AUBOURN, HADDINGTON AND SOUTH HYKEHAM: HADDINGTON, HALL CLOSE

SK 914627

 

Earthworks on the banks of the River Witham some 200 metres to the south of the present hamlet of Haddington (Fig 64) represent the remains of a considerable manorial complex or grange. However, the tenurial complexity of the settlement is such that it has not proved possible to positively identify them. In 1086 there were only two holdings which were inland and soke of the manors of Doddington Pigot and Aubourn held by Baldwin the Fleming and Robert de Tosny (1). They subsequently passed to the honours of Wake and Belvoir and were enfeoffed sometime in the twelfth century (2). By the mid thirteenth both were heavily subinfeudated, and the process of fragmentation may have continued into the next century, for in 1346 there were at least ten mesne fees in the vill (3). The lands of Fosse, St Katherine's of Lincoln, and the Temple of Temple Bruer were probably held by rents, and it is unlikely that any of the houses maintained an establishment in Haddington. However, the 1848 tithe award map may indicate that the site was tithe free (4), and its identity as a grange cannot therefore be entirely excluded. Equally some of the lay tenants may have been resident, and the earthworks could therefore represent a secular site. Ralf de St Vedast certainly held a capital messuage in Haddington of the honour of Belvoir in 1222, and it may have passed to William de Coleville by 1346 (5). The only other reference, however, is to a simple 'messuage' that William son of Alan possessed as part of a fee of 15 bovates held of Wake and four  bovates held of Belvoir in 1322, the former part of which can be traced back to 1242 (6). Some amalgamation of fees probably took place in the later Middle Ages, and by 1504 there seems to have been only one manor of Haddington (7).

          The complex consists chiefly of one more or less square moated area 30 by 40 metres, surrounded by water-filled ditches (Fig 65). A rectangular platform, partly ditched, which lies to the west, and is approximately 100 metres across, has the appearance of part of a formal garden. There is a narrow bank across it 20 metres from the west end which may conceal a buried wall; it encloses part of the west end, but is unclear at its southern corner. A 30 metre length of water may have been a symmetrical pond. The remainder of the earthworks continue on a layout almost at right angles to that first described.

 

1.       Lincs DB, 18/30; 65/1.

 

2.       BF, 187-8.

 

3.       BF, 1046-7; RH i, 285; FA ii, 211-2.

 

4.       LAO, Tithe Award B 503. The site is not identified by so much as a field name or number, presumably because it was not subject to tithes.

 

5.       RA, nos 2153-4.

 

6.       CI vi, 247; FA ii, 174; BF, 1047. William son of Alan was said in 1303 to be the successor to William le Chen who held one quarter of a knight's fee in 1242.

 

7.       CI HVII ii, 377.