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Deoring 5

Name

Summary

Deoring 5 was a small landowner with two manors straddling the Kent-Surrey border, assessed at the equivalent of 3½ hides and worth £5.

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 Kent	Phil. ref. 5,15	Vill Farningham	DB Spelling Dering	Holder 1066 Deoring 'of Chaldon'	Lord 1066 -	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 Odo, bishop of Bayeux	1086 Subtenant Ernulf de Hesdin	Fiscal Value 1.50	1066 Value 3.00	1086 Value 2.00	Confidence D	Map
Shire Surrey	Phil. ref. 5,9	Vill Chaldon	DB Spelling Derinc	Holder 1066 Deoring 'of Chaldon'	Lord 1066 Edward, king	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 Odo, bishop of Bayeux	1086 Subtenant Ralph 'the man of Odo, bishop of Bayeux'	Fiscal Value 2.00	1066 Value 2.00	1086 Value 4.00	Confidence D	Map
Totals								Fiscal Value	1066 Value	1086 Value

Profile

Two downland manors less than 20 miles apart in east Surrey and west Kent are attributed to the name Deoring and probably belonged to the same person, on grounds of proximity, though the name was not so rare as to rule out the possibility that they had different owners. The Surrey manor, Chaldon, lay on top of the south-facing escarpment of the North Downs and was assessed at 2 hides and had land for two ploughs. Deoring held ‘of King Edward’, the standard phrase in Surrey for tenure with power of alienation. In 1086 the manor had only demesne ploughteams at work, with no recorded peasant population, though that does not necessarily reflect pre-Conquest arrangements. The church mentioned in DB was evidently (on architectural grounds) a new one built by the Norman subtenant: much of the tiny early Norman nave and chancel survives (Blair 1991: 122, 125, 134–6, 140).

Twenty miles to the north-east in Kent, the same or another Deoring held a second downland manor of much the same size as Chaldon, at Farningham, where the river Darent cuts a narrow valley through the North Downs on its way north to the Thames. The vill of 2½ sulungs was divided into four or five parts, one held by the archbishop of Canterbury and the others by laymen explicitly with power of alienation (Kent 2:28; 5:10; 5:13). Farningham stretched up on to the Downs on either side of the valley, and Deoring’s manor included a mill and meadow in the valley as well as pasture for 100 sheep and woodland on the Downs.

Both Chaldon and Farningham came into the hands of Bishop Odo after the Conquest, but that does not in itself confirm the identification of a single Deoring as one of his antecessors. In Kent, Odo’s fief was geographically based. There are some hints that in Surrey he acquired the manors of his principal Kentish predecessors, men such as Æthelnoth Cild (Æthelnoth 69) and Esbern Bigga (Esbern 3), though considerations of that kind may well not have applied as far down the social scale as Deoring; further research is needed on how Odo’s Surrey fief was constructed before we can determine how far it was geographically or tenurially based.

Bibliography

Blair 1991: John Blair, Early Medieval Surrey: Landholding, Church and Settlement before 1300 (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing and Surrey Archaeological Society, 1991)

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