Bucca 3

Bucca ‘of Leueberge’ (Kent), fl. 1066
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Bucca

Summary

Bucca 3 held 1 yoke 5 acres worth 8 shillings in an unidentified vill in east Kent.

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
Kent 5,196 Leueberge Boche Bucca 'of Leueberge' Edward, king Odo, bishop of Bayeux Thurstan Tinel 0.56 0.40 0.40 A Map
Totals

Profile

The name Bucca appears only once in DB, holding ‘from King Edward’ 1 yoke 5 acres at Leueberge, the largest of three holdings there TRE and comprising very nearly two thirds of the vill.

Leueberge does not survive as a place-name and has eluded precise identification. It lay in Bewsbury hundred, which stretched inland from the coast either side of Dover up on to the North Downs. The pattern of succession is no help with identification, since neither of the bishop’s tenants at Leueberge in 1086 had any other holding in the hundred. Nor is the position of Leueberge in the run of DB entries for the bishop’s fief, since this part of the return is arranged by the names of the subtenants, not geographically (Kent 5:185–96).

It has been argued, however, that the name Leueberge means ‘(at the) eleven barrows’ (Phill. Kent, note 5,189), which opens the possibility of locating it through archaeology, in particular from aerial photographic evidence for ploughed-out barrows and their ring ditches, which typically survive only as crop marks. The north-eastern fringes of the hundred coincide with a remarkable concentration of barrows, though none of the groups hitherto identified contains as many as eleven (Perkins 2010: esp. 285).

Another possibility is that Leueberge lay in Guston parish, which is otherwise represented in DB only by two rather small holdings amounting to 1 yoke 25 acres and 1½ ploughteams, seemingly far too little for the area of the later parish. Two Bronze Age barrows survived in Guston long enough to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey (Ashbee and Dunning 1960: 55, no. 7), though the parish was outside the area in which clusters of barrows were most numerous. Leueberge has been mapped provisionally in the southern part of Guston.

A charter of the early 1040s for Guston’s eastern neighbour West Cliffe says that the West Cliffe estate had on its western side beocceding land. The meaning of ‘Beocced’s land’ is unclear, and if the word has been transmitted accurately (the charter is apparently an original) the underlying personal name ought to be Beocca rather than Bucca (S 1044; LangScape), so perhaps the similarity in the two names is merely a concidence.

Bibliography


Ashbee and Dunning 1960:

LangScape: LangScape. The Language of Landscape: Reading the Anglo-Saxon Countryside http://www.langscape.org.uk  

Phill. Kent: Domesday Book, ed. John Morris, 11: Kent, ed. Philip Morgan (Chichester: Phillimore, 1983)

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