Sigmund 2

Sigmund the Dane, thegn of Earl Edwin, fl. 1066
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Sigmund
Sigmund 3

Summary

Sigmund 2 was called Sigmund the Dane both in DB and in Hemming’s account of his ploys to acquire the manor of Crowle from Worcester cathedral priory. In 1066 he had three manors assessed at over 7 hides and worth £6 10s., but held only the least valuable (worth 10s.) in his own right rather than as a tenant of Worcester or Earl Edwin. Hemming gives the impression that he had once held rather more, and it is possible that in 1066 he was an old man who had already handed over the bulk of his estate to others.

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
Warwickshire 22,24 Wolverton Simund Sigmund the Dane - Robert of Stafford Urfer 'of High Offley' 1.33 0.50 1.00 A Map
Worcestershire 19,6 Shelsley Walsh Simon Sigmund the Dane Edwin, earl Osbern fitzRichard - 1.00 2.00 1.50 A Map
Worcestershire 2,78 Crowle Simundus Sigmund the Dane Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester Roger de Lacy 5.00 4.00 3.50 A Map
Totals

Profile

The decisive factor in identifying Sigmund the Dane is his appearance in Hemming’s codicellus, a text of the later eleventh century which describes the losses of property sustained by the monks of Worcester from predatory laymen. That said, the name is unusual enough, even when spelled in two different ways, to signal the likelihood that only one person was involved as a TRE landowner.

Hemming calls Sigmund a Dane by descent (Simund quidem, genere Danus) and a thegn (miles) of Leofric, earl of the Mercians (Leofric 49), and tells a story of his misdemeanours against the monks of Worcester. Sigmund owned a manor of his own at Crowle, 5 miles east of Worcester, and coveted the monks’ manor in the same place, ‘as the men of that people usually did’ (ut illius generis homines erant soliti). Having failed to obtain it by (apparently) peaceful means, he then used force, harassing the priory’s tenants (coloni) so much that they abandoned the place. Then, with Earl Leofric’s help, he persuaded the prior of Worcester, Æthelwine (Æthelwine 56), to lease him the manor for his lifetime, in return for which he would serve the monastery on military expeditions by land and sea and acknowledge the prior’s lordship by making an annual payment in cash ‘or a horse’ (Hearne 1723: I, 264–5). Leofric was earl of the Mercians from the late 1020s until his death in 1057 (Baxter 2007: 33, 43); the date of Æthelwine’s appointment as prior is unknown but he apparently died a few years before the earl (Heads: 83). That makes it impossible to assign a narrow date range to Sigmund’s acquisition of the tenancy.

Sigmund appears elsewhere in Hemming’s account of the monks’ losses as their tenant also at Shelsley, on the steep west bank of the river Teme some 15 miles north-west of Worcester, which he held ‘by grant of the brethren’, paying the services due from it, until the French arrived and deprived him of that estate ‘and many others’ (Hemming, I, 251). This shows that Sigmund was still alive in 1066.

Hemming’s evidence does not quite square with DB’s account of Sigmund’s estates TRE. Simundus did indeed hold Worcester’s 5 hides at Crowle without power of alienation, ‘and paid the bishop all the service & geld from it’. But the other 5 hides at Crowle belonged not to Sigmund but to Ketilbert (Worcs. 19:14). We might speculate that Ketilbert was a kinsman of Sigmund (as Williams 1988: 22).

A second discrepancy is that in DB Sigmund held the small manor of Shelsley Walsh not from Worcester but as ‘a thegn of Earl Edwin. & could not withdraw [it] from him without his permission’ (teinus Eduini comitis . 7 non potuit ab eo recedere sine eius licentia), making him the earl’s tenant as well as his thegn.

Thirdly, rather than holding ‘many’ other estates when the Normans came, Sigmund otherwise only had one other manor, at Wolverton on the rising land north of the Avon in Warwickshire, which he held freely (libere). There DB specifically named him as Sigmund the Dane (Simund danus).

The most likely explanation for the discrepancy between Hemming’s impression of a powerful predatory landowner with many estates, and DB’s account of a thegn with just three manors, and primarily a tenant of Worcester, is that in 1066 Sigmund was at the end of a long life, now the thegn of the youthful Earl Edwin rather than his grandfather Leofric, and had already transferred other manors to members of his family, presumably including Ketilbert.

Bibliography


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

Heads: The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, 940–1216, ed. David Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke, and Vera C. M. London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)

Hearne 1723: Hemingi chartularium ecclesiæ Wigorniensis, ed. Thomas Hearne, 2 vols (Oxford, 1723)

Williams 1988: Ann Williams, ‘An introduction to the Worcestershire Domesday’, The Worcestershire Domesday, [ed. Ann Williams and R. W. H. Erskine] (London: Alecto Historical Editions, 1988), 1–31