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Ælfheah 83

Name

Summary

(Unknown Person) was among 34 minor tenants on the estate of Bury St Edmunds Abbey at Troston.

Profile

(Unknown Person) is named in FBB (140v; p.37) among 34 minor tenants on the estate of Bury St Edmunds Abbey at Troston, just under 6 miles to the north-north-east of Bury, in 1086. The corresponding DB entry records only 24 free men on the estate in 1086 and does not include their names; it also notes that 12 of them held from the abbot’s subtenant (and brother) Frodo, but FBB does not indicate to which of the named men this applied.  (Unknown Person) held 2 acres (rendering 2d and service), which was among the smaller such holdings there.  It is possible that he is the same person as Ælfheah 84, a minor tenant on another of the abbey’s estates only about 2 miles away in 1086; but the name was common, Ælfheah 84’s patronymic Ælmeri filius was not repeated in the entry for (Unknown Person), the holdings were very small and so 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