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Godtovi 2

Name

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 Surrey	Phil. ref. 20,1	Vill Tadworth	DB Spelling Godtoui	Holder 1066 Godtovi 'of Titsey'	Lord 1066 Harold, earl	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 William de Briouze	1086 Subtenant Hansard 'of Tadworth'	Fiscal Value 5.00	1066 Value 5.00	1086 Value 2.25	Confidence A	Map
Shire Surrey	Phil. ref. 20,2	Vill Little Bookham	DB Spelling Godtoui	Holder 1066 Godtovi 'of Titsey'	Lord 1066 Harold, earl	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 William de Briouze	1086 Subtenant Hansard 'of Tadworth'	Fiscal Value 5.00	1066 Value 2.50	1086 Value 3.00	Confidence A	Map
Shire Surrey	Phil. ref. 30,1	Vill Titsey	DB Spelling Goltoui	Holder 1066 Godtovi 'of Titsey'	Lord 1066 Edward, king	Tenant-in-Chief 1086 Hamon the sheriff	1086 Subtenant -	Fiscal Value 20.00	1066 Value 10.00	1086 Value 11.00	Confidence A	Map
Totals								Fiscal Value	1066 Value	1086 Value

Profile

The unusual name Godtovi appears in two different spellings along a 20-mile stretch of the North Downs in Surrey, but nowhere else within or beyond Domesday Book. It can hardly be doubted that they referred to the same person. The spelling Goltoui in one of the three entries presumably includes a simple miscopying of –d– as –l–.

Godtovi held his largest manor from King Edward and the two smaller ones from Earl Harold. Their division between two Normans does not cast doubt on Godtovi’s identity (even though the division follows the difference of spelling between Godtoui and Goltoui), since William de Braose, who acquired two of the manors as his only possessions in Surrey, was evidently a latecomer to England in the early 1070s. By then Titsey, right on the shire boundary and including outliers in Kent (Blair 1991: 17) may already have been in the hands of Hamon, who was sheriff of Kent (Green 1990: 50).

All three manors look over-assessed for the amount of arable land recorded in DB, but that was presumably because they all included extensive downland pasture with flocks of sheep which were omitted from GDB (VCH Surr. III, 252, 335; IV, 330).

As noted elsewhere, Godtovi was typical of Surrey thegns in having a church on just one of his manors (Blair 1991: 119), his largest, Titsey, where the church originally stood adjacent to the manor house (VCH Surr. IV, 330). Little Bookham evidently acquired a church in the very early Norman period under the family established as subtenants by 1086 (Blair 1991: 124–5, 155), while Tadworth never had a church or chapel. The existence of a church at Titsey suggests that it was Godtovi’s main residence, confirmed, perhaps, by the large demesne farm there in 1086, which had four ploughteams worked by nine slaves.

Bibliography

Blair 1991: John Blair, Early Medieval Surrey: Landholding, Church and Settlement before 1300 (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing and Surrey Archaeological Society, 1991)

VCH Surr.: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: The Victoria History of the County of Surrey, ed. H. E. Malden, 4 vols and index (London, 1902–14)