Leofweard 9

Leofweard ‘of Langley’ (Berks.), fl. 1066
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Leofweard
Leofweard 3
Leofweard 10

Summary

Leofweard 2 was a small landowner in central Berkshire, who held 1 hide which he was not free to withdraw from the Oxfordshire manor of which it formed part, and which was held by Wigot of Wallingford.

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 33,9 Langley Leuuard Leofweard, man of Wigot of Wallingford Wigot of Wallingford Miles Crispin Leofweard 1.00 0.00 0.00 A Map
Totals

Subtenant in 1086

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 33,9 Langley Leuuard Leofweard, man of Wigot of Wallingford Wigot of Wallingford Miles Crispin Leofweard 1.00 0.00 0.00 A Map
Totals

Profile

The last entry in the Berkshire fief of Miles Crispin names Leofweard as holding 1 hide both TRE and in 1086 in an unusual form.

In Reading hundred Leofweard holds 1 hide from Miles in Lonchelei, and he could not go where he wished without Wigot’s permission. This land lies and is valued in Gratentvn, which is in Oxfordshire, and yet gives scot in Berkshire.

In Radinges hundredo tenet Leuuard in Lonchelei .i. hidam de Milone . 7 non potuit ire quolibet absque licentia Wigoti . Haec terra jacet 7 appreciata est in Gratentvn quod est in Oxenafordscire . 7 tamen dat scotum in Berchescire.

The entry is out of order in the sense that it is not placed with Miles’s other manors in Reading hundred, Pangbourne and Sulham (Berks. 33:1–2), at the head of his Berkshire fief; on the other hand it seems to have been written consecutively and is rubricated, lacking any appearance of being a late addition to the text. Presumably the anomalous status as a Berkshire appendage of an Oxfordshire manor caused it to be separated it from Miles’s other Berkshire property when information for collated for the Domesday Survey.

Leofweard’s tenure as Miles’s subtenant in 1086 is explicit in DB; his position TRE is implied by the past tense of potuit, employed in a phrase which is only ever used of pre-Conquest tenures. The Wigot from whom he was not free to withdraw the land without permission must be Wigot of Wallingford (Wigot 2), Miles’s antecessor in Oxfordshire.

The mention of Wigot as implied owner of Gratentun, where Leofweard’s hide ‘lies and is valued’, requires Gratentun to be an Oxfordshire manor held by Wigot TRE and Miles in 1086. It can therefore be identified unequivocally as Gatehampton (Oxon. 35:1), a manor of 5 hides held by Wigot TRE and Miles Crispin in 1086. The spelling Gratentun in the Berkshire folios can thus be written off as simply a mistake: both Oxfordshire entries for the vill use the form Gadintone (Oxon. 22:2, 35:1), which is consistent with the origin and development of the name in ways that Gratentun is not (PN Oxon. I, 52). The standard editions of DB have left Gratentun unidentified (VCH Berks. I, 355; Phill. Berks. 33:9, with a misleading note; Alecto trans.: 152), though it was correctly identified, without explanation, in the Domesday Gazetteer (Darby and Versey 1975: 13, 324).

Gatehampton is on the Thames in the Goring Gap, between the Chilterns and the Berkshire Downs. No evidence has yet come to light for an outlier in Berkshire at any time after DB, making Leofweard’s hide at Lonchelei difficult to place on the ground. Before William I’s death in 1087 (perhaps in 1086), Miles Crispin and his wife gave the demesne tithes of Gatehampton to Bec abbey, along with tithes from many other manors. There is no reference in Miles’s own charter or in any of the confirmations that Bec secured from the king and in the twelfth century from the relevant diocesan bishops to any place which could represent Lonchelei (Salter 1925: 76–8; Bates 1998: no. 167; Smith 1980: no. 18; Kemp 1999: no. 49). Nor do Gatehampton charters of the twelfth century and later refer to manorial outliers; in particular, the 1 hide given to the nuns of Goring in the twelfth century was specifically in the vill of Gatehampton itself (Salter and Cooke 1930: pp. 55–65).

The location of Lonchelei, in Reading hundred, is not easy to establish for certain. Gatehampton stood across the river from Basildon (Berks.), which was not in Reading hundred but Slotisford (Berks. 1:7–8); Reading hundred started with the next vill downstream, Pangbourne, and it is presumably in that area, not too far from Gatehampton, that Lonchelei should be sought.

Margaret Gelling made a tentative identification with Langley Farm in Tilehurst (PN Berks. I, 194), due south of Pangbourne and only 6 miles from Gatehampton, though there are two possible objections. First, Lonche– is barely credible as standing in DB for so common an OE element as lang (‘long’), which otherwise appears repeatedly as Lange– or occasionally Langa–, Lang–, Langhe–, or Langue–, with a few instances from Mercian counties only as Longe– (Keats-Rohan and Thornton 1997: 417–18, 426). On the other hand, the anomalous DB entry that gives us Lonchelei also gives us a mangled form of Gatehampton, so that an aberrant form of Langley might almost be expected. Secondly, Langley in Tilehurst was not a manorial site, and its early history is as yet unclear (not mentioned in VCH Berks. III, 329–36); further, we have not been able to find an alleged example of the place-name in the fourteenth century (PN Berks. I, 194) in the modern edition of the document cited (Kemp 1986–7). Despite those reservations, Langley remains the best solution of Lonchelei yet made, and it has been mapped there.

If Langley were to be ruled out, an alternative might be the manor of La Hyde or Hyde Hall, centred on the house now called Purley Hall, which lay in the parishes of Pangbourne, Purley, Sulham, and Whitchurch (the last presumably in the fragment of what was really an Oxfordshire parish that lay on the Berkshire side of the Thames). La Hyde has been identified with 1 hide in Pangbourne held in 1086 by an unnamed knight from Miles Crispin’s tenant William, though the grounds for doing so are not especially convincing (Berks. 33:1; VCH Berks. III, 304).

Whatever the location of Leofweard’s hide, which he held without the power to withdraw it from his lord Wigot of Wallingford, it is highly unlikely that Leofweard should be identified with any of his namesakes elsewhere.

Bibliography


Alecto trans.: Domesday Book: A Complete Translation, ed. Ann Williams and G. H. Martin (London: Penguin Books, 2002)

Bates 1998: Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I (1066–1087), ed. David Bates (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)

Darby and Versey 1975: H. C. Darby and G. R. Versey, Domesday Gazetteer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)

Keats-Rohan and Thornton 1997: Domesday Names: An Index of Latin Personal and Place Names in Domesday Book, comp. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan and David E. Thornton (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1997)

Kemp 1986–7: Reading Abbey Cartularies, ed. Brian Kemp, 2 vols, Camden 4th Series 31 and 33 (1986–7)

Kemp 1999: English Episcopal Acta, 18: Salisbury, 1078–1217, ed. B. R. Kemp (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1999)

Phill. Berks.: Domesday Book, ed. John Morris, 5: Berkshire, ed. Philip Morgan (Chichester: Phillimore, 1979)

PN Berks.: Margaret Gelling, The Place-Names of Berkshire, 3 vols, English Place-Name Society 49–51 (1973–6)

PN Oxon.: Margaret Gelling, The Place-Names of Oxfordshire, 2 vols, English Place-Name Society 23–24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953–4)

Salter 1925: ‘Two deeds about the abbey of Bec’, ed. H. E. Salter, English Historical Review, 40 (1925), 73–8

Salter and Cooke 1930: The Boarstall Cartulary, ed. H. E. Salter with A. H. Cooke, Oxford Historical Society 88 (1930)

Smith 1980: English Episcopal Acta, I: Lincoln, 1067–1185, ed. David M. Smith (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1980)

VCH Berks.: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: The Victoria History of the County of Berkshire, ed. William Page [and H. A. Doubleday], 3 vols and index (London, 1904–14)