Gethne 2

Gethne ‘of Bosle’ (Salap.), fl. 1066
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Gethne

Summary

Gethne 2 was a small landowner in south Shropshire, with a single manor of 1 hide worth less than £1.

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
Shropshire 4,21,11 Bosle Gethne Gethne 'of Bosle' - Roger, earl Helgot de Fourches 1.00 0.80 0.80 A Map
Totals

Profile

Gethne occurs only once in DB and is unlikely to be the same name as Genu(s)t, as asserted by Thornton (2007: 145).

Gethne’s holding at Bosle is not mentioned in any source other than DB. The place was long identified with Broseley on the river Severn, but later spellings of Broseley tell strongly against it being the same name (PN Salop. III, 278), and Bosle’s hundred is also wrong for Broseley. Although a single spelling is not a secure basis for a confident interpretation, the second element appears to be leah ‘wood, clearing in woodland’. Given the very restricted distribution of place-names in leah across Alnodestreu hundred (which applies both to the names of Domesday estates and to other names), the best guess for its location is in the southern part of Morville parish near Meadowley, which follows Bosle in Helgot’s fief (Salop. 4.21:12).

Gethne was the only landowner at Bosle, which had the curiously precise value TRE of 16s. 1d.

Bibliography


PN Salop.: Margaret Gelling with H. D. G. Foxall, The Place-Names of Shropshire, 5 vols (incomplete) English Place-Name Society 62/63, 70, 76, 80, and 82 (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 1990–2006)

Thornton 2007: David E. Thornton, ‘Some Welshmen in Domesday Book and beyond: aspects of Anglo-Welsh relations in the eleventh century’, Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Nick Higham (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), 144–64