Tumi 2

Tumi thegn of King Edward at Droitwich (Worcs.), fl. 1066
Male
CPL
4 of 5

Name

Tumi
Tumi 3

Summary

Tumi 2 was a thegn of King Edward who held three manors in the northern half of Worcestershire, together assessed at 5½ hides and worth £4 10s. Given that his most valuable manor was at Witton, a place closely bound up with the salt-making centre of Droitwich, he may well have had some administrative role in relation to the king’s interests there which transcended his importance as a rural landowner.

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
Worcestershire 23,5 Selly Oak Tumi Tumi, thegn of King Edward at Droitwich - William fitzAnsculf Robert 'the man of William fitzAnsculf' 0.50 0.50 0.38 A Map
Worcestershire 24,1 Witton Tuini Tumi, thegn of King Edward at Droitwich Edward, king William fitzCorbucion - 2.00 3.00 3.00 A Map
Worcestershire 26,7 Stone Tumi Tumi, thegn of King Edward at Droitwich - Urse d'Abetot Herlebald 'of Cookhill' 3.00 1.00 0.75 A Map
Totals

Profile

Tumi is such a rare name that the three estates in Worcestershire assigned to it in DB clearly belonged to the same person, specified as a thegn of King Edward at one of them, though there the scribe of DB inadvertently confused the letters in his name and wrote Tuini rather than Tumi (von Feilitzen 1937: 388 note 4 uncharacteristically gets this fact wrong).

Witton is the key to grasping who Tumi was, and not only because it was there that he was called a king’s thegn. Witton was within the territory of the royal borough of Droitwich, the most important centre for salt-making in England. The connection is signalled by DB’s very unusual designation of both manors there as ‘Witton in Droitwich’ (Witone In Wich: Worcs. 24:1; Witune in Wich: Worcs. 26:16), and it has been elucidated by careful topographical research into the origins and early development of Droitwich (Bassett 2008).

Tumi’s manor corresponds to the later manor of St Peter Witton (VCH Worcs. III, 81) and to the parish of Witton St Peter. The church of St Peter almost certainly existed already in Tumi’s day, since a priest was mentioned on the manor in 1086. The significance of this estate as a component of early medieval Droitwich it shown by two circumstances: it included a large detached area to the north, outside the borough, which hints at an originally greater extent, and in the seventeenth century it was still the only one of the Droitwich parishes which had freed itself sufficiently from the original mother-church of the area (St Augustine’s, Doddinghill) as to have burial rights (Bassett 2008: 7, 9, 13).

Tumi’s manor at Witton was distinct from the smaller holdings in Droitwich and even from the other manor at Witton in not including any burgesses (Worcs. 4:1; 5:1; 7:1; 8:13; 12:1; 15:14; 18:6; 22:1; 26:16). It may have been largely populated by non-burgess salt-workers, since in 1086 there were as many as 18 bordars, who are unlikely to have been rural peasants since there was only a single ploughteam which was probably on the demesne.

Droitwich was a place where many different landowners had a stake in 1066. The king’s interests were complex: houses (domus); a share in brine-pits (putei) and the ‘seals’ or salt-houses (salinae) and mounds (hocci) associated with them, all of which produced the massive sum of £52 a year for the king’s revenues; more ‘seals’ and boiling pans (plumbi) attached to the manor of Tardebigge; ½ hide of land belonging to the king’s hall (aula) at Gloucester (Worcs. 1:3a; 1:5; 1:7); and a mint. There was also a supervisory and regulatory function over the multifarious industrial and commercial activities of the borough. The sheriff of Worcestershire evidently had oversight on behalf of the king and earl (Worcs. 1:3b), but more immediate supervision would have been needed too, and the king’s thegn Tumi was well placed to provide it.

Tumi’s other holdings were at places where another person had an interest, Tumi being named first in both cases. At Stone, 8 miles from Witton and near Kidderminster, Tumi and Euchil () had 6 hides as two manors. At Selly Oak, on the plateau at the north-eastern extremity of Worcestershire, 15 miles from Witton and 12 from Stone, Tumi and Eleua had 1 hide as two manors. This pattern of holdings has been interpreted (albeit with some diffidence) as meaning that Tumi and Ælfgifu were man and wife, that Euchil was their son, and that Ælfgifu was the daughter of the Wulfgeat who had given the smaller holding at Witton to Evesham abbey when his son Ælfgeat became a monk there in 1046 or 1047 (Williams 1988: 24). All this is supposition: the facts of tenure as given in DB fall a long way short of demonstrating any of it.

Bibliography


Bassett 2008: Steven Bassett, ‘Sitting above the salt: the origins of the borough of Droitwich’, in A Commodity of Good Names: Essays in Honour of Margaret Gelling, ed. O. J. Padel and David N. Parsons (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2008), 3–27

VCH Worcs. III: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: The Victoria History of the County of Worcester, ed. J. W. Willis-Bund, H. Arthur Doubleday, and William Page, 4 vols and index (London, 1901–26)

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

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