Swithgar 1

Swithgar the secretary, fl. 1066
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Swithgar

Summary

Swithgar 1 owned a valuable manor in north Kent from Queen Eadgyth and was a canon of the royal collegiate church of St Martin’s at Dover, where he had two smaller holdings as prebends. Assessed at only 9 sulungs, his lands were worth £45 10s. He was a priest in the royal household who witnessed and wrote charters as Swithgar the secretary (notarius).

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 13,1 Newington Sidgar Swithgar the secretary Eadgyth, queen Albert the Lotharingian - 15.00 40.00 34.00 A Map
Kent M10 St Margaret's at Cliffe Sigar Swithgar the secretary unnamed canons of Dover Unnamed canons of Dover in 1086 Walter de Cambremer 2.00 3.50 3.00 A Map
Kent M11 St Margaret's at Cliffe - Swithgar the secretary unnamed canons of Dover Unnamed canons of Dover in 1086 Robert Trublet 1.00 2.00 1.50 B Map
Totals

Profile

The identification of Swithgar as a Domesday landowner starts outside DB, in three forged charters of Edward the Confessor purporting to date from the 1060s. First, a general confirmation of the privileges and lands of Ramsey abbey (Hunts.), dated 1062, includes among the witnesses the statement ‘+ I Swithgar the secretary wrote this’ (+ Ego Switgarius notarius scripsi) (S 1030). Swithgar’s attestation follows that of Regenbald the chancellor (Regenbald 1), the two being placed after the bishops and before the abbots. Secondly, a general confirmation for Earl Harold’s collegiate church at Waltham (Essex) is ‘signed’ at the end, after a long list of witnesses, ‘I Swithgar have assented to this in Christ’s name +’ (Haec ego subscripsi Swidgar sub nomine Christi +) (S 1036). In that charter Swithgar’s attestation differs from the rest in having the sign of the cross after the name rather than before, in not having any kind of status identification (episcopus, abbas, comes, or the like), and in providing a verb of assent, otherwise confined to the important people who head the list, and to Harold as patron of Waltham. Without saying so unequivocally (unless the verb subscripsi is taken literally to mean ‘I have written under’), the witness list nonetheless arguably singles out Swithgar as the scribe. Finally, a charter for Westminster abbey, the so-called First Charter, dated 28 December 1065, ends, after the witnesses and an elaborate dating clause, with ‘[I] Swithgar the secretary, for Regenbald, chancellor of the royal prerogative, wrote this charter and have joyfully assented in God’s name. Amen’ (Swiðgarus notarius ad uicem Reinbaldi regiae dignitatis cancellarii hanc cartam scripsi et subscripsi in dei nomine foeliciter. Amen) (S 1043).

All three charters including Swithgar’s name (Switgarius, Swidgar, and Swiðgarius) as scribe are outright forgeries. The Waltham and Westminster texts were composed by Osbert de Clare in the second quarter of the twelfth century. Although Osbert made up their contents and phrasing, he evidently copied or adapted the lists of witnesses from authentic charters of Edward’s reign. In any case, the Ramsey charter has nothing to do with Osbert, and provides independent evidence for the existence of Swithgar the secretary (notarius), a charter-writing royal priest associated with Regenbald the chancellor (Keynes 1987: 197–203, 209–10).

A writer of royal charters (even if not these charters) on behalf of the chancellor in the earlier 1060s is likely in principle to have been a senior priest who was well supported financially, if not so lavishly as his master Regenbald. Swithgar can indeed be identified in DB as the holder of church lands in Kent in 1066. His chief manor was Newington, in the fertile foothills of the North Downs on the road from Rochester to Canterbury, 9 miles from the former and 18 from the latter. Its TRE owner was named in GDB as Sidgar and in IA as Sindgar. IA’s spellings often represent OE personal names rather better than GDB’s. Sindgar is either the CG name Swindger (a specifically High German form) or a misreading (through confusing the minims) of Suidgar or Suiðgar, that is OE Swithgar. The fact that Newington was held from Queen Eadgyth does not necessarily mean that Swithgar was a member of her household rather than the king’s. Newington was held in 1086 by another royal priest, the Lotharingian Albert the chaplain (Albert 3).

Newington will bear close investigation. There are several unusual features of it as an estate, and some evidence that it still in 1066 accommodated a collegiate prebendal church and perhaps a house of nuns. The survival of a nunnery would help to explain why the estate had been assigned to the queen. The manor was worth the large sum of £40 TRE, most of which came from places other than Newington itself. The demesne, not separately valued in 1066, was at farm for only £3 in 1086, when the tenants, though numerous (10 villans and 48 bordars), had only five ploughteams and the other local resources were modest: 12 acres of meadow, a fishery, and ‘a small wood for fencing’. Although the manor also included urban tenements in Canterbury and Rochester, the 6 hagae in question were worth only 64d. There were also woodland denns, outlying pastures which paid 30 pigs a year for swine pannage. The denns can probably be located among the places on the Downs south of Newington where the manor still had quit-rents in the seventeenth century: Stockbury, Bredgar, and Bedmonton (in Wormshill) only a few miles away, and Otham, Wierton (in Boughton Monchelsea), and West Farleigh up to 9 miles distant (Hasted 1797–1801: VI, 51). The manor also drew quit-rents from Minster and Leysdown on the island of Sheppey in the Thames estuary, and some of Swithgar’s peasant tenants may have lived there. There were other connections with Sheppey, as will appear shortly.

A large part of Swithgar’s income from Newington derived from payments made out of the adjoining royal manor of Milton Regis. Milton was an enormous complex scattered estate of 84 sulungs worth £200 in 1066 (Kent 1:3), the most valuable manor in England. GDB tells us that 28 sulungs of Milton paid Newington 28 weys (pensae) of cheese and £10 10s. (IA says £11 10s. and specifies that it was gablum, that is, gavel rent), and that another 9 sulungs gave 28½ weys of cheese and 58s. of gablum, for which Swithgar rendered cartage (avera) at Milton.

The wey of cheese was a large measure, in the thirteenth century varying between 175 lbs and 196 lbs (Grierson 1987b: 84). Only one of the handful of DB references gives its value in cash: the 10 weys of cheese rendered at Buckland (Berks.) were worth 33s. 4d. (i.e. 2 marks or 400d.), correcting DB’s reading of 32s. 4d. (Berks. 5:1) on the presumption that .xxxii. was a mistake for .xxxiii. A wey of cheese in the Vale of White Horse was thus worth 40d. The same valuation at Newington would make the total of Swithgar’s revenues in cash and cheese from Milton Regis £23 16s. 4d., more than half the value of Newington TRE. The high value of Newington, in other words, depended on the diversion of revenues from the adjacent royal manor.

Newington, literally ‘the new estate’ (Ekwall 1960: 340), had once undoubtedly been part of Milton Regis, a primary focus for the early kings of Kent. After it was separated, Newington’s (new?) church became one of the mother-churches of Kent, collecting chrism on behalf of seven daughter-churches in the vicinity (Everitt 1986: 159, 190, 261; Tatton-Brown 1988: 107–9; Eales 1992: 36, 38). Newington’s foundation as a minster and mother-church can probably be dated to the Viking or immediately post-Viking period by making use of the confused traditions about the nuns of Minster-in-Sheppey that were preserved at St Augustine’s abbey and elsewhere in later centuries. Minster-in-Sheppey was a royal nunnery of the seventh century associated with the kings of Kent and supposedly founded from an earlier house at Milton Regis (Rollason 1982: 30–1, 87); much of the nave of the seventh-century monastic church survives at Minster (Taylor and Taylor 1980–4: I, 429–30). The nuns may have been driven from the island by the Viking attack on Sheppey in 835 or the overwintering of another Viking army in 855–6 (ASC), or in some unrecorded episode. It is plausible to see the nuns resettled at Newington (as VCH Kent II, 149), and Newington separated from Milton, in the wake of those disasters. Asser’s reference in the 890s to the ‘excellent monastery’ ‘built’ on the island of Sheppey (in qua monasterium optimum constructum est) (Asser, c. 3) was arguably only to the building rather than to a functioning religious house on the island.

The nunnery of Minster-in-Sheppey, however, may well have continued at Newington. The link between the two places was turned on its head in later legend, which had a nunnery at Newington removed to Sheppey after the abbess was strangled at night in her own bed by her cook, or in another version—even more bizarrely—by her cat (Foot 2000: II, 121–3; Douglas 1944: 13 note 7). A group of nuns certainly did reoccupy the old monastic site on Sheppey in 1130 (Knowles and Hadcock 1971: 261), and they may well have come from Newington.

In parallel with that strange story about the origins and fate of the nunnery of Newington, there was a second, and plainly related, legend about a house of seven secular canons in the same place. The story, again as preserved at St Augustine’s, had the canons established soon before 1170 when Henry II gave them the lands of the former nunnery. It went on to say that one of the seven canons was murdered and four of his brethren were found guilty of the crime, with the other two being acquitted; the latter then gave their shares of the church’s endowment to St Augustine’s, while the king granted the rest to his justiciar Richard de Lucy (d. 1179) (Knowles and Hadcock 1971: 433). The story served to explain why the vill of Newington in later times was divided into two estates: the abbey’s manor of Newington and the Lucys’ manor of Newington Lucies (Hasted 1797–1801: VI, 48–56), while its enumeration of seven canons likely follows the number of Newington’s daughter churches. In reality, this account postdates Richard de Lucy’s interest in the manor by many years: there is evidence that Newington was part of his paternal inheritance, having been acquired from Henry I soon after the Lucys first settled in England (ODNB, citing Amt 1988). That being so, the dispersal of the canons of Newington—whether or not it happened in so dramatic a fashion—can perhaps be pushed back to the time of Henry I. Certainly the arrival of the Lucys will have deprived them of at least part of their endowment.

This conjectural history accords with other and better established facts about Newington church. It was certainly prebendal, i.e. collegiate, in the late eleventh and early twelfth century, when the prebends were claimed variously by the archbishop of Canterbury and the abbot of St Augustine’s.

Some time before 1082 Archbishop Lanfranc had a writ from William I restoring to him all the customs in the church of Newington which his predecessors had under earlier kings (Bates 1998: no. 73). The wording is general, but evidently what was meant was the four prebends worth £6 that the archbishop listed at the end of his demesne manors in Domesday Monachorum (DM: 88); the income—but not its precise source—was also noted in GDB’s account of Newington, and for 1086 only, not TRE, suggesting that it was not in the archbishop’s hands in Swithgar’s time, and thus either that the prebends were then still in the hands of individual canons or that they were held by Swithgar. Much later, four prebends at Newington were among the extended list of property said to have been recovered by Lanfranc against Bishop Odo through the land-plea on Penenden Heath in 1072 (Bates 1998: no. 69 at pp. 321–2, where an earlier place in the list, Newendenne is wrongly identified also as Newington). The extended list appears only in an interpolation of the thirteenth or fourteenth century (Bates 1998: p. 319). In fact, Lanfranc’s claim was presumably not against Odo but against either Swithgar or Albert the chaplain.

There was another, conflicting claim to eight prebends at Newington by the abbots of St Augustine’s, who repeatedly obtained writs which restored what their predecessors had enjoyed, after rulings in their favour in the shire court of Kent in William I’s time, at a meeting of three shires at Southwark under William II, and in the hundred court of Milton under Henry I (Bates 1998: no. 88; van Caenegem 1990–1: I, nos. 6, 157, 201, 213). The abbey never did win back the church, which fell under the control of the Lucys at some point after 1108 × 1116 (when their antagonist locally was one Ralph Goiz) and was given by the justiciar Richard de Lucy to his new religious house at Lesnes at its foundation in 1178 (VCH Kent II, 165). Lesnes was a house of Augustinian canons which adopted the austere rule of the French house of Arrouaise (Knowles and Hadcock 1971: 164; Burton 1994: 52). The Augustinian canons took over many surviving minster churches in the earlier twelfth century (Burton 1994: 47), and the hypothesis is that the new house at Lesnes did precisely that with Newington, though removing to a remote site some miles away on the edge of the Thames marshes.

This has been an elaborate and necessarily provisional demonstration that there was an important prebendal minster church at Newington in the later eleventh century, and perhaps still a female religious community, and that St Augustine’s abbey (unsuccessfully) and the archbishop of Canterbury (successfully) claimed long-standing rights in it. In 1066 it was in the hands of Swithgar, one of King Edward’s household priests, who was presumably de facto if not titular dean. He held Newington from the queen, her interest perhaps being related to a surviving nunnery. Swithgar acted as the king’s secretary (notarius) in the writing of charters on behalf of the king’s chancellor Regenbald, and presumably in other capacities too.

Swithgar was also on the complement of the king’s collegiate church of St Martin at Dover, since it must surely have been the same man who held two prebends in the canons’ vill of St Margarets at Cliffe a very few miles along the coast north of Dover. Although lightly assessed at 1 sulung and ½ sulung, they were worth 70s. and probably £2 respectively in 1066. The TRE holder of the first is named in IA as Swyngar, garbled in GDB into the more familiar name Sigar. At the smaller prebend IA called him Suthgar, perhaps for Suithgar, i.e. Swithgar; GDB missed out that name altogether. Dover had many important men among its twenty canons in 1066, including Archbishop Stigand and perhaps the bishop of Dorchester (Barlow 1979: 131), and it is no surprise to find Swithgar among them.

Despite having his name rendered Sigar twice in GDB, Swithgar was almost certainly not the Sigar who appears in 1086 holding another of the prebends of Dover, inland at Sibertswold, 1½ yokes which his unnamed father had held as a prebend before the Conquest (Kent M:20; contra Barlow 1979: 133). That Sigar farmed the land himself in 1086, with ½ ploughteam in demesne and whatever services were due from 2 villans and 1 bordar. If he were Swithgar the secretary, he had fallen a long way under the new regime. But in fact his name appears in IA as Sigar and he must have had the OE name Sigegar or (less likely) the Scandinavian name normalized as ON Sigarr.

The forms of Swithgar’s name in IA allow for the possibility that his name was German, and specifically High German if the n really was present (von Feilitzen 1937: 359). The diplomatic formula associated with Swithgar’s name in the Westminster charter (if copied from an original of Edward’s reign rather than being the work of Osbert de Clare) was modelled on the final protocol of Carolingian and Capetian diplomas (Keynes 1987: 210), suggesting a familiarity with Continental practice in drafting charters which may have been acquired by Swithgar himself in some earlier phase of his life.

Bibliography


Amt 1988: Emilie M. Amt, ‘Richard de Lucy, Henry II’s justiciar’, Medieval Prosopography, 9 (1) (1988), 61–87

ASC: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. and ed. M. J. Swanton (London: J. M. Dent, 1996)

Asser: Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. William Henry Stevenson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904); translation in Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and other contemporary sources, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983)

Barlow 1979: Frank Barlow, The English Church 1000–1066: A History of the Later Anglo-Saxon Church, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1979)

Bates 1998: Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I (1066–1087), ed. David Bates (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)

Burton 1994: Janet Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

DM: The Domesday Monachorum of Christ Church, Canterbury, ed. David C. Douglas (London: Royal Historical Society, 1944) [text]

Douglas 1944: The Domesday Monachorum of Christ Church, Canterbury, ed. David C. Douglas (London: Royal Historical Society, 1944) [introduction]

Eales 1992: Richard Eales, ‘An introduction to the Kent Domesday’, The Kent Domesday, [ed. Ann Williams and G. H. Martin] (London: Alecto Historical Editions, 1992), 1–49

Ekwall 1960: Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)

Everitt 1986: Alan Everitt, Continuity and Colonization: The Evolution of Kentish Settlement (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986)

Foot 2000: Sarah Foot, Veiled Women, 2 vols (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000)

Grierson 1987b: Philip Grierson, ‘Weights and measures’, Domesday Book: Studies, [ed. Ann Williams and R. W. H. Erskine] (London: Alecto Historical Editions, 1987), 80–5

Hasted 1797–1801: Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of Kent, 2nd edn, 12 vols (1797–1801)

IA: An Eleventh-Century Inquisition of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, ed. Adolphus Ballard, British Academy Records of the Social and Economic History of England and Wales 4 (2) (London, 1920) [the text]

Keynes 1987: Simon Keynes, ‘Regenbald the chancellor (sic)’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 10 (1987), 185–222

Knowles and Hadcock 1971: David Knowles and R. Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses in England and Wales, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman, 1971)

ODNB: On-line Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Rollason 1982: D. W. Rollason, The Mildrith Legend: A Study in Early Medieval Hagiography in England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982)

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 

Tatton-Brown 1988: Tim Tatton-Brown, ‘The churches of Canterbury diocese in the 11th century’, Minsters and Parish Churches: The Local Church in Transition, 950–1200, ed. John Blair, Oxford University Committee for Archaeology Monograph 17 (Oxford: 1988), 105–18

Taylor and Taylor 1980–4: H. M. Taylor and Joan Taylor, Anglo-Saxon Architecture, 3 vols, paperback edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980–4) 

van Caenegem 1990–1: English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, ed. R. C. van Caenegem, 2 vols, Selden Society 106–7 (1990–1)

VCH Kent II: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: The Victoria History of the County of Kent, ed. William Page, II (London: The St. Catherine Press, 1926)

von Feilitzen 1937: Olof von Feilitzen, The Pre-Conquest Personal Names of Domesday Book, Nomina Germanica 3 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1937)