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Offa 15

Name

Summary

Offa 15 was named among 29 free men who between them held 147½ acres, with a value of 40s 4d, in Claydon Hundred in south Suffolk.

Profile

Offa 15 was named among 29 free men who between them held 147½ acres, with a value of 40s 4d, in Claydon Hundred in south Suffolk; the DB entry also refers to the land of Whitton church, which need not imply that the men’s land was also at Whitton (although this has been adopted here for mapping purposes). The entry occurs in the section dealing with the ‘Lands of the Vavassors’ (Coss 1983) and states that these were men of the king’s that the sheriff held on his behalf, and that the king and the earl had the soke. Although the name Offa was unusual and the only other TRW landholder of that name recorded in DB (Offa 12) held lands less than 30 miles away from Whitton, Offa 15’s holding was clearly very small and there seems no good reason to associate the two men.

Bibliography

Coss 1983: P. R. Coss, ‘Literary and social terminology: the vavasour in England’, in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton, ed. T. H. Aston, P. R Coss, C. Dyer and J. Thirsk (Cambridge, 1983)