Ernebald 2

Ernebald ‘of Yarnfield’ (Som.), fl. 1066
Male
DWP
4 of 5

Name

Ernebald

Summary

Ernebald 2 may have held a small estate in east Somerset TRE assessed at 2 hides and with a value of 40s; however, it is also possible that he should be identified with Erlebald 2.

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
Somerset 23,1 Yarnfield Erneboldus Ernebald 'of Yarnfield' - Walter Giffard William 'the man of Walter Giffard' 2.00 2.00 1.50 Z Map
Totals

Profile

Ernebald 2 is recorded as the TRE holder of a small estate at Yarnfield in east Somerset, probably on the edge of Selwood which then straddled the border with Wiltshire (to which county Yarnfield was transferred in 1895). Although it is tempting to associate the first element of both the personal name and the place-name with each other and with words meaning ‘eagle’ (Old High German ern and Old English earn respectively), the place-name is more probably derived from a stream-name (Gover et al. 1939: 172-3).

That having been said, there is a distinct possibility that Ernebald 2 is a chimera caused by scribal error rather than being a TRE landholder. Both Exon (447a4) and DB spell his name as Erneboldus, which points to an apparently otherwise unrecorded but formally acceptable Continental Germanic name Ernebald (Forssner 1916: 82). However, the Anglo-Norman tendency to interchange or assimilate /l/ and /n/ (Dodgson 1987: 125-6), perhaps exacerbated by the place-name form Gernefelle in DB, mean that a misspelling of the name Erlebald is also possible. This is significant because the only two estates held TRE by Erlebald 2 lay just 2¾ and 11½ miles from Yarnfield, and to have two pre-Conquest landholders with very similar continental names and with estates so close to each other suggests a connection between them. Nevertheless, these estates passed to different successors after the Conquest and this perhaps outweighs the hypothesis of a misspelled name in both DB and Exon, and for that reason Ernebald 2 and Erlebald 2 are treated here as different people.

Bibliography



Dodgson 1987: J. McN. Dodgson, ‘Domesday Book: place-names and personal names’, in Domesday Studies, ed. J. C. Holt (Woodbridge, 1987)

Forssner 1916: T. Forssner, Continental-Germanic Personal Names in England (Uppsala, 1916), p. 82.

Gover et al. 1939: J. E. B. Gover, A. Mawer and F. M. Stenton, The Place-Names of Wiltshire (Cambridge, 1939), pp. 172-3.