Costelin 2

Costelin ‘of Birch’ in Archenfield (Herefs.), fl. 1066
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Costelin

Summary

Costelin 2 was a Welsh landowner in Archenfield, annexed to Herefordshire in the earlier 1060s. His son survived on the same estate as tenant of a Norman lord in 1086, when he paid a rent of six sesters of honey and 10s.

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
Herefordshire 1,58 Birch Costelin Costelin 'of Birch' - William, king Roger de Lacy 0.00 0.75 0.75 A Map
Totals

Profile

The Welsh name Costelin occurs only once in DB, as the holder of one of the ‘vills or lands’ (villæ vel terræ) in Archenfield (Ergyng in Welsh), a culturally and linguistically Welsh territory which probably came definitively under English rule only with Earl Harold’s defeat of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn in 1062–3 (Lewis 1985: 158–62).

Costelin’s holding was named in DB as Mainaure and is identified as (Much and Little) Birch  in the centre of Archenfield by the marginal note Birches in the ‘Herefordshire Domesday’, a complete copy of DB for Herefordshire made in the 1160s and annotated with place-name and tenurial identifications and other material (HDB: 20). The place-name in DB, Mainaure, represents the south Welsh word maenor, the term for a district comprising a number of vills which was a standard component of early Welsh territorial organization. It is not clear that Maenor was ever used as a simplex place-name (though it did form place-names qualified by a personal name: Owen and Morgan 2007: 305), and DB may have misunderstood the common noun maenor as a proper name. Later evidence suggests that Birch was the remnant of a much larger land-unit covering several adjoining places, a true maenor in the Welsh sense (Jones 1972: 306–7; PN Herefs. 33–4).

Costelin’s holding in 1066 was not especially large: his (unnamed) son inherited it and in 1086 held as subtenant of Roger de Lacy with just 4 ploughteams in demesne. Costelin was nonetheless of some standing in Archenfield, since he was not included among the unnamed men who held directly from the king in 1066 (Herefs. 1:49).

Bibliography


HDB: Herefordshire Domesday (c. 1160–1170) from Balliol College MS. 350, ed. V. H. Galbraith and James Tait, Pipe Roll Society new series 25 (1950)

Jones 1972 = Glanville R. J. Jones, ‘Post-Roman Wales’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, I (ii): a.d. 43–1042, ed. H. P. R. Finberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 281–382

Lewis 1985: CPL, ‘English and Norman government and lordship in the Welsh borders, 1039–1087’ (Oxford University D.Phil. thesis, 1985)

Owen and Morgan 2007: Hywel Wyn Owen and Richard Morgan, Dictionary of the Place-Names of Wales (Llandysul: Gomer, 2007)

PN Herefs.: Bruce Coplestone-Crow, Herefordshire Place-Names, British Archaeological Reports, British Series 214 (1989)