Gundhard 2

Gundhard ‘of Ciclet’ (Devon), fl. 1066
Male
DWP
4 of 5

Name

Gundhard

Summary

Gundhard 2 held two small estates in north-central Devon TRE with a combined assessment of 1 hide and with a value of 25s.

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
Devon 24,10 Coombe Gonhard Gundhard 'of Ciclet' - Walter de Claville Walter the wild 0.50 0.75 0.75 C Map
Devon 24,31 Ciclet Gonnar Gundhard 'of Ciclet' - Walter de Claville Walter the wild 0.50 0.50 1.00 C Map
Totals

Profile

Gunhard 2’s two small TRE estates were at Coombe, in a tributary valley of the river Loman in north-central Devon, and at Ciclet, an unidentified place in the same part of Devon. The DB and Exon (393b2) entries for Coombe give the only certain forms of Gundhard’s extremely rare Continental Germanic name (as Gonhard and Gonerdus respectively) to occur in England in or before 1086 in England. The DB and Exon (391b1) forms for the TRE holder of Ciclet are ambiguous (Gonnar and Gōnerus respectively), however, because the macron over the ‘o’ in the Exon spelling indicates a scribal abbreviation and the omitted letter would normally be an ‘m’ or ‘n’ rather than a ‘d’ or ‘t’ (although cf. Leodmær 11 for a possible parallel).

Although von Feilitzen (1937: 98-9, 276-7; cf. Forssner 1916: 135-6) did not rule out the possibility that Gonnar (and Gōnerus) could represent CG Gundhard, with loss of ‑d‑ after both elements, he preferred to interpret it as representing Old Norse Gunnarr (or Old Danish Gunnar). Yet these two Devonshire estates of Coombe and Ciclet lay less than 7 miles apart (see below) and passed to the same post-Conquest successor, Walter de Claville; by contrast, the nearest estates held TRE by people certainly called Gunnar(r), another rare name in pre-Conquest England, lay more than 75 miles away. Furthermore, Coombe and Ciclet were two of the only three estates held by Walter’s subtenant Walter siluestris (the byname is from Exon) in 1086, with the third being at Murley and less than 2 miles from Coombe. The points in favour of identifying the TRE holder of both Coombe and Ciclet as the same person, Gundhard 2, seem to outweigh the possible vagaries of spelling and philological precision in this instance (cf. Lewis 1997: 75-6).

The location of Gundhard’s estate at Ciclet has not been identified. IG (68b3) and the order of entries in Exon (391a3-391b1) suggest that it paid geld with Walter de Claville’s estate in the part of Burlescombe that lay in Bampton Hundred in 1086 (Thorn & Thorn 1985: DB 24,30 Notes; 24,31 Notes). A place in Bampton Hundred cannot have lain more than about 7 miles from Coombe (or Murley) and could have been less than 2 miles. That it does not feature in later fee-lists suggests that it became part of Burlescombe manor and/or was among lands there used by Walter’s descendent, another Walter de Claville, to found Canonsleigh Priory in c.1160 (London 1965: ix-xi, 2-4); for this reason it has speculatively been mapped in Burlescombe parish. The first element of the place-name Ciclet could represent an Old English word *cicc ‘bend’ or a personal name *Cic(c)a (cf. Parsons 2004: 53), while the second element appears to be OE ge-lēt ‘road-junction, water-conduit’.

Although each of Gundhard’s estates was assessed at ½ hide, that at Ciclet had land for 4 ploughs and (in 1086) a slightly larger population and more pasture than that at Coombe, which had land for 3 ploughs. Despite the difficulties in identifying Ciclet, therefore, it seems to have been the more substantial of the two estates and for that reason has been adopted here for Gundhard’s byname.

Bibliography


Forssner 1916: T. Forssner, Continental-Germanic Personal Names in England in Old and Middle English Times (Uppsala, 1916)

Lewis 1997: C. P. Lewis, ‘Joining the dots: a methodology for identifying the English in Domesday Book’, in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: the Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Woodbridge, 1997)

London 1965: The Cartulary of Canonsleigh Abbey (Harleian MS no. 3660): A Calendar, ed. V. C. M. London, Devon and Cornwall Record Society ns 8 (Torquay, 1965)

Parsons 2004: D. N. Parsons, The Vocabulary of English Place-Names (Ceafor–Cock-pit) (Nottingham, 2004)

Thorn and Thorn 1985: Domesday Book 9: Devon, ed. C. Thorn and F. Thorn (Chichester, 1985)

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