, agent’ as well as ‘dealer’ (Toller 1898: 194). However, the questions of how Lanc acquired such a byname and what it might signify, be that from some personal trait or incident or from his putative rôle at the royal court, must remain open.

Nevertheless, some official rôle for Lanc 2 at Edward the Confessor’s court seems likely given his apparent wealth under the king’s lordship and yet his absence from the surviving witness-lists and other records in which magnates of similar wealth generally occur, even if only once or twice. To put this in perspective, if the tables produced by Clarke to rank the non-earlish secular magnates may be used an approximate guide (Clarke 1994: 32-3), then Lanc 2 would be ranked about 75th in that company terms of the value of his estates as recorded in DB.

Finally, it is possible but unlikely that Lanc 2 was the same person as Land 2, who held 3¾ hides in Bedfordshire TRE. The possibility arises because Land’s name is spelled Lant in DB and scribal confusion of ‹t› and ‹c› was by no means uncommon (Dodgson 1987: 128, 136). In favour of the identification are that both Lanc and Land are otherwise unrecorded names and it would simplify matters if by dint of a scribal error they could be regarded as one and the same, while the less than 60 miles that separated Land 2’s estates from that of Lanc 2 at Winterbourne are perhaps not too far removed given the latter’s wealth. Against this identification, however, are that the two men had different lords TRE and that the scribal error would need to be repeated in both of the DB entries relating to Land 2 (or in an earlier return on which those entries were based). On balance, therefore, it is unlikely that they were the same person.

Bibliography


Barlow 1976: ed. F. Barlow, ‘The Winton Domesday’, in ed. M. Biddle, Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, Winchester Studies 1 (Oxford, 1976), 1-141

Toller 1898: ed. T. N. Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth (Oxford, 1898)

Clarke 1994: P. A. Clarke, The English Nobility under Edward the Confessor (Oxford, 1994)

Cox 1998: B. Cox, The Place-Names of Leicestershire. Part One: The Borough of Leicester, English Place-Name Society 75 (Nottingham: EPNS, 1998)

Dodgson 1987: J. McN. Dodgson, ‘Domesday Book: place-names and personal names’, in ed. J. C. Holt, Domesday Studies (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1987), 121-37

Pugh and Crittall 1955: ed. R. B. Pugh and E. Crittall, A History of Wiltshire: Volume II, Victoria History of the Counties of England (Oxford, 1955)

von Feilitzen 1937: O. von Feilitzen, The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book, Nomina Germanica 3 (Uppsala, 1937)

von Feilitzen 1976: O. von Feilitzen, ‘The personal names and bynames of the Winton Domesday’, in ed. M. Biddle, Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, Winchester Studies 1 (Oxford, 1976), 145-229