[55] Cott. MS, quoted Dugdale, Monasticon, VI. iii. 1242.
[56] Ibid. 1242-3.
[57] Luard, op cit., iii 104.
[58] Vict. County Hist., ii. 55.
[59] For the disputes between ecclesiastics and their tenants see Mrs Green, Town Life, i. 333-383; Thompson, Municipal History, passim. This feature is not confined to England. For the disputes between the men of Rouen and the chapter see Giry, Établissements de Rouen, 34.
The Chester Lordship
The place where the monks settled was probably little better than a village. We may picture it as a couple of straggling streets intersecting one another, with small wooden houses on either side of the highway, which was comparatively empty of people except on market days when country folk would come in to sell their wares in the "Cheaping" at the monastery gates. Domesday records that there were only sixty-nine heads of families living in Godiva's estate at Coventry in 1086,[60] though Leicester and Warwick were fair-sized towns, as towns were accounted then. Of the two parish churches, existing probably at the Conquest, S. Michael's served maybe for the tenants of the lay lord, and Trinity for those of the ecclesiastical estate. For from the beginnings of its history the town had been divided into two lordships, whereof the convent held the northern part or Prior's-half, not mentioned in Domesday, as the gift of their founder, Earl Leofric; while the southern portion, the Earl's-half, which Leofric retained, became a part of the Earl of Chester's vast inheritance.