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Austin 3

Name

Summary

Austin 2 and Austin 3 were small landowners in Shropshire and Staffordshire who between them held land assessed at 6¼ hides and worth £5 10s. They are very likely to have been members of the same family and their separate holdings cannot be distinguished. One of them survived in 1086 as Earl Roger’s subtenant in Sussex, holding a single manor of 3 hides worth £1 10s.

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 Shropshire	Phil. ref. 4,3,44	Vill Cardington	DB Spelling Austin	Holder 1066 Austin 'of Cardington, junior'	Lord 1066 -	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 Roger, earl	1086 Subtenant Reynold de Bailleul	Fiscal Value 2.50	1066 Value 1.00	1086 Value 1.00	Confidence B	Map
Totals								Fiscal Value	1066 Value	1086 Value

Subtenant in 1086

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 Sussex	Phil. ref. 11,108	Vill Strettington	DB Spelling Augustinus	Holder 1066 Godwine 'of Lavant'	Lord 1066 -	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 Roger, earl	1086 Subtenant Austin	Fiscal Value 3.00	1066 Value 1.00	1086 Value 1.50	Confidence D	Map
Totals								Fiscal Value	1066 Value	1086 Value

Profile

The four estates attributed to the very rare name Austin (Latinized in Staffordshire as Augustinus) are all in north-west Mercia: Cardington and Broome in a side valley off Strettondale in south Shropshire, Meadowley 15 miles to the east in the Severn basin, and Barlaston about 40 miles from Cardington in the upper Trent valley in north Staffordshire. Despite the distances, there is a strong link between Barlaston and the Shropshire manors, since it was held in 1086 under the tenant-in-chief Robert of Stafford by Helgot, one of Earl Roger’s Shropshire barons and his tenant at Meadowley. The identity of the Staffordshire and Shropshire Austins is probably the reason why Helgot acquired a tenancy under Robert of Stafford, who was not his lord.

The complication is that the largest of these manors, Cardington, was held as two manors TRE by ‘Austin and another Austin’ (or ‘Austin and the other Austin’: Austin 7 alter Austin). They must surely have been close kinsmen. It is impossible to say whether the other manors belonged to the first or the second Austin, whom we have arbitrarily designated ‘senior’ and ‘junior’.

The name Austin occurs once as a landowner in 1086, remarkably enough as Earl Roger’s undertenant on part of the large Sussex manor of Strettington 3 miles north-east of Chichester. Earl Roger seems here to have uprooted a surviving Englishman from his earldom in Shropshire and given him a modest knightly estate in his other great honor of Arundel. The lapse of time since 1066 makes it more likely that the younger of the two Austins was the man in question.