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Stanmær 5

Name

Summary

Stanmær 5 was one of 27 minor tenants holding land on a manor of Bury St Edmunds Abbey at Hopton, 13 miles north-east of Bury in 1086.

Profile

The name-form Stanmer occurs three times in FBB (42) among a list of 27 minor tenants holding 22 plots of land on a manor of Bury St Edmunds Abbey at Hopton, 13 miles north-east of Bury; the corresponding DB entry records 23 free men as subtenants on the manor in 1086 but does not include their names. The first two occurrences of Stanmer are consecutive, each recording that he held 4 acres rendering 4d and the only difference being that the second adds Crispini filius after the name; the third occurrence is at the end of the list, recording that Stanmer held ½ acre rendering 1d. It is possible that the first and second occurrences represent scribal duplication of a single entry.

The problems here are whether these three occurrences represent one, two or three different people and how the form Stanmer should be interpreted, given that the Old English name Stanmær is rare and the Continental Germanic name Ste(i)nmar even more so (Förstemann 1900: 1360; von Feilitzen 1937: 372). To have three different men with the same rare name and each holding a tiny plot of land on the same manor and nowhere else on the abbey’s fief, or indeed anywhere else on record in 1086, seems to push coincidence too far and for that reason they are grouped together here under a single identity, Stanmær 5. However, if his father’s name was the Old French name Crispin (rather than, say, a Latin rendering of a byname meaning ‘curly’; cf. Tengvik 1938: 216) then perhaps the CG form of Stanmær 5’s name should be preferred.

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

Förstemann 1900: E. Förstemann, Altdeutsches Namenbuch. Erster Band: Personennamen (Bonn, 1900)

Tengvik 1938: Gösta Tengvik, Old English Bynames, Nomina Germanica 4 (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1938)

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