Gauti 4

Gauti housecarl of Earl Harold
Male
DWP
4 of 5

Name

Gauti
Gauti 5

Summary

Gauti 4 was the TRE holder of eight or nine estates across Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Essex and Suffolk with a total assessment of just under 29 hides and a valuation of about £45. He was described as both a housecarl and a thegn of Earl Harold (Harold 3).

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
Essex 13,1 Hutton Gotius Gauti, housecarl of Earl Harold - Gausbert, abbot of Battle - 2.83 5.00 6.00 D Map
Essex 28,1 Ateleia Gotius Gauti, housecarl of Earl Harold Harold, earl Hamon the steward Serlo 'of Essex' 1.00 1.00 1.00 B Map
Essex 28,11 Stambourne Gotius Gauti, housecarl of Earl Harold - Hamon the steward - 0.50 5.00 6.00 C Map
Essex 28,11 Toppesfield Gotius Gauti, housecarl of Earl Harold - Hamon the steward - 0.50 7.00 8.00 C Map
Essex 28,9 Little Wigborough Gotius Gauti, housecarl of Earl Harold - Hamon the steward Vitalis 'of Little Wigborough' 8.00 7.00 7.00 C Map
Hertfordshire 17,13 Cockhampstead Gouti Gauti, housecarl of Earl Harold Harold, earl Eustace, count - 2.00 7.00 7.00 A Map
Middlesex 8,3 East Bedfont Gouti Gauti, housecarl of Earl Harold Harold, earl Robert, count of Mortain - 2.00 1.00 0.25 A Map
Middlesex 8,4 Feltham - Gauti, housecarl of Earl Harold Harold, earl Robert, count of Mortain - 7.00 4.67 3.50 C Map
Suffolk 3,56 Nettlestead Gouti Gauti, housecarl of Earl Harold - Alan, count Erland 'Nettlestead' 5.00 7.50 7.50 D Map
Totals

Profile

Gauti 4 is explicitly described as ‘a housecarl of Earl Harold’ (Harold 3) only in the Domesday Book entry for his TRE estate of 2 hides at East Bedfont in Middlesex, which he held with the power of alienation. However, the entry also notes that ‘this land belonged and belongs to Feltham’, which had been held as two manors TRE: one was of 5 hides held by an unnamed thegn of King Edward (Edward 15), the other was of 7 hides held by an unnamed thegn of Earl Harold, with both thegns having power of alienation. Given that the terms ‘thegn’ and ‘housecarl’ appear to have been to a great extent interchangeable (Hooper 1985: 174-5), it seems probable that the ‘thegn of Earl Harold’ who held the larger part of Feltham was the same as the ‘housecarl of Earl Harold’ who held its dependent lands at East Bedfont (Pinder 1969: 100) and that this was therefore Gauti 4.

The Gauti who held the 2-hide manor of Cockhampstead in Hertfordshire TRE was also described as ‘a thegn of Earl Harold’ (and again with power of alienation); and although the TRW successor at Cockhampstead was Count Eustace of Boulogne (Eustace 1) whereas the successor at Feltham and East Bedfont was Count Robert of Mortain (Robert 9), it is highly improbable that Earl Harold would have been the lord of two different thegns (or housecarls) with the same extremely rare name Gauti. Although the manor at Cockhampstead lay nearly 40 miles away from Gauti 4’s Middlesex estates this does not seem too far removed for someone who was clearly a medium thegn (i.e. one holding between about 5 and 40 hides of land) to have held both.

Another estate to have been held TRE by someone called Gauti in the lordship of someone called Harold was a single hide at an unidentified Ateleia in Barstable Hundred, Essex. In this instance it looks as though Gauti was holding the land in dependent tenure and there is no mention of his being a thegn nor, indeed, of Harold being the earl of that name. Nevertheless, Earl Harold held very extensive estates in Essex TRE and parts of several of these (such as Hatfield Broadoak) had passed to Hamon the Steward (Hamon 2), who was also the TRW successor as tenant-in-chief at Atelieia (Round 1903: 336-7). It is therefore almost certain that the Harold who was TRE lord of Ateleia was Earl Harold and thus, in turn, that the man with the extremely rare name Gauti who was Earl Harold’s dependent tenant there was Gauti 4.

This being the case, it is highly likely that the other three Essex estates held by Hamo as tenant-in-chief in 1086 in succession to someone called Gauti – namely 7 hides of land and 1 of woodland at Great and Little Wigborough (a small part of which was held by Count Eustace rather than Hamo TRW, which may echo some claim relating to the count’s succession to Gauti 4 at Cockhampstead), and 1 hide held as two manors at Stambourne and Toppesfield – had also been held by Gauti 4 TRE, despite there being no mention of this TRE holder being either a thegn or a housecarl (although the Wigborough entry refers to him as a free man) nor of having any TRE association with Earl Harold.

It is also likely, as Rumble (1983: Notes to 28,1) has pointed out, that another estate in Essex held TRE by a ‘free man’ called Gauti, namely a manor of 3 hides (less 20 acres) at Hutton in Barstable Hundred, had been held by the same Gauti who had held Ateleia in the same hundred; in other words, that this too was one of Gauti 4’s TRE estates. There are some potential problems with this identification, however. The first is that this estate had passed to Battle Abbey rather than to Hamo the Steward by 1086 and this difference in successors could indicate a corresponding difference in their TRE antecessors. Against this objection can be set the fact that Gauti 4’s estates elsewhere did not pass to a single successor; furthermore, Battle Abbey was granted several estates that had previously been held by Earl Harold and it may be that this rationale extended to some lands of Harold’s followers such as Gauti 4. The second potential problem is that DB gives the spelling Gotius for all the TRE instances of the name in Essex but spells it Couti, Gouta or Gouti for the TRE instances elsewhere, which could indicate that the Essex landholder was called Gøti (the Old Danish form of the name) rather than Gauti; however, the fact that these Gotius spellings include the thegn who held the estate at Ateleia in Harold’s lordship (and who was almost certainly Gauti 4) strongly suggests that Gotius represents a local or scribal variation in spelling rather than a separate name (cf. von Feilitzen 1937: 258, 274). Despite these potential problems, therefore, it remains most probable that the Essex estates at Ateleia, Wigborough, Stambourne, Toppesfield and Hutton were all held TRE by Gauti 4.

The case for including the 5 carucates at Nettlestead in Suffolk among Gauti 4’s TRE estates is much less clear-cut. The Gauti who held it TRE as a manor was described (as at Wigborough and Hutton) simply as a ‘free man’, rather than as a thegn or housecarl, and there is no apparent connection between Nettlestead and the lordship of Earl Harold; furthermore, the manor had by 1086 passed to Erland as a subtenant of Count Alan 1, neither of whom was a successor to Gauti 4 elsewhere. Although these potential problems are all made ex silentio and when taken separately none needs be fatal to the identification of Gauti 4 as the TRE holder of Nettlestead, when taken together they do seem to weigh against it. The evidence in favour of the identification is similarly nebulous: someone who held 5 carucates of land was of potentially thegnly status, the name Gauti was extremely rare, and Gauti 4’s other estates all lay in the same part of England, with the closest (at Stambourne and Toppesfield) being only 23 miles away. On balance, the positive evidence seems just to outweigh the negative and tip the balance of probability in favour of the identification of Gauti 4 as the TRE holder of Nettlestead.

There is perhaps another reason to link Gauti 4 with an estate in Suffolk, in this instance one of 10 carucates at Freckenham in the north-west of the county and about 30 and 21 miles respectively from Nettlestead and Stambourne. Although DB records the TRE holder of this estate as being Orthi, a thegn of Earl Harold, a bilingual post-Conquest writ records that Thorbjorn 1 (spelt Turbertus and Þurbearn in the writ) and Gauti 1 (spelt Gotinus and Goti) held it from Earl Harold ‘on the day that William crossed the sea’ (Pelteret 1990: 63 no.25; Bates 1998: 715-16 no.226). The writ relates to Rochester Cathedral’s claim to Freckenham and the extant version was written some time after the events it describes and is not entirely trustworthy, but the references to Thorbiorn 1 and Gauti 1 are incidental to Rochester’s claim and may well be genuine. If so, then it is virtually certain that Gauti 1 and Gauti 4 were the same person rather than that Earl Harold was the lord of two such men of that name. The fact that DB records the TRE holder as Orthi rather than as Gauti or Thorbiorn need not be as problematic as Bates (1998: 715) supposed, nor is it necessary to accept the suggestion by Fleming (1991: 86 n.139) that the unique DB name Orthi represents a mistranscription of Gauti. Instead, it may be that Harold reassigned the Freckenham estate after becoming king, hence the difference between the TRE holder recorded in DB and the holders ‘on the day that William crossed the sea’ recorded in the writ.

It is also probable that Gauti 4 is to be identified with the Gouti 1 who witnessed (as Gouti) the will of Thurstan 9, datable to 1043x1045 (S 1531; Whitelock 1930: 80-5 no.31, 192-7). As with Gauti 4, Gouti 1 too is found alongside Earl Harold, both being named among the witnesses from Norfolk (these were followed by separate lists for Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex; no witness is repeated in a subsequent list). Although Rumble (1986: Notes to 3,56) regarded this Norfolk context as a bar to identifying Gouti 1 with the Gauti who held Nettlestead in Suffolk TRE, it should be noted that some twenty-two years separate Thurstan’s will and the Conquest, during which interval the fortunes of the Godwines and their followers fluctuated. On balance, the rarity of the name Gauti and the association with Earl Harold are again in favour of identifying the Gouti 1 who witnessed Thurstan’s will with Gauti 4. If so, then not only does this imply that in the mid-1040s Gauti 4 held lands in Norfolk that (for whatever reason) he did not hold in the mid-1060s, but it also implies that he had been born in or before the late 1020s. On present evidence, however, it is not possible to determine if he was likely to have been of insular or foreign origin.

Despite this apparent connection with Norfolk, it does not seem possible that Gauti 4 could be the same as Gauti 5, who with Eskil shared a tiny estate of 2½ acres in south Norfolk in 1086 and appears to have done so before the Conquest as well. Although this land was held by someone with the extremely rare name Gauti and lay close to Nettlestead and Freckenham.

Bibliography


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

Clarke 1994: P. A. Clarke, The English Nobility under Edward the Confessor (Oxford, 1994), pp. 308-9.

Fleming 1991: R. Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991), p. 86 n.139.

Hooper 1985: N. Hooper, ‘The housecarls in England in the eleventh century’, Anglo-Norman Studies 7 (1985), 161-76

Pelteret 1990: D. A. E. Pelteret, Catalogue of English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents (Woodbridge, 1990)

Pinder 1969: T. G. Pinder, ‘Domesday Survey’, in A History of the County of Middlesex, Volume I, ed. J. S. Cockburn, H. P. F. King and K. G. T. McDonnell (Oxford, 1969), pp. 80-118

Round 1903: J. H. Round, ‘Domesday Survey’, in H. A. Doubleday and W. Page, eds., A History of Essex, Volume I (London, 1903), pp. 333-425

Rumble 1983: Domesday Book 32: Essex, ed. A. Rumble (Chichester, 1983)

Rumble 1986: Domesday Book 34: Suffolk, ed. A. Rumble (Chichester, 1986)

S: P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, Royal Historical Society Guides and Handbooks 8 (London, 1968), revised by S. Kelly, R. Rushforth et al., The Electronic Sawyer: Online Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Charters, published online through Kemble: The Anglo-Saxon Charters Website, currently at http://www.esawyer.org.uk/about/index.html

von Feilitzen 1937: Olof von Feilitzen, The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book, Nomina Germanica 3 (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1937)

Whitelock 1930: Anglo-Saxon Wills, ed. D. Whitelock (Cambridge, 1930)