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Distribution map of property and lordships associated with this name in DB
List of property and lordships associated with this name in DB
Holder 1066
Shire
Phil. ref.
Vill
Holder 1066 DB Spelling
Holder 1066
Lord 1066
Tenant-in-Chief 1086
1086
subtenant
Fiscal value
1066
value
1086 value
Holder 1066 ID conf.
Show on map
Buckinghamshire
23,3
Hitcham
Hamingus
Hemming 'of Marlow', king's thegn
Edward, king
Miles Crispin
Ralph 'the man of Miles Crispin'
3.00
2.50
2.00
B
Map
Buckinghamshire
23,3
Hitcham
Hemming 'of Marlow', king's thegn
Edward, king
Miles Crispin
Roger 'the man of Miles Crispin'
3.00
2.50
2.00
B
Map
Buckinghamshire
23,4
Marlow
Haming
Hemming 'of Marlow', king's thegn
Edward, king
Miles Crispin
Ralph 'the man of Miles Crispin'
4.31
2.00
1.50
B
Map
Buckinghamshire
23,4
Marlow
Hemming 'of Marlow', king's thegn
Edward, king
Miles Crispin
Roger 'the man of Miles Crispin'
4.31
2.00
1.50
B
Map
Gloucestershire
64,2
Cherington
Haminc
Hemming 'of Marlow', king's thegn
Edward, king
Miles Crispin
Geoffrey 'the man of Miles Crispin'
2.00
4.00
4.00
B
Map
Total
16.62
13.00
11.00
Lord 1066
Shire
Phil. ref.
Vill
Lord 1066 DB Spelling
Holder 1066
Lord 1066
Tenant-in-Chief 1086
1086
subtenant
Fiscal value
1066
value
1086 value
Lord 1066 ID conf.
Show on map
Buckinghamshire
23,15
East Claydon
Haming
2 men of Hemming
Hemming
Miles Crispin
2 Englishmen
2.00
1.00
1.00
B
Map
Total
2.00
1.00
1.00
Hemming 6 was a king’s thegn who held at least three manors: two large ones on the Thames in Buckinghamshire and a smaller one in the Cotswolds; he probably also had a manor in north Buckinghamshire and perhaps other property in Oxfordshire. His three certain manors paid geld on about 16½ hides and were worth £13; the other Buckinghamshire manor was 7¾ hides worth £4. Any Oxfordshire holdings are too uncertain to be quantified.
Hemming 6 is identifiable principally because he was one of the antecessors of the important Norman baron Miles Crispin, castellan of Wallingford (Berks.) and a major landholder across southern Mercia in 1086. Miles was son-in-law of the royal constable and castellan of Oxford, Robert d’Oilly, and evidently acquired much of his fief from Robert at the time of his marriage (Stenton 1939: 382–3). The lands which first passed through d’Oilly’s hands seem to have included Hemming’s Gloucestershire manor of Cherington, which d’Oilly held in 1074, when he gave two thirds of his demesne tithes there to St George’s chapel in Oxford castle (VCH Glos. XI, 168). Other manors passed via d’Oilly from the pre-Conquest magnate Wigot of Wallingford (Wigod 4 %% Wigot 4) to Miles Crispin.
The larger of the two Buckinghamshire manors was Marlow, on the north bank of the Thames 25 miles upstream from London and stretching back from the river on to the Chilterns. Hitcham, less than 5 miles to the south-east, was a long narrow Chiltern parish which in modern times did not have a river frontage (Kain and Oliver 2001: no. 03/220) but in 1086 included a render of eels from a fishery. At both manors Hemming was described as a thegn of King Edward who had liberty to dispose of his lands.
A third Buckinghamshire manor associated with Hemming also passed to Miles Crispin, namely 2 hides at East Claydon which in 1066 belonged (with power of alienation) to two unnamed Englishmen who were Hemming’s men; they retained the land in 1086 as Miles’s tenants. East Claydon was almost 30 miles from Hemming’s manors on the Thames, and it is surprising that the two men in question should choose so distant a thegn as their commended lord, since they would have had little local support from a lord who had no interests in the hundred where they were landowners. The solution to this conundrum is a gap in DB. In 1086 Miles Crispin had a second manor in East Claydon, much larger at 7¾ hides and described in DB immediately after the Englishmen’s 2 hides (Bucks. 23:16). DB does not name the TRE holder, but we can presume with some confidence that it was Hemming. His presence as a landowner somewhere in the vicinity is needed to explain why the two unnamed Englishmen chose him as their lord.
A handful of Miles’s other estates in Buckinghamshire had defective tenurial information for 1066, but the only one where Hemming can conceivably have been the landowner was 4 hides worth £4 at Ickford, in the Thame valley on the Oxfordshire boundary. In Oxfordshire itself, DB failed to give the TRE holder for as many as thirteen of Miles’s manors, mainly along the Thames and in the Chilterns. It would not be in the least surprising if some of them had been owned by Hemming, though it is fruitless to speculate further.
Hemming’s other certain manor was Cherington, a small manor high in the Cotswolds near the source of the river Thames. The manor’s assessment of only 2 hides belies its size: it had as many as 6½ ploughteams at work in 1086, three of them on the demesne, as well as a particularly large number of 12 slaves, more numerous than the free peasantry. Twelve slaves was twice as many as needed for tilling the land at the usual ratio of two for each demesne ploughteam; probably the others were shepherds. Although these figures are for 1086, they may well reflect the pattern of farming twenty years earlier under Hemming, indicating heavy exploitation of the demesne.
Cherington was an outlying property for Hemming even if we suppose him to have owned undisclosed manors in Oxfordshire. The point of owning it may have been that it was only some 13 miles from Gloucester, where King Edward kept court at Christmas; Hemming was not the only king’s thegn with a single manor in the Gloucester district.
It has to be left open whether Hemming 6, king’s thegn with at least 24 hides in southern Mercia, was identical with Hemming 5, king’s thegn with nearly 70 carucates in the Danelaw. The name was not a common one but it was certainly not unique, and two men of comparable standing are not out of the question. The Cotswolds and the Thames are 90–100 miles as the crow flies from the nearest of the Danelaw manors, but such distances are not out of the question for the property of a wealthy king’s thegn. What most tells against identification is that the two groups of manors went to different Normans. Although even that need not be decisive, on balance two king’s thegns called Hemming should be identified in 1066.
Bibliography
Kain and Oliver 2001: Roger J. P. Kain and Richard R. Oliver, Historic Parishes of England and Wales: An Electronic Map of Boundaries before 1850 with a Gazetteer and Metadata (Colchester: History Data Service, 2001)
Stenton 1939: F. M. Stenton, ‘Domesday Survey: Introduction’, in The Victoria History of the Counties of England: The Victoria History of the County of Oxford, I, ed. L. F. Salzman (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1939), 373–95
VCH Glos. XI: The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Gloucester, ed. N. M. Herbert (London: Oxford University Press for the Institute of Historical Research, 1976)
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