Luuede 2 was a small landowner on Wirral whose ½ hide was worth a little over 2 shillings.
Profile
The name is unique in DB. Luuede was listed last after Wulfgeat and Eadric, between them holding 1½ hides at Prenton on Wirral ‘as 3 manors, and they were free’ (pro .III. maneria, & liberi fuerunt). The reference to multiple TRE manors, and the way it is phrased, are common in Cheshire and other northern shires. The status of such ‘manors’ and their owners is by no means clear: did they hold equal shares (our pragmatic assumption for the purposes of calculating the hidage and valuation to be attributed to each)? Unequal shares but equal standing as landholders? Or was there some unstated tenurial or other relationship between them, which did not affect their status as free men? One small detail in this entry for Prenton perhaps casts some oblique light on the puzzle. In 1086 the estate had ‘a mill serving the court’, ‘court’ being in the singular (molin’ seruiens curiæ). Although the phrase necessarily refers to the manorial curia of the Norman tenant Walter de Vernon, rather than to any pre-Conquest situation, it seems that it was natural to assume that there should be only one curia at a place which had three maneria TRE. Prenton was afterwards a single township and a unitary manor. Can the existence of a single curia be read back before 1066? If so, what are we to make of Luuede’s standing in relation to Wulfgeat and Eadric?
