Rathi 2

Rathi of Gimingham (Norf.), fl. 1066x1086
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Rathi
Rathi 3

Summary

Rathi 2 was a free man who held a single substantial holding in north Norfolk, assessed at 2 carucates and worth £2 in 1066, besides being the lord of a handful of lesser free men in an adjoining vill. He survived to 1086 but was placed under the lordship of William de Warenne and at Domesday was paying the stiff rent of £8 for the same land.

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
Norfolk 8,119 Gimingham Ratho Rathi 'of Gimingham' - William de Warenne - 2.00 2.00 8.00 A Map
Norfolk 8,119 Gimingham - Rathi 'of Gimingham' - William de Warenne - 0.23 0.00 0.00 A Map
Totals

Lord 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
Norfolk 8,119 Gimingham - 23 sokemen Rathi 'of Gimingham' William de Warenne - 0.40 0.00 0.00 A Map
Norfolk 8,128 Southrepps Ratho 5 free men Rathi 'of Gimingham' William de Warenne - 0.08 0.13 0.13 A Map
Totals

Profile

An estate at Gimingham, just inland from the north-east Norfolk coast, was among those in the hands of William de Warenne in 1086. DB adds that Waleran—identifiable from this and other Norfolk entries as a royal agent if not the sheriff of Norfolk (Green 1990: 60)—had delivered 1 carucate at Sidestrand and 1 carucate at Knapton to William ‘to make up the manor of Gimingham’ (ad perficiendum manerium Gimingeham) (Norf. 8:120–121). Each of those places lay within a couple of miles of Gimingham, Sidestrand along the coast to the north-west, Knapton inland to the south-east. Each had belonged TRE to an unnamed free man who cannot have been identical with the holder of Gimingham, Rathi, who is also described as a free man.

Rathi’s name appears at the beginning of the entry for Gimingham in the present tense: ‘Rathi, a free man, holds 2 carucates of land in Gimingham’, the verb ‘holds’ being abbreviated to ten by a horizontal line over the n, a normal scribal feature used throughout the Norfolk folios in the formula for 1086 subtenants, alongside an alternative which made use of the ampersand (ten&). When the scribes wanted to specify the past tense of the verb they wrote it out in full as tenuit. On the face of it, this leaves Gimingham without any statement about its tenure TRE, and indeed von Feilitzen omitted this entry from his listing of pre-Conquest personal names (von Feilitzen 1937: 293). In fact, the ambiguous abbreviation ten (which could, of course, also stand for tenuit) seems often to have indicated tenure at both dates.

Besides Rathi’s 2 carucates, Gimingham included 48 acres in the hands of 23 sokemen, and 28 acres belonging to the parish church. DB does not say directly that the sokemen were connected with Rathi or that he was owner of the church, but they are not separately valued, which probably means that Rathi drew income from them and so can be reckoned as lord of the sokemen and holder of the church.

Rathi’s part of Gimingham was a substantial holding. In 1066 he farmed with two demesne ploughs, and kept pigs, sheep, and goats in modest numbers (thirty of each), besides two horses and eleven wild mares. The latter perhaps ran on the extensive heathland commons which later evidence shows were shared between Gimingham and neighbouring parishes (Blomefield 1805–10: VIII, 175). Besides the sokemen there were 12 villans and 40 bordars with four ploughs, as well as two slaves attached to the home farm. Rathi’s farm also included a large block of woodland (sufficient for 80 pigs), adequate meadow (12 acres), and two mills. The extent of his resources suggests that his holding also covered the adjoining vill of Trimingham, for which there was no separate entry in DB. Trimingham was indeed a dependent part of the manor of Gimingham in later centuries (Blomefield 1805–10: VIII, 178), and the nineteenth-century boundary between the two parishes indicates that they had once formed a single unit (Kain and Oliver 2001: nos. 25/43–44), while a tithe dispute between the two rectors in 1281 is a hint that Trimingham had once been dependent ecclesiastically too (Blomefield 1805–10: VIII, 125).

Although Sidestrand and Knapton had been added to Gimingham to make up a manor, it seems that they were held separately under William de Warenne in 1086, and not by Rathi: in DB their resources are listed separately and they had their own valuations, so probably the free men who had owned them before the Conquest continued in possession as Warenne’s tenants. The valuation of all three components of the enlarged manor rose sharply between 1066 and 1086, Gimingham’s making the largest leap, from £2 to £8. That evidently represents a much larger rent being taken by Warenne from Rathi in 1086 than Rathi himself had extracted TRE. £8 was indeed a very high value for 2 carucates, even if Gimingham was beneficially assessed.

Turning the financial screw on Rathi puts in a different light the intensification of demesne farming at Gimingham that is apparent in DB after the Conquest. The number of villans and bordars and their ploughteams were unchanged between 1066 and 1086, but on the home farm Rathi had added a third plough and greatly increased his livestock: there were now 40 pigs (a third more), 160 sheep (more than five times as many), 30 goats (unchanged), and a new herd of 8 dairy cattle. Only the horses and wild mares were fewer in number than before the Conquest. He had also doubled the number of mills on the river Mun, to four: Gimingham remained an important milling site well into the twentieth century (Neville 2007: Gimingham, consulted 11 Jan. 2012).

Rathi’s tenure of Gimingham before the Conquest is confirmed by the reference to him in an entry for Southrepps and Northrepps, 2–3 miles west and north-west of Gimingham, where 16 acres were held by eight free men of three different lords, five of them holding ‘of Rathi of Gimingham’ (Rathonis degiming’). The free men were still holding in 1086, when all three of their lords were demonstrably still alive (Abbot Ælfweald of St Benet of Hulme (Ælfweald 30), Rathi of Gimingham, and Osbeorht, but they can hardly still have been their lords in 1086, since the holdings in question, with others, had been delivered to William de Warenne to be added to his manor of Thorpe Market (Norf. 8:122–128).

It is not likely that Rathi of Gimingham was the Rathi who owned land in south-east Norfolk TRE (Rathi 3): the latter did not survive in 1086, and Rathi of Gimingham’s topographical byname may well have been used in the Southrepps and Northrepps entry in order to distinguish him from another known Norfolk Rathi. The odd circumstance that there were only two men called Rathi holding land in England in 1066 and that they were only 20 miles apart does not in itself require them to be the same person.

Bibliography


Blomefield 1805–10: Francis Blomefield, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, continued by Charles Parkin, 2nd edn, 11 vols (London, 1805–10)

Green 1990: Judith A. Green, English Sheriffs to 1154, Public Record Office Handbooks 24 (London: HMSO, 1990)

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)

Neville 2007: Jonathan Neville, Norfolk Watermills http://www.norfolkmills.co.uk/Watermills (index dated 2007)

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