Azur 38
Azur the king’s bursar, fl. 1066x86
Male
SDB
2 of 5
Summary
A provisional attempt has been made to identify this person; however, the material remains to be checked and edited, and the profile remains to be written.Profile
The Berkshire evidence is for an Azur who was King Edward’s bursar (dispensator) before the Conquest and who survived holding land directly from King William in 1086.Azur the bursar was recorded in DB as having held 1 hide of land with freedom of alienation before the Conquest, and as still holding it from the Norman Robert d’Oilly in 1086; but the men of Wantage hundred declared that ‘he ought to hold from the king, because King William restored it to him (reddidit ei) at Windsor and gave him his writ for it. Truly, Robert holds wrongfully (injuste), for none of them saw either the king’s writ or the man who gave seisin on his behalf.’ (Berks. 41:6).
Azur’s manor is unnamed in Domesday Book but it can be located at Ardington, one of the long, narrow parishes which are stacked side by side over the downland escarpment and Vale of White Horse east of Wantage. In Oilly’s Domesday return, Azur’s hide follows the entries for two other and larger holdings at Ardington, of 5 hides and 9 hides. There are two grounds for confidence in assigning the anonymous manor also to Ardington. First, when taken with the second manor it makes a unit of 10 hides. Although the tax assessments of holdings and vills in Wantage hundred are not so uniformly regular as to make this a clinching argument, over a dozen holdings in the hundred were assessed individually at 5 hides or 10 hides, and some of the most heavily subdivided vills also had a round total, as Charlton, where four holdings of 2½, 2½, 7, and 8 hides made a total of 20 hides [REF]. More conclusive is the fact that in later centuries the only manor in Wantage hundred which belonged to the honor of Wallingford and could correspond to Oilly’s anonymous hide was Ardington [REF].
Probably the only other Berkshire manor attributed TRE to Azur also belonged to the king’s bursar. That was Eddington, at 10 hides worth £6 significantly larger and more valuable than Ardington, and located some 15 miles away in the south-west of the county on the river Kennet opposite where the town of Hungerford was founded in the twelfth century (Berks. 1:28). Eddington had clearly once been part of the great royal manor of Kintbury, centred a few miles downstream, though Azur specifically held it in alodium in 1066, just as he specifically had the right to ‘go where he wished’ with his hide at Ardington (Berks. 41:6). But whereas King William had given Ardington back to Azur (implying that he had earlier been deprived of it), he kept the larger and more valuable manor of Eddington in his own hands in 1086—unless Azur had some subordinate interest not mentioned by DB.
What did it mean to be a dispensator regis at Edward’s court? And is Azur, King Edward’s dispensator and owner of Ardington, really the same man as Azur, dapifer regis, who appears among the subscribers of the forged Waltham charter? Both texts, Domesday Book and the Waltham charter, are of course post-Conquest productions. The first point to note is that at William I’s court dapifer (steward) and dispensator (bursar) were not synonyms. We know a good deal about William’s stewards—both in Normandy and England—rather less about his bursars, chiefly from charter subscriptions and Domesday Book. No one person ever held both offices, and the dapifer was distinctly higher in rank than the dispensator. The distinction was reflected further in the twelfth century, when the master dispensatores (three of them, responsible for bread, the larder i.e. other food items, and the buttery i.e. wine) had an allowance of 2s. 10d. a day but the steward’s allowance was nearly twice as much at 5s., significantly the same as the chancellor’s (Constitutio Domus Regis: 198–201, 204–5). That scale of rewards codified what had long been the case: the stewardship was a much more important and higher-ranking honorific office than the bursary.
That relative ranking of the two offices in Norman practice is reflected in the use of the two offices as bynames for persons named in Domesday Book. The king’s principal steward in England, Eudo fitzHubert, commonly called Eudo dapifer in DB, was among the leading landowners, with interests in nine counties, whereas the king’s bursar, Robert dispensator, was much less wealthy.
But DB shows the position to be more complicated than simply differentiating dapifer and dispensator as distinct offices. First, the king had more than one dapifer in 1086. The Englishman Godric the steward was a major figure in his own right, who in 1086 had custody of the vast estates which had been confiscated from Earl Ralph of East Anglia after his rebellion of 1075. Hamon the steward was a tenant-in-chief in Essex and also sheriff of Kent [CHECK]. And it is clear that the stewards of other major landowners besides the king commonly held landed estates as tenants of the lords they served: at least a dozen such men can be traced in Domesday Book. The households of great lords also included bursars, but it seems to have been far less common for bursars to be given landed tenancies; indeed only two can be found as subtenants in 1086: Archbishop Lanfranc’s bursar William in Kent (Kent 2:10) and Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances’s bursar Roger in Somerset (Exon 143b2, providing the occupational byname omitted in GDB: Som. 5:34). [REF MASON?] The abundance of stewards and scarcity of bursars as landholders probably reflects the nature of their duties in the household. The dapifer was a chief official whose essential role to be with his lord: he literally (as in Classical Latin) served the food and drink which his lord consumed, or at any rate supervised the menials who actually carried the dishes. The dispensator, although also honorific and much grander than a storesman, superintended the practical business of providing food and drink on a daily basis to a large number of people.
But can that distinction be maintained at Edward’s court? We might expect it to be, since Edward had spent much of his life in the courts of Normandy and its neighbours (Keynes), and in any case English court life was no less deeply affected than the northern French princely households by practices and norms which originated with the Carolingians [REF?]. For pre-Conquest times, DB gives us the names of the stewards of Queen Eadgyth (Exon 146b1; byname omitted in GDB: Som. 5:46), the abbot of Ely (Cambs. 32:37), and the great magnate Esgar the staller (ICC 39; byname omitted in GDB: Cambs. 22:2). The West Country landowner Eadnoth dapifer was probably the staller of that name and so the king’s steward (Wilts. 22:1–5; OTHER REFS, ANN?). In contrast, the only time that DB uses the word dispensator other than as Azur’s byname and as the byname of the three post-Conquest Norman bursars mentioned above is for the ‘working’ bursars who were among the 75 monastic ‘bakers, brewers, tailors, laundrymen, shoemakers, robemakers, cooks, porters, and bursars’ who lived in the town of Bury St Edmunds (Suff. 14:167).
Although Azur the king’s bursar must have been a high-status honorific official, we should take his designation as dispensator seriously as the office which he had actually held in Edward’s household. Not only was he still alive in 1086, but he may well have appeared in person when the Wantage hundred jurors testified about his tenure. He was unlikely to be misnamed in DB. A mistake in the Waltham charter is far more likely.
In fact, the detail of the Waltham charter tends to confirm Azur’s status in the king’s household as being relatively low (like a bursar) rather than relatively high (like a steward). The subscription list includes three dapiferi, named immediately after two pincernae (butlers), in the order Wigodus regis pincerna (Wigod the king’s butler), Herdingus reginae pincerna (Hearding the queen’s butler), Adzurus regis dapifer (Azur the king’s steward), Yfingus regis dapifer (Ifing the king’s steward), and Godwinus reginae dapifer (Godwine the queen’s steward). All five names come significantly lower among the subscribers than other persons who also seem to hold offices in the royal household, namely Esgar regiae procurator aulae, Ralph regis aulicus, and Bondi regis palatinus. Indeed they do not even follow on directly from those three names, but after the interruption of six more names: four of the king’s household clerks (his cousin Osbern fitzOsbern, the chancellor Regenbald, two priests, Peter and Baldwin), and two principes, Beorhtric and Ælfstan.
As far as the secular ‘office-holders’ of the Waltham charter are concerned, we start with three known stallers, Esgar, Ralph, and Bondi, all of whom owned very large landed estates. The text assigns them three different Latin styles, for which the sense seems to be something on the lines of, respectively, ‘superintendent of the royal court’, ‘king’s courtier’, and ‘king’s palace courtier’. These are not the names of real offices in the royal household either before or after 1066; and they are best understood as elegant twelfth-century variations in translating the non-specific pre-Conquest position of ‘staller’ (Old English stalre [CHECK]).
We continue with offices which demonstrably did exist: the king’s butler, the queen’s butler, the king’s two stewards, and the queen’s steward. Note that the butlers come before the stewards, which was emphatically not their ranking in the royal household of the twelfth century [ADD BUTLER’S PERKS]. But in any case, whether the charter’s pincerna and dapifer are any more closely related to the real titles of the people concerned must be doubtful.
Azur’s companion as a king’s steward, Ifing, can also be located as a landowner in DB. The name was not at all common in late Anglo-Saxon England, and the Ifing of the charter can be identified with a high level of confidence with the Ifing who owned two manors some 18 miles apart in Somerset and Wiltshire, which together were taxed on 15 hides and worth £11 a year. DB adds that part of the Somerset manor, Norton St Philip, had been given to Ifing by King Edward (Som. REF; Wilts. REF; Ifing 3). It is intriguing, too, that Ifing’s manor of Norton was given after 1066 with his neighbour Wulfwynn of Creslow’s manor of NAME to Edward of Salisbury. Apart from those two manors, there is only one other Ifing named in 1066 as a landowner, and with a holding of only 1 virgate in Devon he can be securely identified as a different person (Devon REF; Ifing 4). Ifing ‘the king’s steward’, then, was a relatively modest landowner in 1066.
To sum up: Azur the bursar’s likely landed estates in Berkshire (two manors of 11 hides worth £9) were very similar in scale to Ifing’s in Somerset and Wiltshire (two manors of 15 hides worth £11). The two men appear side by side among officers of the royal household whose names were included in the Waltham charter. There is no warrant for thinking that they were really, by title or function, the king’s stewards in the post-Conquest sense of being the senior lay officer of the court. Whatever Old English word described their office and functions was probably in reality best translated by Latin dispensator, as in DB for Azur.
If this interpretation is correct, then we should stop looking for King Edward’s bursar among the many other Azurs present as landowners in southern England in 1066. In particular, the connection with Robert d’Oilly is illusory and does not link this Azur with the Azur who appears elsewhere as Oilly’s predecessor. The men of Wantage hundred specifically swore under oath the Oilly was not the legitimate owner of Azur’s little manor at Ardington; King William had restored it to Edward’s old bursar to be held directly from himself. Oilly only got his hands on it because it was the ‘missing’ fragment of the large and valuable vill of Ardington. Oilly’s encroachment indeed serves to emphasize Azur the bursar’s powerlessness as an English survivor of the Conquest, and his consequent dependence on King William’s continuing benevolence for his dignified retirement.