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Frederic 4

Name

Summary

Frederic 4 was a thegn with a single manor of 1 sulung worth 70s. 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
Shire Kent	Phil. ref. 9,1	Vill Eastwell	DB Spelling Frederic	Holder 1066 Frederic 'of Kent'	Lord 1066 Edward, king	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 Hugh de Montfort	1086 Subtenant -	Fiscal Value 2.00	1066 Value 3.50	1086 Value 3.50	Confidence E	Map
Totals								Fiscal Value	1066 Value	1086 Value

Profile

The name Frederic occurs as a TRE landowner only three times, all in south-eastern England. On balance, however, they are marginally more likely to belong to two different people, Frederic 4 in Kent and Frederic 5 in Sussex (contra Lewis 1994: 141): different spellings are used in the two counties, and the nearer of the Sussex manors is 55 difficult miles through the Weald from the Kentish manor. At first sight it might be thought unlikely that two thegns in relatively close proximity would have the same Continental name, otherwise not used in pre-Conquest England, but in fact the south-east was precisely the region in which such a name would appear, whether brought by immigrants from Europe or adopted by native families familiar with Continental names.

The Kentish manor in question is Eastwell, a small east Kentish vill, rather valuable for its size, at the eastern end of the spring-line in Holmesdale. Its much larger neighbour Westwell, from which it looks to have been cut at some earlier period (Kain and Oliver 2001: nos. 19/292–3), belonged to the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury (Kent  3:16), and was perhaps an early centre of settlement (Everitt 1986: 76, 88, 102, 188, 197, 199), but in recorded times the manor of Eastwell was entirely independent and without links to Westwell or Canterbury (Hasted 1797–1801: VII, 398–412), so that Canterbury connections cannot be used to explain the appearance of the Continental name here.

Bibliography

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

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

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)

Lewis 1994: C. P. Lewis, ‘The French in England before the Norman Conquest’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 17: Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1994 (1995), 123–44