Domesday Bourne and Beyond
Bourne Civic
Society, 9 May 2011
Thank you for
inviting me to talk to you tonight. I first came to Bourne as a historian about
35 years ago in the dying days of the
Callahan government. It was a time of unemployment before we were told to get
on our bikes. Job creation was the favoured means of massaging the statistics
and South Lincolnshire Archaeological Unit was graced with a motley crew of
ne’r-do-wells. As small town surveys were then in vogue, we sent our MSC lads
and lasses around our patch re-designing history. We did Sleaford, Grantham,
Spalding,
Where to start? Well, it is customary in local studies to first look at the place-name. In the case of Bourne, it does not take us very far. As you know, the name means ‘spring or stream’. It is likely that the settlement it identified was in the vicinity of the Wellhead to which the source in question almost certainly refers. Single element names of this kind often indicate early Saxon settlements, but here we must equivocate. The earliest forms – Brunne, Brunna, Brunum and the like – are probably Old Norse Brunnr, indicating a date no earlier than the late ninth or tenth century. It may, of course, be a dialectical rendering of an earlier English name. Or it could be an entirely new name. We just do not know.
We are thrown back on the documentary sources for the early history of the town and they are sparse to say the least. If we discount the uncertain ground of twelfth-century romance, the earliest is Domesday Book and there we seem to strike lucky for there are no less than seven references relating to six manors. However, once we start reading confusion sets in. Gnomic is the word that comes to mind. In fact, we cannot make sense of them without using later sources. In understanding the society of eleventh-century Bourne we shall have to travel as far as the fifteenth century. There is also a limited amount of archaeological evidence, but mostly of the negative kind. Less obvious, but nevertheless all around us today, is the street pattern of Bourne. It too gives us vital evidence as to the early development of the town.
From all this I shall argue that
Bourne was a major settlement in Kesteven before the Norman Conquest. Its
principal lord was a man of more than local importance and the church probably
a minster. Already a significant estate centre, thereafter Bourne became the
head of a barony and its lord developed it in the early twelfth century in
time-honoured fashion by building a castle there, founding an abbey as a family
mausoleum, and building a new town. It is here that I locate the origins of the
modern town of
Domesday Book was compiled in the
late eleventh century from the returns of a survey commissioned by William the
Conqueror in 1085. Threat of invasion in that year had brought into relief
deficiencies in taxation and service and the aim of the survey was to inform a
reassessment. Information was collected for the time of King Edward the
Confessor and ‘now’, that is 1086 when most of the data were collected. We thus
have a snapshot of
In 1066 the largest manor in Bourne was, according to Domesday Book,
held by Earl Morcar of
M. In BOURNE, Earl Morcar had 2½ carucates of land to the geld. [There is] land for 2½ ploughs. Ogier the Breton has 2 ploughs there in demesne; and 4 sokemen on 4 bovates of this land and 14 villans and 4 bordars with 5 ploughs. There is half a church and a priest, and 3 mills [rendering] 30s., and 6 fisheries rendering 2½ thousand eels, and 19 acres of meadow. [There is] woodland pasture 1 league and 8 furlongs long and 1 furlong broad. TRE worth 100s.; now £8; tallage 40s.
Modern
historians have pointed to this passage to dismiss the later medieval tradition
that the manor of Bourne was held by Hereward the Wake in succession to his
father. I, however, in an article in Lincolnshire
History and Archaeology, have argued for the authenticity of that
tradition. The argument is complex and technical, but I’ll try and summarize it
for you. The first thing to notice is that the Domesday entry does not say that
Morcar held in 1066. The past tense notionally refers to ‘the day on which
Edward the Confessor was alive and dead’, ie
So, Domesday does not necessarily tell us about the tenure of Bourne
in 1066. Much of the land Morcar acquired between then and his death must have
come to him by forfeiture, escheat, and the like in his capacity as earl. Now
we know that Hereward was outlawed, so it is not inherently unlikely that
Bourne came to Morcar as a result. That this indeed was the case is, I think,
proved by the fact that Hereward conferred title on the post-Conquest lord of
Bourne, Ogier the Breton. The main
way in which William the Conqueror gave out land to his followers was to grant
all of the estates of a single English lord. Gilbert de Ghent, for example, was
given the manors of Ulf Fenisc who is mentioned as his predecessor in almost
all of his manors. Legally, Ulf was his ancestor, his antecessor in the legal terminology of Domesday Book, and Gilbert
had right through him as an heir. He so held Edenham to the west of Bourne and
Folkingham to the north. Now for Ogier it seems that Hereward filled that
position for Rippingale came into the honour because it had been held by the
rebel. Witham-on-the-Hill was subsequently acquired by his successor
I see no reason, then, to doubt the basic veracity of the mid
twelfth-century tradition. So, people of Bourne, I urge you to rise up and
reclaim Hereward the Wake as one of your own. He is an important figure in
English history and should be celebrated as such here in his home town. Modern
historians have, again, tended to downgrade his status. He is now usually seen
as a mere man of the abbeys of
If we can substantiate so much of the twelfth-century tradition, then I see no reason to question the assertion of the Crowland sources that Bourne descended through Hereward’s daughter. We must reject the notion that she married Hugh de Evermue or William Rullos, but a marriage with Ogier or his son Ralf is not unlikely. It is, I suspect, Hereward’s status that determined that the post-Conquest lord of Bourne would choose the settlement as his principal residence. I have tentatively accepted that Ogier son of Ungomar was not one of the great tenants-in-chief in 1086. He had no more than twenty-eight carucates and hides of land, but Bourne was his largest estate. The manor extended into Cawthorpe and Dyke with an outlier in Spanby. I think perhaps the manors in Laughton and Morton were also appurtenant to it before the Conquest. The hall was clearly in Bourne itself. The fact that half the church belonged to it suggests that it must have been somewhere in the centre of the present town. We shall come to the problems of the castle later on.
The other half of the church belonged to a second manor which had been held by Leofwine TRE. The Domesday entry reads as follows:
M IN THE SAME PLACE Leofwine had 7 bovates of land to the geld. [There is] land for 7 oxen. Ogier has there 3 sokemen on 4 bovates of this land and 4 villans and 2 bordars with 2 ploughs. There is half a church, and 6 fisheries [rendering] 24d., and 2 parts of a mill [rendering] 5s., and 9 acres of meadow. [There is] woodland pasture 1 league and 8 furlongs long and 4 furlongs broad. TRE, as now, [worth] 60s.; tallage 20s.
The name Leofwine is so common that it is impossible to identify him positively. The manor, however, is clearly closely related to Morcar/Hereward’s. Not only was the church shared, but you will notice that the woodland was apparently contiguous. Ogier held it in 1086, apparently as a separate estate.
It does not obviously appear in later records, but I would hazard a
guess that it was held by Leofwine the priest in 1066. A Leofwine the priest
was a lawman of
In this respect, it approximated more closely
to ordinary communities of canons. Embodying the aspirations of the
Hildebrandine reform movement, the Augustinian rule was initially developed to
reform existing communities of secular priests attached to minster churches,
and indeed the earliest English foundations, like St Mary, Huntingdon, and Holy
Trinity, Aldgate, were almost all institutions of some antiquity. Despite the
peculiarities of its origins and practice, it is clear that the Arrouaisian
rule in
The abbey of Bourne may have had similar
antecedents. In a will of 971x983 Ealdorman Æthelmær of Hampshire bequeathed
one pound to a minster church at a place called Burnan which has been
tentatively identified with Bourne by Cyril Hart. No evidence has come to light
to corroborate this identification, but the size of the parish of the
We are left with four further manors which are
identified as ‘Bourne’ in 1086. Before the Conquest they were held by Seuen,
Thorkell, Healfdene, and Wulfric Wild. I shall deal with them together for, as
we shall see, they were closely related to each other. The
four entries are widely separated in the text, so when you read them each in
isolation, nothing in particular arrests your attention. Together, though, an
interesting pattern emerges. The
following table lists the vital statistics, as it were, as recorded by Domesday
Book.
Lord 1066 |
Lord 1086 |
Geld |
Mill |
Fishery |
Meadow |
Wood |
Seuen |
Ivo Taillebois |
0.3b |
1/6 |
3 |
3½a |
15a |
Thorkell |
Alfred of |
0.6b |
1/3 |
6 |
6a |
30a |
Healfdene |
Robert of |
0.6b |
1/3 |
6 |
7a |
30a |
Wulfric Wild |
Seuen |
0.3b |
1/6* |
3 |
4½a |
15a |
* text has ‘six parts’, recte ‘a sixth part’.
The assessment to the geld of the four manors is in the ratio of 1:2:2:1, and so is the division of the mill, the fisheries, and the woodland. Only the proportion of meadow is askew and even there we might suspect that the Domesday scribe meant 3½, 7, 7, and 3½ acres. The manpower on the estates and their value are more disparate, reflecting, no doubt, economic realities in 1086. But the infrastructure of the manors echo each other. Clearly, at some point before 1066 a single estate had been divided into four in the ratio 1:2:2:1.
The circumstances in which this
happened are, of course, not explicit. But we get some sort of clue from a
similar division of an estate in
Lord 1066 |
Lord 1086 |
Geld |
Meadow |
Wood |
S Peter |
S Mary |
Wulfric Wild |
|
0.7b |
6a |
35a |
1/12 |
1/6 |
Godwine Thorkell |
Kolsveinn |
1.2b |
18a |
72a |
|
|
Alsige |
Odo Ardblaster |
0.7b |
12a |
70a |
1/6 |
1/3 |
Wulfric Wild |
Wulfgeat |
0.3b |
6a |
35a |
1/12 |
1/6 |
The division of the geld assessment is not as precise as in Bourne, but, again, a ratio of 1:2:2:1 is apparent. This begins to look like a family matter. Before the Conquest primogeniture – inheritance by the eldest son – was not always the norm. With certain types of land known as socages it was usual to divide estates between sons and sometimes even daughters. There are several instances in the Lincolnshire Domesday that illustrate the process. The result was a proliferation of manors just like the four we have here in Bourne.
I say ‘Bourne’, but in fact these estates were not situated in the settlement. You may think that the place-names of Domesday Book are pretty much transparent. In fact, they are anything but. A name from time to time may simply refer to a particular village, but it is equally likely to refer to an estate or a unit of local government. In which case one name may refer to a number of settlements. So, how can you determine what sort of name you have, then? Well, you have to use the later history of the estates. It turns out that the name ‘Bourne’ in Domesday Book refers not to a settlement but to a unit of twelve carucates that was known as the hundred and functioned as an administrative area akin to a modern civil parish.
By 1086 the four manors had passed to different lords. Ivo
Taillebois the sheriff, Alfred of Lincoln, and Robert of Stafford were major
tenants-in-chief in Lincolnshire; Seuen, by contrast, was an Englishman who
managed to hang on to his lands where most of his countrymen were dispossessed.
Wulfric was presumably his father. All of their fees can be traced into the
fourteenth century. In most records they are simply identified either as ‘Bourne’
or ‘the Hundred of Bourne’ (the unit survived into the fifteenth century).
Some, however, are more precise. The Pipe Roll of 1167 is the earliest and most
eloquent. It records that the sheriff rendered account of 1 mark of the forest
pleas of Alan de Neville due from the fee of Hugh Wake in Bourne and Dyke. This
is the main manor of Bourne. The next entry, by contrast, concerns ‘1 mark from
all the fees of Austerby’. In the thirteenth century there are references to
the
The name means ‘the settlement to the east’. Today it is used generally
of the area to the south-east of Bourne and specifically of the road that runs
west-east from
The Old Bakehouse gives a fair idea of the centre of the village.
The layout of the streets provides even better clues. If we are looking for a focus
of settlement, then it must be
Although Domesday Book designates the four estates as manors, I
suspect that they amounted to little more than farms in 1066. Notionally, each
must have had a hall at which dues were rendered. This was the essence of the
Domesday manor and service was due in return to a superior lord. In practice,
however, the hall could be any structure. In the Boldon Book, an account of the
estates of the bishop of
Well, I’ve gone rather a long time about the Domesday entries. I think, though, that we now have a clearer picture of Bourne in the middle to late eleventh century at the beginning of its recorded history. The tenurial framework is simpler than it at first appears. There is what I shall call the main manor to which is attached an important church. I have suggested that the second manor in Bourne was probably attached to this church. The remaining manors were situated in Austerby. At some time in the recent past they had been constituted as a single estate but by 1066 it had been so subdivided that its constituent elements effectively functioned as farms.
It is de rigeur in these circumstances to give a figure for the Domesday population at this point and I will duly do so. The statistics are summarized in the following table:
Manor |
Sokemen |
Villeins |
Bordars |
Total |
Bourne I |
4 |
14 |
4 |
22 |
Bourne II |
3 |
4 |
2 |
9 |
Austerby I |
|
3 |
1 |
4 |
Austerby II |
|
2 |
4 |
6 |
Austerby III |
|
3 |
3 |
6 |
Austerby IV |
|
5 |
1 |
6 |
There were a
total of 31 recorded individuals in Bourne and 22 in Austerby. Each person is
usually held to represent a family, normally considered to average five persons,
so we will have a population of 155 and 110 respectively. These figures,
however, should be seen as a minimum. Domesday Book records only those
individuals who owed service. Not all did. Just over the boundary to the east
in
The selectivity of the Domesday text highlights an important characteristic of society in the eleventh century. When we think of the manor we tend a assume that it all belonged to the lord and its inhabitants were little better than slaves. There are elements of this characterization that were to become true by the thirteenth century. In both 1066 and 1086, however, the inhabitants were still free. Sokemen, as here in Bourne, were free to dispose of their lands, but so too did villeins have a degree of freedom. They were so called because they were men of the villa, that is, the village. They were obliged to work on their lord’s demesne, but in return had a full share in the resources of the vill. It was only bordars who might be unfree, although they were not always so. The point I make here is that society was basically tributary: it was dues of one kind or another that kept it together rather than land. The value of the various manors in Bourne would have included the rents of peasants who are otherwise not noticed.
The
economy that Domesday describes reflects this kind of society. Manorial infrastructure
is recorded not because it was there but because it contributed to the income
of the lord’s demesne, that is his home farm. Unfortunately, we do not have an
exhaustive account of livestock in
All this – the tributary society and
economy – began to change in the fifty years after the Domesday survey. By 1140
Bourne had changed out of all recognition. The early twelfth century was a
period in which lordship became territorialized. Society became feudal if you
like. The change was general, but the transformation of Bourne was facilitated
by an expansion of the honour. The details are hazy, but by the 1130s
Now, I know that there has been a considerable amount of debate in Bourne of late as to whether there actually was a castle here. All I can say it that in the medieval period many people thought there was. The first reference occurs in 1180 and we have notices right up into the sixteenth century. We hear of the eastern bailey, the gatehouse, the chapel and so on. It matters not whether it was called a castrum or castellum. Now you might complain that the site can never have been defensible or was just a moated manor house, but this misses the point. Let’s take probably the most iconic of English castles. Bodiam certainly looks the part. But it might as well be a cardboard cut-out for all of its defensive value. It was built half way up a hill and any besiegers just had to slight the dam to let out the moat and walk in. Bodiam was built for show. It was a statement of status. So was Bourne castle. Whether it worked as a serious fortress was a secondary matter.
The real problem is the date of the
castle. As a motte and bailey, it could just as easily date from the late
eleventh century as the early twelfth. Did Ogier build it, then? Without
archaeological investigation there is, of course, no way of knowing short of a
cache of new documents coming to light. But I suspect not. With a total income
of £28 pounds, it is unlikely that Ogier had the resources. In fact, it was
probably not until the barony of Bourne was joined to the fess of Godfrey de
Cambrai and Baldwin the Fleming in the hands of
What is perhaps clearer is that the
construction of the castle saw a remodelling of the town. We have no
documentary evidence to illustrate what happened, but the street pattern of
Bourne is eloquent. At first appearances Bourne is a simple crossroads
settlement.
The market place is evidently a secondary
feature of the town plan. Where, then, was the original centre of Bourne? All
we have to do to find out is follow the original alignments of the roads. If we
extend the line of
The date of the re-planning is
inevitably problematic. You might say that it must follow the grant of a market
to Baldwin Wake in 1281. But life is not that simple, I’m afraid. A charter
does not necessarily date the creation of the market; it may as often merely
confirm it. So, 1281 is as likely to be the latest date for the change as the
earliest. Indeed, a closer association with the construction of the castle is indicated
by the course of
So, as in so many other places, I am
inclined to see the creation of the market as an integral part of the construction
of the castle. Was there also a scheme to create a new town? This is precisely
what happened at Sleaford at much the same time. There the construction of the
castle saw a remodelling of the settlement and the introduction of burgage
tenure. The topography of ‘New Sleaford’, as it was called, is strikingly
similar to that of Bourne. There is no evidence for burgage tenure here – we
know it of Sleaford from only one source – but the tenements either side of
I would conclude, then, that the
skeleton of modern Bourne was formed in the early twelfth century through a
radical transformation of the Domesday settlement. The same period also saw a
transformation of its society and economy. Work had already begun on the
division and drainage of the fen and the lords of Bourne were in the forefront
of appropriating common rights to themselves. The foundation of the abbey also
began to change the face of tenure. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries it attracted endowments and, as we have seen, it consolidated these
into its own manor it the fourteenth. But all of that must be another story for
another time. Tonight my objective was to unpick the early history of Bourne
from the Domesday account of the vill and highlight the changes that were
wrought on it in the early twelfth century. It was here, after all, that we
find the origins of the modern town of