Smelt 1

Smelt king’s priest, fl. 1066
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Smelt

Summary

Smelt 1 was a chaplain in the royal household who served successive kings from before 1035 until after 1066. In 1066 he controlled the former minster church of Nonneminstre in Sussex with its substantial landed estate, and was one of the canons of the king’s collegiate church of St Martin at Dover.

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 M9 St Margaret's at Cliffe Esmellt Smelt king's priest unnamed canons of Dover Unnamed canons of Dover in 1086 Robert the black 2.00 1.00 1.50 A Map
Sussex 11,63 Nonneminstre Esmund Smelt king's priest Edward, king Roger, earl unnamed abbess of Almenêches 13.00 20.00 25.00 A Map
Sussex 11,64 Nonneminstre Esmeld Smelt king's priest - Roger, earl unnamed abbess of Almenêches 1.00 1.50 1.50 A Map
Totals

Profile

Smelt is such an unusual name and his status as a king’s priest so clear that there can be no doubting that there was just one man of this name whose career in royal service stretched from before 1035 until 1066 or later. He first appears as a witness of the charter by which Cnut gave Corscombe (Dors.) to the monks of Sherborne in the last year of his reign, 1035 (S 975; Charters of Sherborne, no. 16). The witness list is very full: Smelt was listed third of three priests, alongside the king and queen, both archbishops, three bishops, three earls, six abbots and nineteen thegns. His colleagues from the royal chapel were the future archbishop Stigand (Stigand 1) and Eadweald (Eadwald 35), both of them already long in the king’s service (Barlow 1979: 156), and in 1035 Smelt clearly ranked as their junior.

The other surviving charter witnessed by Smelt was Harthacnut’s confirmation of his father Cnut’s grants in Sussex to the Norman ducal abbey of Fécamp, which cannot be dated more narrowly than 1040 × 1042 (S 982; Haskins 1918). The group of king’s priests there starts again with Stigand and Eadweald, and continues with Herman, Alwine, Smelt, and Spirites. Again the order may reflect rank or longevity of service or both.

Smelt did not witness any of Edward’s surviving charters, but in common with some other priests of the king’s household, he owned landed estates in 1066. The larger of his two properties was Nonneminstre in Sussex, described in two successive entries in DB, either because one of the 14 hides did not owe geld, or because it formed a physically separate part of what was clearly a complex estate, or because by 1086 it had been combined with another hide not held by Smelt TRE but by Alwine (the name coincidentally the same as that of Smelt’s colleague in the Fécamp witness list, though it was one of the commonest of all Anglo-Saxon personal names and there is no evidence that the man at Nonneminstre was a priest). As the place-name hints, Nonneminstre was the estate of a former minster church, founded probably in the early eighth century, which had long since fallen into the king’s hands (VCH Suss. V (2), 6).

The size of Smelt’s holding at Nonneminstre is clear from the resources listed in 1086: land for 13 ploughs, 21 ploughs at work, and a population numbering 59 villans, 21 cottars, and 4 slaves. Besides the arable there were two salt-works, a fishery, 25 acres of meadow, 70 acres of pasture, and woodland for 20 pigs. 

The church of Nonneminstre, also mentioned in DB, was what is now St Peter and St Paul, Rustington (a classic minster dedication) (VCH Suss. V (2), 6, 294), on the south coast near the mouth of the river Arun. The historic parish of Rustington, however, is far too small to have included the whole of Nonneminstre, even taking into account its smallish detached parts by the Arun and on the South Downs; moreover the parish included West Preston, which in 1086 was part of the distinct manor of Preston (VCH Suss. V (2), 269). Nonneminstre in fact probably also included much of its northern neighbour Angmering and most of its western neighbour Littlehampton. The Domesday manors of Angmering and Littlehampton plainly included far less land than the later parishes, and what is known about the manors of Barpham and Ham (in Angmering), the park attached to Michelgrove manor (also in Angmering), and Littlehampton suggests that they all originated when the minster estate of Nonneminstre was broken up following its reversion to Henry I after the rebellion of Robert de Bellême in 1101–2 and the consequent dispossession of the nuns of Almenêches, holders of Nonneminstre in 1086 (VCH Suss. V (2), 29–31, 42, 169, 281; VCH Suss. VI (1), 12–14; Suss. 11:65–66, 77).

Smelt’s other landed interest was as a canon of St Martin’s, Dover, an ancient and well endowed collegiate church where other royal priests were also canons (VCH Kent, II, 133; Tatton-Brown 1984: 23; Barlow 1979: 131). His prebend consisted of 1 sulung in the canons’ vill of St Margaret’s at Cliffe, standing on the cliffs above South Foreland, 3 miles east of Dover.

Bibliography


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

Charters of Sherborne: Charters of Sherborne, ed. M. A. O’Donovan, Anglo-Saxon Charters 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1988)

Haskins 1918: Charles H. Haskins, ‘A charter of Canute for Fécamp’, English Historical Review, 33 (1918), 342–4

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 1984: Tim Tatton-Brown, ‘The towns of Kent’, Anglo-Saxon Towns in Southern England, ed. Jeremy Haslam (Chichester: Phillimore, 1984), 1–36

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)

VCH Suss V: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Sussex, V, Part 2, ed. C. P. Lewis (London: Boydell & Brewer for the Institute of Historical Research, 2009)

VCH Suss. VI: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Sussex, VI, Part I, ed. T. P. Hudson (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1980)