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Topi 4

Name

Summary

Topi 4 was one of two co-holders of a manor in south Essex TRE assessed at about 2¾ hides and with a value of £4.

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
Shire Essex	Phil. ref. 32,34	Vill Fryerning	DB Spelling Topius	Holder 1066 Topi 'of Ing'	Lord 1066 -	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 Robert Gernon	1086 Subtenant William d'Aunay	Fiscal Value 1.38	1066 Value 2.00	1086 Value 2.00	Confidence C	Map
Totals								Fiscal Value	1066 Value	1086 Value

Profile

Topi 4 was the co-holder of one of four estates at Fryerning, in south Essex on a hill overlooking the Roman road approaching Chelmsford, all four of which passed to Robert Gernon (Robert 53) after the Conquest. The manor was called Ingā in DB, representing an Old English folk-name modernized as Ing that occurs in several place-names in the Wid valley. At Fryerning the folk-name has Middle English frerene ‘of the brothers’ as an affix referring to its later medieval holders, the Hospitallers (Reaney 1935: 254, 258-9; Watts 2004: 243, 332).

Topi’s co-holder was Sylvi 2 and although their manor was not the largest of the Fryerning estates in hidage it was the most valuable TRE, worth more than the other three estates combined; the reason for this is not immediately apparent from the details of manorial resources given in DB. Topi and Sylvi ran a mixed agriculture, with 1½ ploughs for the arable on their demesne and a further 1½ ploughs on the lands of their peasants, who comprised one villan and fourteen bordars with their households. On the pastoral side of the manor were ten cattle and twenty sheep together with thirty pigs that probably foraged in the small area of woodland. Also recorded were a horse (runcinus ‘rouncy’) that may have been a pack animal and two beehives to provide honey and wax.

For both men this appears to have been the only estate they held TRE but the division of the estate between them and their relationship to each other (if any) is not apparent from DB, although it is notable that both had extremely rare Old Danish names and some familial relationship is possible. There seems no reason to consider Topi 4 in connection with Topi 5, whose small estate more than 25 miles away passed to a different post-Conquest successor, nor with anyone else of that name.

Bibliography

Reaney 1935: P. H. Reaney, The Place-Names of Essex (Cambridge, 1935)

Watts 2004: V. E. Watts, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (Cambridge, 2004)