THE LINDSEY SURVEY

(1115-18)

This 'invaluable Survey', as Mr Stevenson has termed it,[1]

might be described as a miniature Domesday for each of the Wapentakes in the three trithings into which Lindsey was divided. For although drawn up, Wapentake by Wapentake, as is the Leicestershire Survey, Hundred by Hundred, the lands within each Wapentake described are grouped under the names of the holders of fiefs, instead of being entered Vill by Vill. It was doubtless compiled, like other surveys, in connection with the assessment of the 'geld'.[2]

Remarkable from a palaeographic standpoint, as well as from the nature of its contents, the record, which is found in a Cottonian MS. (Claud. C. 5), has been singularly unfortunate in its editors. As Mr Greenstreet truly observed:

The indefatigable Hearne, seeing that the manuscript related to a very ancient period of our history, and recognizing its great importance, printed it in the Appendix to his 'Liber Niger', but he does not appear to have properly examined either the question of the date of the writing, or the internal evidence.... As a natural consequence of his superficial examination, he associates it wrongly with the reign of Henry II.

Stapleton, of course, knew better than this, and assigned the survey at one time to circ. 1108,[3] but in his Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniæ[4] to 1106-20. It was subsequently investigated and analysed with great care by Mr Eyton, whose note-books, now in the British Museum, show that he adopted the sound method of comparing it in detail with Domesday Book. After his death Mr Chester Waters issued (1883) an annotated translation of the text, with an introduction, analysis, etc., in which the place-names were carefully identified, and the same system of comparison with Domesday adopted.[5]

It is, unfortunately, necessary to explain that Mr Waters in the table of contents described his translation as 'from the Cotton MS., Claudius C. 5', and wrote on the opposite page:

This MS. engaged the attention of Thomas Hearne, the antiquary, who has printed it amongst the additaments to his edition of the Liber Niger Scaccarii; but Hearne was one of those industrious but uncritical antiquaries who had no conception of the duties of an editor of the importance of accuracy.

Knowing the high opinion entertained of Mr Waters' works,[6] I accepted his translation in all good faith as 'from the Cotton MS.' and was, I confess, not a little startled to discover from Mr Greenstreet's facsimiles that it was made not from the Cotton MS., but from that inaccurate edition by Hearne, which Mr Waters had mentioned only to denounce. On fo. 4b a whole line, containing three entries, was accidentally omitted by Hearne, and is, consequently, absent also from Mr Waters' version. On collating the two, however, I found, to my great surprise, that matters were even worse than this, and that Hearne's text was far less inaccurate than Mr Waters' own, the erroneous figures found in the latter being almost always correctly given by the 'uncritical' Hearne. As for the version given by Mr Waters, even in the very first Wapentake, there are three serious errors, five carucates being given as three, nine as seven, and eleven as two! And for Bradley Wapentake (p. 27), his figures are so erroneous that, according to him, 'Radulf Meschin alone had 42 cars. 6 bovs. in this Wapentake', though his real holding was only fifteen cars. three bovs. With another class of resultant errors I shall have to deal below.

To the enterprise of Mr Greenstreet scholars were indebted for an édition de luxe of the record in facsimile, which made its appearance shortly after the treatise of Mr Waters. Unfortunately, no attempt was made in the appended literal translation to identify the names of places or persons, while such a word as '[ap]pendiciis', which occasionally appears in the survey, is mistaken for a place-name 'Pendicus'. The book enjoys, however, the great advantage of an index.

The identification of places and of persons in Mr Waters' treatise shows extraordinary knowledge; but both Mr Eyton and Mr Waters had the provoking habit of making important assertions without giving their authority. I expressed a wish in the Academy, at the time, that Mr Waters would give us some clue as to his sources of information, but as he did not think fit to do so, we have to test his statements as best we can for ourselves. Now we learn from him on p. 36 that 'Walter fitz William', a tenant at South Willingham, was 'brother of Simon mentioned above', namely of 'Simon fitz William (ancestor to the Lords Kyme)'. This is impressive until we discover that the actual words in the survey (as indeed in Hearne's text) are 'Walt[erius] fil[ius] Walt[eri]i' (fo. 11 b).[7] To an expert such a test as this will prove significant enough. But to turn from an actual misreading of the text to cases in which are incorporated interlineations, not part of the original text, but written in later times, we find Mr Waters—like other antiquaries who had followed Hearne's text—stating that 'Ranulf [Meschin] is twice styled in the Roll Earl of Lincoln, but there is no record of his creation, and no other authority for possession of the earldom' (p. 8). The difficulty vanishes when we discover that this supposed style was a mere interlineation made by a much later hand.[8] So again we read on p. 30:

Richard, Earl [of Chester], has 6 cars. in Barnetby-le-Wold, where [William], the constable of Chester, is his tenant [as his father was Earl Hugh's in Domesday].

But on turning to Mr Greenstreet's facsimiles, we find that the survey had nothing about 'the constable of Chester', the words 'constabularia [sic] Cestrie' being only a faint interlineation by a later hand.

And even where a reference to the true text does not at once dispose of the matter, these statements of Mr Waters are, on other grounds, open at times to question. He assumes, for instance, that Hugh fitz Ranulf, who occurs as a landowner in the survey, was a younger son of Ranulf Meschin, afterwards Earl of Chester (p. 12). No such son would seem to be known; and this assumption, moreover, does violence to chronology. For the pedigree it involves is this:

Now William de Roumare was not old enough to claim his inheritance from the King till 1122, and his half-brother, Ranulf, was some years younger than he was, as the words of Orderic imply in 1140. Consequently Hugh, the youngest brother, can have been only a boy in 1122. How then could he, as Mr Waters alleges, have held a fief in right of his wife so early as 1115 or thereabouts?

In this assumption, however, he only follows Stapleton, to whom he here refers, and who relied on an abstract in the cartulary of Spalding (fol. 416 a, b). This abstract which cannot, from its form, preserve the wording of the original charter, runs:

Sciant tam presentes quam futuri quod Hugo frater Rannulfi comitis Cestrie et Matild' uxor ejus, fil' filia [sic] Lucie comitisse concesserunt, etc., etc.

Stapleton boldly rendered the obviously corrupt words as 'son and daughter-in-law of the countess Lucia',[9] and hence pronounced this Hugh to be 'a married brother of the whole blood' to the second Randulf, Earl of Chester.[10] As he only knew their gift to Spalding to be 'prior to 1141', no chronological difficulty was caused by this view; but the occurrence of Hugh's name in the Lindsey Survey, as already in possession of his small fief, at once raises the difficulty I have explained. The solution that occurs to me is that the Hugh fitz Ranulf of our survey, and the 'Hugo frater Ranulfi Comitis Cestrie' of the Spalding charter, was a brother, not of the second but of the first Earl Ranulf, and that the words 'fil' filia Comitisse Lucie' were introduced in error by the compiler, whose head was full of the Countess Lucy, and who had here confused the two Earls Randulf.

Stapleton, Mr Waters has justly observed, was 'facile princeps of Anglo-Norman genealogists'.[11] Yet I venture to think that, as he here mistook a brother of the first Earl Ranulf for a son, so he confused William Meschin, another and better known brother, with William de Roumare, the Earl's stepson, afterwards Earl of Lincoln. William Meschin was not merely a considerable landowner in Lindsey, but had also estates in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, as our survey of those counties show.[12] Stephen, according to Stapleton, created him Earl of Cambridge.

Remembering the dictum of Dr Stubbs that 'Stephen's earldoms are a matter of great constitutional importance', it is worth while to examine this earldom of Cambridge.

In one of Stapleton's greatest essays, that on Holy Trinity Priory, York,[13] he writes of this William Meschin, that

By King Stephen he was made Earl of Cambridge, as we learn from the following extract from a charter of Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1139, founding the nunnery of Haverholm, in the parish of Ruskington, of the order of St. Gilbert of Sempringham. 'But this donation ... we have confirmed ... by the testimony of Rannulph, Earl of Chester, and of William, Earl of Cambridge, his brother' (p. 34).

The words in the original are:

Testimonio Rannulfi comitis Cestriæ et Willelmi comitis Cantebrigiæ fratris ejus (Mon. Ang., v. 949).

Now, though Stapleton is positive on the point, speaking again of 'William Meschin, Earl of Cambridge' (p. 35), and though this learned paper well sustains his reputation, yet he has here beyond question gone astray. Earl Randulf, first of his name, appears as deceased in the Pipe Roll of 1130. He could not therefore have been the Earl Randulf of 1139, who was his son and namesake. Therefore the latter's 'brother', the Earl of Cambridge, could not have been William Meschin, who was his father's brother.[14] A short chart pedigree will make the matter clear:

The pedigree shows my solution of the mystery. The two brother-earls of 1139 are those who are found so constantly together, and who were jointly concerned, next year, in the surprise of Lincoln, but who were really only half-brothers, though they spoke of one another as 'frater'.

The identity of the 'Earl of Cambridge' is thus clearly established; but there of course remains the question why he is not here styled 'Earl of Lincoln'. Every mention of him as Earl of Lincoln is later, if this charter be rightly dated, so that he may possibly have changed his style. It is really strange that precisely as William, Earl of Lincoln, is here once styled Earl of Cambridge, so William, Earl of Arundel, is twice styled Earl of Lincoln, as I have shown in my Geoffrey de Mandeville (p. 324), though in that case also the fact had never been suspected. It is most tempting, if rash, to suggest that the reason why the Earl of Lincoln was at first Earl of Cambridge is that the Earl of Arundel (Sussex) was at first Earl of Lincoln, and thus kept him out of that title.

In any case an error has now been corrected, and one of Stephen's alleged earls disposed of.

The question of the date of this interesting survey is no less puzzling than important. Mr Greenstreet held that 'there is hardly any room for doubting' that it was previous to 1109. This conclusion was based on a misapprehension, and Mr Waters claimed to have 'established' the date as 'between March 1114 and April 1116' (pp. 2-4). In this conclusion he would seem to have been anticipated by Mr Eyton, as is shown by that writer's note-books,[15] but I cannot accept the identical and somewhat far-fetched argument on which they relied. They obtained their limit on the one hand from a passage in 'Peter of Blois', and on the other from the fact that Robert, the King's son, is entered in the roll as 'filius Regis', and 'was therefore not yet Earl of Gloucester', whereas he was certainly Earl, they say, 'before Easter, 1116', when he witnessed as Earl, a charter they both assign to that date.

Of the latter date I disposed in my paper 'The Creation of the Earldom of Gloucester',[16] in which I showed that Robert did not become Earl till several years later. The other evidence, if it cannot be disproved, cannot at least, be relied on. For, without asserting that the chronicle assigned to 'Peter of Blois' is so daring a forgery as the 'Historia Ingulphi', of which it is a 'continuatio', it must be plainly described as absolutely untrustworthy. Apart from the passage on Cambridge University,[17] we have a description 'Inclyti Comitis Leycestriæ Roberti tunc validissimi adolescentis, burgensiumque suæ dictæ civitatis' in 1113, and of his presence, with his knights, at the laying of the Abbey foundation stones next year.[18] Now the future Earl of Leicester was some nine years old at the time, and his father, the Count of Meulan, lived till 1118. So also, about the year 1114 we meet with 'Milonis Comitis Herfordensis', who did not become Earl of Hereford till 1141, and whose father, Walter of Gloucester, was living long after 1114; while on the next page we find the notoriously false Countess Lucy legend, with the additional blunder of converting her son, the Earl of Lincoln, into her husband's brother![19] It is in the midst of all this that we have the vital passage on which Mr Waters relies:

We know from the Continuator [sic] of Peter of Blois (p. 121) that Stephen and his elder brother Theobald were on a visit to Henry I, at Oxford, at some period between March 7th and August 1st, 1114, when Theobald is described as Count of Blois, and Stephen as 'pulcherrimus adolescens dominus postea rex Anglorum'. It is manifest that at this date Stephen was not yet Count of Moreton, so the Roll must be later than March 7th, 1114 (p. 3).

The fact that this alleged visit is connected by 'Peter' with intervention in favour of the Abbot of Crowland, will not lessen the suspicion under which the evidence must lie. Crowland was guilty of 'hiring', Dr Stubbs has severely observed, 'Peter of Blois, or some pretended Peter who borrows an illustrious name, to fabricate for her an apocryphal chronicle'.[20]

The actual proof of the survey's date is minute, no doubt, but conclusive. In the Lindsey Survey, 'the sons of Ragemer' (himself the Domesday under-tenant) are found holding of Walter de Gant; therefore their father, at the time of the survey, had been succeeded by them in this holding. But, as 'Rachmar, son of Gilbert', he is found attesting a charter of Maud, Walter de Gant's wife, to Bridlington Priory, which is addressed to Thurstan, Archbishop of York, and which therefore must be later at the very least than his election, August 15, 1114. Therefore Ragemer was alive after that date, and the survey, at the time of which he was dead, can consequently scarcely be earlier than 1115. On the other hand, we can scarcely place it later than the death of the great Count of Meulan in the summer of 1118,[21] though, as I have urged in the Genealogist, the lands he had held might still be assigned to 'the Count of Meulan', till his fiefs were divided among his sons, who were boys at the time of his death. On the whole we may safely assign the survey to 1115-1118, and in any case it cannot possibly be later than the close of 1120.

As, according to Stapleton, the best authority, it is in this survey that the name of Marmion first appears in England, it may not be inopportune to examine here the accepted pedigree of that house. In the Roger Marmion of our survey we have its undoubted ancestor, but of Robert Marmion, who appears on its opening folio as a tenant of Walter de Gant at Winteringham, one cannot speak so positively. In Domesday Winteringham, as 12 carucates, was held of Gilbert de Gant by 'Robertus homo Gilberti' (354b): in our Survey eleven[22] of these carucates were held of Gilbert's son Walter by Robert Marmion, and the twelfth in capite by Roger Marmion. Mr Waters (p. 17) identifies the former with the Domesday under-tenant, which is a tempting solution, were not the Domesday Robert also under-tenant at Risby (which was held in our survey not by Marmion, but by Walter de St Paul). It seems to me more probable that Robert, the under-tenant in our survey, was, as Mr Waters, contradicting himself, elsewhere observes (p. 14), the son and heir of Roger. Yet of Roger Marmion's estate at Fulstow, Mr Waters writes (p. 27): 'Roger's father, Robert Marmion, was tenant there in Domesday of Robert Dispenser.' This would give us an interesting clue. But on turning to Domesday (363b), we find that it is only one more mistake of Mr Waters, its 'Robertus' being no other than Robert Dispenser himself.[23]

Stapleton, who worked out the descent, held that Roger's son Robert, who had succeeded by 1130, and who was slain in 1143, was father of the Robert who died in 1218. I would rather interpolate another Robert between the two:

The pedigree really turns on the charter of Henry III in 1249, to Philip Marmion, confirming the royal charters to his ancestor. Mr Stapleton declares that Henry inspected and confirmed

The charter which King Henry, his great-great-grandfather, had made to Robert Marmyon, great-grandfather of Philip Marmyon, of having warren in all his land in the county of Warwick, and especially at Tamworth; and likewise of the charter of King Henry, his uncle ['Avunculus noster' is the reading transcribed on the rolls, obviously in error of 'atavus noster'], which he had made to the said Robert of having warren in all his land of Lindesay (Rot. Scacc. Norm., II. cvi.).

This abstract is strangely inaccurate, considering that Stapleton had, clearly, examined the Inspeximus[24] for himself. Henry VI inspected and confirmed:

It is clear then that Henry III inspected the charter of his grandfather ('avus') Henry II (not, as Mr Stapleton wrote, his great-great-grandfather'), in 1155, to Robert Marmion, 'proavus' of Philip. This, it will be seen, could only be the Robert whom I have inserted in the pedigree. Nor can Mr Stapleton's 'atavus' assumption be accepted in view of the facts. The 'avunculus' and namesake of Henry III would duly have been the 'young king' Henry (crowned 1170). If 'avunculus' is a clerical error, the word to substitute is 'avus'; but the careful way in which the charter distinguishes the King's two predecessors is quite opposed to the idea that they were in both cases his grandfather.

As against the evidence afforded us by the charter of Henry III, we have the statements and documents relating to Barbery Abbey, a daughter of Savigny. It is alleged that the house was first founded in 1140[25] by that Robert Marmion who was slain at Coventry in 1143.[26] Stapleton accepted this without question. Yet, so far as documents are concerned, we have only the charter of Robert Marmion (1181), in which he speaks of his father Robert as beginning the foundation.[27] If that father were indeed the Robert who was slain in 1143, Stapleton's pedigree is duly proved as against that which I derive from Henry the Third's charter. But for this identification we have only, it would seem, the obiter dictum of the 'Gallia Christiana' editors, while the fact that the first Abbot was appointed about 1177,[28] combined with the fact that Robert Marmion, in 1181, was avowedly completing that foundation which his father's death had arrested, certainly seems to point to his father's benefaction being then recent, and little previous to the said appointment of the first Abbot. In that case his father would be not the Robert who died in 1143, but a Robert who, as I suggest, came between the two.[29]

Leaving now this question of pedigree, there is a theory as to the name of Marmion which one cannot pass over in silence, because it has received the sanction even of Stapleton. Writing on the date of the Lindsey Survey, that eminent authority observes:

Robert Le Despenser [Dispensator] was brother of Urso de Abbetot, whose other surname, Marmion, is equivalent in Norman French to the Latin word Dispensator; and as Robert Marmion died in 1107, it was probably in the following year that this catalogue was written.[30]

His meaning, though clumsily expressed, as was sometimes the case, is that the Latin 'Dispensator' represented the name 'Marmion'. This theory would seem to be derived from the word 'Marmiton' (not 'Marmion') which means not a 'Dispensator', but a scullion, the most despised of the menials employed in the kitchen. There was indeed in old French a rare word 'Marmion', but according to Godefroy, it was equivalent to 'Marmot', the name of the Marmoset. In any case, therefore, this illustrious surname, immortalized by Scott

They hailed him Lord of Fontenaye,

Of Lutterworth and Scrivelbaye,

Of Tamworth tower and town

had nothing to do with 'Dispensator', but meant either a scullion or a monkey, and was one of those nicknames that the Normans loved to inexorably bestow on one another.

What was the actual relation of the Marmions to Robert 'Dispensator' is a problem as yet unsolved. Mr Waters wrote:

It is generally believed that Scrivelsby and the rest of the Honour of Dispenser came to the Marmions through the marriage of Roger Marmion's grandson,[31] Robert Marmion, who was the husband of Matilda de Beauchamp, the grand-daughter of Urso de Abitot, and grand-niece of Robert Dispenser. But the Roll proves that Roger Marmion was the immediate heir of Robert Dispenser (p. 14).

I know of no such general belief. Stapleton, to whom one would naturally turn, had pointed out long before, in his 'Rolls of the Norman Exchequer', that this survey proves Roger Marmion to have held the Lincolnshire fief of Robert 'Dispensator',[32] while those who have identified the latter magnate with Robert 'Marmion' have traced the descent of Scrivelsby in the Marmions even from the Conquest.[33]

In any case, as I wrote in my Ancient Charters (1888) of a document there published:

The succession of Urse [de Abetot] to this [Lincolnshire] fief is a genealogical discovery which throws a wholly new light on the very difficult problem of the relation of Marmion to Despenser, and is fatal to the assertion of Mr Chester Waters that 'Roger Marmion was the immediate heir of Robert Dispenser'.

Moreover, in the Leicestershire Survey,[34] and still more in that of Worcestershire,[35] we have evidence that Robert's inheritance was shared between Beauchamp and Marmion which points there also to descent through Urse de Abetot. In my Geoffrey de Mandeville (pp. 313-5) I have suggested that in their rivalry for Tamworth,[36] the Marmions embraced the cause of Stephen, and the Beauchamps that of Maud, their variance being terminated under Henry II by a matrimonial alliance. Such a compromise was common enough. It was agreed on in the case of Grantmesnil; it was carried out at this very period in that of Fitzharding and Berkeley; it was again resorted to at a later stage in the history of the house of Berkeley; it was arranged in the case of Hastings; and it was repeated in that of Boleyn, where the Butler inheritance was at stake.[37]

[1] English Historical Review, v. 96.

[2] I have discussed above (pp. 69-72) the bearing of its evidence on the problem of Domesday assessment, so need not recur to the subject here.

[3] See note 31 below.

[4] Vol. II. p. xcvi.

[5] A Roll of the Owners of Land in the parts of Lindsey ('Reprinted from the Associated Architectural Societies Reports and Papers').

[6] In consideration of which he received a pension on the Civil List.

[7] There is a similar error on fo. 13, where the 'William fitz Aubrey' of Mr Waters proves to be 'filius Albrede' (not Alberici).

[8] Hearne duly prints it as an interlineation.

[9] Rolls of the Norman Exchequer, II. clvi.

[10] He further hazarded the erroneous conjecture that Roheis, Countess of Lincoln, was his daughter.

[11] Gundrada de Warrenne, p. 9.

[12] See pp. [171], [179], infra.

[13] pp. 1-237. Bound up in the York volume of the Royal Archæological Institute.

[14] Stapleton indeed exposed himself unconsciously by stating on the very same page that William Meschin's lands had passed to his heirs 'prior to 1138', so that he could not be the Earl of 1139.

[15] See on this point the important letters of Mr Greenstreet and Mr J. A. C. Vincent to the Athenæum, May 9 and June 27, 1885.

[16] Geoffrey de Mandeville, p. 420 et seq.

[17] Ed. Gale, pp. 114, 115.

[18] Ibid., pp. 118, 119.

[19] Ibid., pp. 124, 125.

[20] Lectures on Mediæval and Modern History, p. 148.

[21] Survey of Lindsey, p. 2.

[22] Mr Waters, in error, states two.

[23] It is an illustration of the ignorance prevalent on early genealogy that even Mr Freeman could write of 'Mr Chester Waters, than whom no man better deserves to be listened to on any point of genealogy, especially of the Norman genealogy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries' (English Historical Review, iii. 690).

[24] Rot. Pat. 27 Hen. VI, part i, m 30.

[25] Neustria Pia, 683.

[26] Gallia Christiana (1874), xi. 452.

[27] Neustria Pia, 881; Gall. Christ., xi., Instr. 86.

[28] Gall. Christ., xi. 452.

[29] Since this was written I have found that Mr C. F. R. Palmer, in his admirable little treatise on the Marmion family (1875), duly inserts this intermediate Robert. Mr Palmer has shown himself by far the best authority on the subject, and has printed a valuable charter of Stephen to Robert Marmion.

[30] Paper on 'Holy Trinity Priory, York', p. 208 note. This identification is accepted by no less an authority than Mr A. S. Ellis (Domesday Tenants of Gloucestershire, p. 69).

[31] i.e. according to Stapleton's pedigree.

[32] And Mr Palmer independently had done the same in his History of the Marmions (1865).

[33] Lodge's Scrivelsby: the Home of the Champions.

[34] See p. [174].

[35] See p. 174.

[36] It is certain that Tamworth originally belonged to Robert 'Dispensator', and equally certain that it was held successively by Roger and Robert Marmion under Henry I.

[37] See my Early Life of Anne Boleyn, pp. 25-7.