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Frawin 3

Name

Summary

Frawin 3 was a minor thegn who held four small estates across Devon TRE that had a total assessment of just under 2¾ hides and a probable value of £5 15s.

Profile

The four estates in Devon held TRE by someone called Frawin – at Hele in Meeth, Bridgerule, Ingsdon and Leonard – lay between 15 and 46 miles from each other. Given their generally small assessments (1 ferding, 1½ virgates, 1½ hides and 3 virgates respectively) they might seem too widely dispersed to have been held by one person, and the fact that they had passed to four different successors by 1086 could also point in this direction. Nevertheless, that there was land for 8 ploughs at Bridgerule points to a estate considerably larger than its assessment of 1½ virgates suggests, while the overall estimate of about 17 ploughlands across the four estates would indicate quite a large holding. Furthermore, the extreme rarity of the name Frawin renders it more likely than not that these four estates were held by the same person TRE, despite them passing to different successors.

Although Bridgerule (the bridge was across the Tamar) was the biggest of Frawin 3’s estates in terms of ploughlands, the largest in terms of assessment was that of 1½ hides at Ingsdon (in the hills to the west of the Teign estuary) and for that reason has been adopted for his byname here.

His smallest estate was of just 1 ferding at Hele in Meeth. This ferding represented Frawin’s share of a virgate held in parage with Almær Eastry (Almær); the details are given in Exon (212a2), DB merely recording that ‘2 thegns held freely in parage’. That it was held in parage implies that Frawin and Almær were co-heirs and suggests that they were related in some way.

As well as stating that Frawin was a thegn, the DB, Exon and TO (497b4) entries for Hele include it among seven lands that Robert, count of Mortain, had added to those of Ordwulf, one of Robert’s antecessors. This suggests that Ordwulf had been Frawin’s lord, perhaps by commendation, with this relationship providing the pretext for Robert to seize the land.

Two of Frawin’s successors gave their names to his former estates, Bridgerule incorporating Roald as a manorial suffix and Moorstone near Leonard deriving from Morin (Gover et al. 1931-2: 135, 549).

Bibliography

Gover et al. 1931-2: J. E. B. Gover, A. Mawer and F. M. Stenton, The Place-Names of Devon, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1931-2), pp. 135, 549.