Top of page Name Summary Distribution Map Property List Profile Bibliography Bottom of page

Nowy 2

Name

Summary

Nowy 2 was a Welsh landowner in Archenfield, annexed to Herefordshire in the earlier 1060s. He 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
Shire Herefordshire	Phil. ref. 1,59	Vill Penebecdoc	DB Spelling Noui	Holder 1066 Nowy 'of Penebecdoc'	Lord 1066 -	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 William, king	1086 Subtenant Roger de Lacy	Fiscal Value 0.00	1066 Value 0.50	1086 Value 0.50	Confidence A	Map
Totals								Fiscal Value	1066 Value	1086 Value

Sub-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
Shire Herefordshire	Phil. ref. 1,59	Vill Penebecdoc	DB Spelling Noui	Holder 1066 Nowy 'of Penebecdoc'	Lord 1066 -	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 William, king	1086 Subtenant Roger de Lacy	Fiscal Value 0.00	1066 Value 0.50	1086 Value 0.50	Confidence -	Map
Totals								Fiscal Value	1066 Value	1086 Value

Profile

The Welsh name Nowy occurs just once in DB, as the holder in both 1066 and 1086 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).

Nowy’s estate was named in DB as Penebecdoc, a name which does not survive. The suggestion that it might be Pendigot, on the western side of Archenfield, is ruled out by a twelfth-century form of that name (Phill. Herefs. note 1,59; PN Herefs. 136). The name evidently starts Pen y ‘end/top of the’, and it has been plausibly suggested that the second element might be bidog ‘dagger’, in reference to the shape of a hill (PN Herefs. 137). The name would therefore mean something like ‘end of the hill shaped like a dagger blade’.

Some progress towards locating Nowy’s estate can be made by considering what it consisted of and which Norman held it in 1086. Nowy held his land on exactly the same terms as the son of Costelin 2 at Birch: each of them had 4 ploughs, held from Roger de Lacy for a rent of six sesters of honey and 10s. (Herefs. 1:58–59). Roger de Lacy’s other possessions in Archenfield comprised part of the manor of Westwood (Herefs. 1:61) and the church of Llanwarne and its glebe (Herefs. 2:12), the latter attached to the bishop of Hereford’s manor of Holme Lacy and held as the bishop’s tenant. The land at Westwood is identified as Wrmenton by a marginal note in the ‘Herefordshire Domesday’ of the 1160s (a complete copy of DB for Herefordshire, annotated with place-name and tenurial identifications and other material) (Galbraith and Tait 1950: 20). Wrmenton, afterwards a manor of Gloucester abbey, can be confidently located at a deserted site close to the church of Much Dewchurch; it was named from the Worm Brook, which rises near by (PN Herefs. 67).

Lacy’s three identifiable manors in Archenfield (Birch, Wrmenton, and Llanwarne church) formed a block of land around what became the hundredal meeting place of Wormelow Tump (Wightman 1966: 128–9). Nowy’s holding from Roger de Lacy at Penebecdoc is likely to have been close by. Possibly it should be identified as Orcop, just south-west of those holdings, whose English name means ‘ridge with a peak’, from OE ōra, ‘ridge’, and OE copp, ‘peak’ (PN Herefs. 155; Gelling and Cole 2000: 158–9, 203–10), a name reminiscent of the possible meaning of Penebecdoc.

Nowy’s estate was not very large, but he must have been of some standing in Archenfield, since he was not lumped in with the unnamed men who held directly from the king (Herefs. 1:49).

Bibliography

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

Gelling and Cole 2000: Margaret Gelling and Ann Cole, The Landscape of Place-Names (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2000)

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

Phill. Herefs.: Domesday Book, ed. John Morris, 17: Herefordshire, ed. Frank and Caroline Thorn (Chichester: Phillimore, 1983)

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

Wightman 1966: W. E. Wightman, The Lacy Family in England and Normandy, 1066–1194 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966)