Wagen 1

Wagen of Wootton (Warwickshire), fl. c. 1046x1066
Male
DWP
2 of 5

Name

Wagen
Wagen 3

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
Staffordshire 12,25 Great Barr Waga Wagen of Wootton - William fitzAnsculf Robert 'the man of William fitzAnsculf' 3.00 0.25 0.25 C Map
Warwickshire 22,1 Churchover Waga Wagen of Wootton - Robert of Stafford - 7.00 1.00 5.00 B Map
Warwickshire 22,2 Wolford Waga Wagen of Wootton - Robert of Stafford - 7.00 1.00 5.00 B Map
Warwickshire 22,23 Norton Lindsey Waga Wagen of Wootton - Robert of Stafford Hervey 'of Stretton' 1.00 1.00 2.00 B Map
Warwickshire 22,4 Tysoe Waga Wagen of Wootton - Robert of Stafford - 23.00 20.00 30.00 B Map
Warwickshire 22,6 Ullenhall Waga Wagen of Wootton - Robert of Stafford - 1.00 3.00 3.00 B Map
Warwickshire 22,7 Offord Waga Wagen of Wootton - Robert of Stafford - 5.00 3.00 4.00 B Map
Warwickshire 22,9 Wootton Wawen Waga Wagen of Wootton - Robert of Stafford - 7.00 4.00 4.00 B Map
Totals

Profile

The name Wagen was extremely rare and so to find moderate or substantial estates within miles of each other held TRE by someone of that name, and all but one of them passing to the same post-Conquest successor, renders it probable that. The only other reference to someone called Wagen in DB is to a post-Conquest subtenant in Norfolk.

He occurs (huscarles; barones in the Latin version) 1049x1052, probably at a meeting of the shire court at Oxford and perhaps after Godwine 51’s exile in autumn 1051 (S 1425; Blair 1994: 107; Baxter 2001: 36; Crick 2007: 213-20). Wagen 1 also features among the witnesses to two leases issued by the bishop of Worcester (S 1406; S 1409; Robertson 1939: 208-11, 456-61), and in a further charter (S 1408).

It is worth nothing that Wagen also occurs, as Wagen’ de Whitton’, as the last of a group of admittedly high-status figures who supposedly witnessed Earl Leofric’s foundation charter for Coventry Abbey, which purports to date from 1043 but is in fact an early-twelfth-century forgery (S 1226; Lancaster 1954: 117-21, 126-30, 138-40; cf. Bassett 2001: 24 n. 73). Even so, it shows that a generation or more after the Conquest the name of Wagen was considered important enough to lend weight to such a fabrication and also that he was identified by reference to his estate at Wootton. 

Finally, it may be, as Baxter (2001: 28-9) has suggested, that some memory of Wagen 1 finds an echo in the character called Vagn in the stories woven around Palna-Toki and the Jomsvikings in a Scandinavian saga composed c. 1200. 

Bibliography


Bassett 2001: S. Bassett, Anglo-Saxon Coventry and its Churches, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers 41 (Stratford, 2001)

Baxter 2001: S. Baxter, ‘The earls of Mercia and their commended men in the mid eleventh century’, Anglo-Norman Studies 23 (2001), pp. 23-46

Baxter 2007: S. Baxter, The Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2007)

Blair 1994: J. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (Stroud, 1994)

Crick 2007: Charters of St Albans, ed. J. Crick, Anglo-Saxon Charters 12 (Oxford, 2007)

Hooper 1985: N. Hooper, ‘The housecarls in England in the eleventh century’, Anglo-Norman Studies 7 (1985)

Lancaster 1954: J. C. Lancaster, ‘The Coventry forged charters: a reconsideration’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 27 (1954)

Napier and Stevenson 1895: The Crawford Collection of Early Charters and Documents, ed. A. S. Napier and W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1895)

Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. A. J. Robertson (Cambridge, 1939)

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

Williams 1989: A. Williams, ‘A vice-comital family in pre-Conquest Warwickshire’, Anglo-Norman Studies 11 (1989)