Gos 2

Gos ‘of Huntingdon’, fl. 1066
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Gos

Summary

Gos 2 had an interest in a block of urban property in Huntingdon which was attached to an adjoining rural manor. Either he was the tenant of the other person with an interest in the houses concerned, or (much more speculatively) he was her lord, for the rural manor too. If the latter, his unusual name may in fact conceal that of Gospatric, briefly earl of Northumbria under William I.

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
Huntingdonshire B14 Huntingdon Gos Gos 'of Huntingdon' Edward, king William, king Judith, countess 0.00 0.00 0.00 A Map
Huntingdonshire D3 Huntingdon Gos Gos 'of Huntingdon' Edward, king - - 0.00 0.00 0.00 A Map
Totals

Profile

The name Gos appears only in Huntingdon, in association with Hungifu (Hungifu 4) as owner of 16 houses which had passed by 1086 to Countess Judith (Judith 3), widow of Earl Waltheof (Waltheof 2): ‘In this borough Gos and Hungifu (Hunef) used to have 16 houses TRE with sake & soke & toll & team. Countess Judith has them now.’ Possession of sake and soke and toll and team, Hungifu’s name as co-holder TRE, and ownership by Countess Judith in 1086 serve to identify the houses in question as the block of land which in the thirteenth century was a soke or liberty within the borough of Huntingdon attached to the manor of Great Stukeley, which adjoined the borough along Ermine Street to the north. The core of the liberty in 1279 was the built-up part of Ermine Street running out of Huntingdon towards Great Stukeley church and onwards to Peterborough, a stretch of road then called Baldwinshoe and in the seventeenth century Bolme Holle (VCH Hunts. II, plate facing p. 124, 128, 135). In the nineteenth century the boundary between Huntingdon and Great Stukeley was heavily indented in a way which suggests artificiality and/or a late date (Kain and Oliver 2001: nos. 17/64, 134).

There is a second reference to Hungifu’s and Gos’s houses in the testimony of the men of the borough recorded at the end of the county folios (Hunts. D:3): ‘The men who swear in Huntingdon . . . testify that the land of Hungifu and Gos was under the hand of King Edward on the day he was alive and dead, and that they held from him, not from the earl. But they say that they heard that King William will have been obliged to give it to Waltheof.’ The meaning of the last verb is crucial to understanding this passage: they heard quod rex .W. debuerit eam dare Walleuo. The phrase has been variously translated, never with happy results. Frank Stenton made it ‘they heard that king William was said to give it’ to Waltheof (VCH Hunts. I, 354), which is barely intelligible. More recent translations are ‘they had heard that King William was going to give it to Waltheof’ (Phill. Hunts.: D,3) and ‘they had heard that King William should have given it to Waltheof’ (Alecto trans.: 561), both of which are wrong. Debere with an infinitive (here dare, ‘to give’) had a perfectly straightforward meaning in classical Latin, carrying the sense of ‘to be under an obligation (to do something)’. The tense (debuerit) is future perfect, so the meaning is ‘they heard that King William will have been obliged to give it to Waltheof’. This makes sense of the preceding phrase in DB: the land in question was not held from the earl TRE but nonetheless King William will have been obliged to give it to Earl Waltheof. Why was he so obliged (in the jurors’ opinion)? Surely because the urban tenements in question were part of Earl Waltheof’s manor of Great Stukeley. King William clearly did give the urban land of Hungifu and Gos with its sixteen houses to Waltheof, since it belonged to his widow Judith in 1086. Judith’s possession may have been impeded by the fact that Eustace, sheriff of Huntingdon, had make a claim to Great Stukeley, noted laconically in DB (‘Eustace claims’) with a marginal d in what looks like a late addition at the end of the entry for Great Stukeley. Perhaps Eustace claimed only the urban part of the manor, which would explain why it was the borough jurors who made a pronouncement, while the county jurors were evidently not required to consider the matter.

This leaves a puzzle about Gos’s position. Why is he mentioned as owner of the houses in Huntingdon but not of the rural manor to which they belonged? Only the most tentative of solutions can be offered. Gos might in theory be some male relative or dependent of Hungifu, even a tenant of her urban property who had no interest in Great Stukeley as such. A more remote possibility is that Gos did have an interest in Great Stukeley which DB does not report. The Huntingdonshire return does not generally preserve information about TRE lordship, apart from a handful of manors held in dependent tenure from abbots (Hunts. 6:17; 20:1; 22:1–2). So Hungifu could well have held Great Stukeley from a lord, and that lord could well have been Gos. Pursuing that hypothesis, Gos as lord of Great Stukeley is unlikely to have been some obscure person with an odd name; more likely he was someone of significance. That opens the possibility that DB’s Gos conceals the name Gospatric, the only insular name that starts with that string of letters. As it happens, there is a prime candidate for a Gospatric who might well have had an interest in Great Stukeley and its urban liberty in 1066.

One of the historical Gospatrics alive on the day King Edward was himself alive and dead (as Gos is stated to have been) was Waltheof’s immediate predecessor as earl of Northumbria (Gospatric 1). Through his mother, Gospatric was a grandson of Earl Uhtræd of Northumbria (d. 1016). He was himself elevated to the earldom of Northumbria by William I in 1067 and deposed from the office in favour of Waltheof in 1072 (Aird 2004). Gospatric was a kinsman of Edward the Confessor (his grandmother, Earl Uhtræd’s wife, was the king’s half-sister), and may well have held land in southern counties TRE. A strategically significant manor partly within one of the greatest towns of the southern Danelaw and astride the Roman road from London to York (Ermine Street) is exactly the sort of place where we might expect to find such a great northern lord. On this hypothesis, Hungifu will have held Great Stukeley and its urban liberty from Gospatric, which would help to explain why Earl Waltheof and Judith acquired it afterwards.

Bibliography


Aird 2004: William M. Aird, ‘Gospatric, earl of Northumbria (d. 1073x5)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Alecto trans.: Domesday Book: A Complete Translation, ed. Ann Williams and G. H. Martin (London: Penguin Books, 2002)

Kain and Oliver 2001: Roger J. P. Kain and Richard R. Oliver, Historic Parishes of England & Wales: An Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata (Colchester: History Data Service, 2001)

Phill. Hunts.: Domesday Book, ed. John Morris, 19: Huntingdonshire (Chichester: Phillimore, 1975)

VCH Hunts.: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: The Victoria History of the County of Huntingdon, ed. William Page, Granville Proby, and others, 3 vols and index (London: The St. Catherine Press, 1926–38)