The English and Their Legacy, 900-1200: Essays in Honour of Ann Williams, ed. David Roffe

In this collection, pupils and colleagues pay tribute to the career of Ann Williams, whose work on eleventh-century England—especially her facsimile edition of Domesday Book and her book, The English and the Norman Conquest (1995; rev. ante, cxii [1997], 1236–7)—is well known. The contribution closest to her own work is the article by the volume’s editor David Roffe, himself a fellow Domesday Book specialist. He argues that in Lincolnshire more median thegns may have survived with their holdings intact, pointing out that, while most post-Conquest documentation was concerned with the feudalisation of estates, land held by socage rights was never affected by the imposition of knight service. As a result, we may have underestimated how much land was still in the hands of Englishmen. Other contributions on thegns follow: Lucy Marten’s persuasive piece concerns the kin-group of the Dane Azur Swarte, a royal thegn, whose sons and grandsons served three consecutive kings of different ethnic origins. Azur probably acquired his lands from Cnut, and his sons kept them under the English kings Edward and Harold, but ultimately his grandsons were left with only a fraction of the family lands under the Norman king William. When Eadgifu survived her husband, Azur’s grandson Edward, she remarried William the Conqueror’s goldsmith Otto—a man handsomely rewarded for preparing the king’s tomb. A similarly illuminating contribution by Charles Insley concerns the thegn Wulfric Spott, from the northern Midlands, whose family settled in what developed, in effect, into a marcher land with Wales. That many moneyers reached a comparative amount of wealth (though not necessarily in landed property) as some thegns is an argument put forward by Hirokazu Tsurushima. He underlines the importance of the royal minters about whom little is known, yet piecing together the snippets from the coins themselves and references to their use enables him to point out how wealthy English moneyers could become, even after 1066. Coins also feature in Sally Harvey’s intriguing contribution about their evidence for the years 1051–2. The counts of Boulogne were the only landholders in England after 1066 to use pennies ‘at the weight of this count’ (ad pensum huius comitis), namely with a silver content determined by them instead of by the Crown, a privilege dating apparently from these crisis years in Edward the Confessor’s reign. The only pre-Conquest English nobleman to have been executed by William the Conqueror, Earl Waltheof, is the subject of a stimulating reassessment by Emma Mason. Where to bury the king is a question answered by Simon Keynes, for Æthelred II, in a detailed explanation as to why his last resting-place was St Paul’s in London. Localities and institutions are studied by Vanessa King, researching the early history of the manor of Bredon on the boundary of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire, and Pamela King, who identifies the estate of Eadulfungtun as Edmonton.

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