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Ælfheah 82

Name

Summary

(Unknown Person) was one of 28 peasant tenants on the estate of Bury St Edmunds Abbey at Wattisfield.

Profile

(Unknown Person) is named in FBB (141v; p.40) among 28 minor tenants on the estate of Bury St Edmunds Abbey at Wattisfield, 11¾ miles to the north-east of Bury, in 1086; the corresponding DB entry records 20 free men on the estate in 1086 but does not include their names and notes that ‘others have [land] there’.  (Unknown Person) held 6 acres (rendering 8d), which was one of the three largest such holdings there.  It is possible that he is the same person as Ælfheah 85, a minor tenant on another of the abbey’s estates only 2 miles away in 1086, or conceivably even (Unknown Person), who held land nearby and in the abbot’s lordship TRE; but the name was common, the holdings were very small and the possibility must be left open.  The implicit continuity of holdings between TRE and 1086 in DB does not prove that (Unknown Person) already held his land before the Conquest, although the possibility cannot be ruled out.

Bibliography

FBB: ‘The Feudal Book of Baldwin, abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, 1065–1098, contained in the Black Book of the abbey, MS. Mm. iv. 19, fols. 124–43b. (Cambridge University Library)’, in Feudal Documents from the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, ed. D. C. Douglas, British Academy Records of the Social and Economic History of England and Wales, 8 (London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1932), 1–44