Skule 10

Skule brother of Agemund
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Skule
Skule 2
Skule 11

Summary

Skule 10 was a junior member of an important family of Lincoln burgesses, who himself had rural property in three places near Lincoln, partly in partnership with his brothers. His holdings were assessed at around 7½ carucates and worth almost £6.

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
Lincolnshire 16,47 Canwick Strui Skule brother of Agemund - Roger the Poitevin Earnwine the priest 2.00 1.50 2.00 D Map
Lincolnshire 16,48 Canwick - Skule brother of Agemund - Roger the Poitevin - 1.00 0.00 0.00 E Map
Lincolnshire 28,11 Harpswell - Skule brother of Agemund - Jocelin fitzLambert - 0.63 0.11 0.75 C Map
Lincolnshire 28,15 Redbourne Scule Skule brother of Agemund - Jocelin fitzLambert 1 man 2.38 4.33 2.00 C Map
Lincolnshire 4,80 Canwick Escule Skule brother of Agemund - Odo, bishop of Bayeux Ilbert de Lacy 1.50 0.00 0.00 B Map
Totals

Profile

A Skule who held land only in Lincolnshire is identifiable through his connections with Agemund son of Walraven (Agemund 7), lawman and moneyer of Lincoln. A large holding at Redbourne, on Ermine Street 17 miles north of Lincoln, was held as three manors in 1066 by Agemund, Brunhyse (Brunhyse 3), and Skule; the last two can be presumed the unnamed ‘two other brothers’ who held manors with the same Agemund and Sigketil (Sigketil 2) near by at Harpswell. In addition, at Canwick and Bracebridge, a linked pair of vills immediately south of Lincoln which were long associated with the burgesses (Hill 1948: 9, 231 note 1, 344, 354–6), there were manors held variously by Walraven and Agemund as well as Skule. One of Skule’s manors there was entered with the spelling Strui, hitherto explained as an error for Sturi or Strut and so representing one of the uncommon ON names Sture or Strútr. Although either of them would involve only minor miscopying of the name, it is less plausible as an explanation than a more serious blunder which turned a spelling of Skule (perhaps Scul or Sculi) into Strui. The holding in question included the only church recorded in Canwick or Bracebridge in 1086, and one would not expect it to be in the hands of an otherwise unattested landowner rather than a member of the important family which owned more than half of the double vill. That said, the miscopying is not easy to explain in full: Sc– could easily become St– because the forms of lower-case –c– and –t– were so similar, but some more radical confusion is required for the rest of the name. On the whole it is more likely than not that Strui represents Skule. The church was probably All Saints, Bracebridge, which retains some pre-Conquest fabric (Taylor and Taylor 1980–4: I, 85–6) and which a known tenant of Skule’s successor Roger the Poitevin gave to Lincoln cathedral in the early twelfth century (Stocker and Everson 2006: 108–12; Sanders 1960: 130).

Strui’s manor in Canwick and Bracebridge is followed in DB by an entry which says that ‘in the same place’ was 1 carucate which ‘lies in Branzuic’. Branzuic seems to be a mistake for Branztone or Branztune, that is Branston, which adjoined Canwick and Bracebridge on the south-east (Fellows Jensen 1978: 189). The sense in which this land was ‘in’ Canwick and Bracebridge but ‘lies in’ Branston is not immediately apparent. It was evidently not part of the assessed land of Branston, which formed a complete 12-carucate hundred in itself, entirely in the hands in 1066 of the substantial king’s thegn Hemming 5. Perhaps it was physically located in Branston but assessed with Canwick and Bracebridge, a possibility given some substance by the irregular nineteenth-century boundaries of the parishes in question (Kain and Oliver 2001: nos. 22/518, 521, 523). No TRE holder is given for this carucate, but its placement in DB makes it more likely than not that it belonged to the same Strui as the previous entry, namely Skule.

Bibliography


Fellows Jensen 1978: Gillian Fellows Jensen, Scandinavian Settlement Names in the East Midlands (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag 1978)

Hill 1948: J. W. F. Hill, Medieval Lincoln (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948)

Kain and Oliver 2001: Roger J. P. Kain and Richard R. Oliver, Historic Parishes of England and Wales: An Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata (Colchester: History Data Service, 2001)

Sanders 1960: I. J. Sanders, English Baronies: A Study of their Origin and Descent, 1086–1327 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)

Stocker and Everson 2006: David Stocker and Paul Everson, Summoning St Michael: Early Romanesque Towers in Lincolnshire (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2006)

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