Wintra was an abbot in Wessex in A.D. 704. Another Wintra was a monk at Abingdon in 699, and a third so named was abbot of Tisbury in Wiltshire in 750. Wintred also was the name of several monks who are recorded in the later Saxon period, and Wintre was apparently the name of the head of a family who gave his name to the place called Wintreshleaw, now Winterslow, in Wiltshire.
The personal name Wintre was not confined to England, one who was so called having been physician to Charles the Great. It can also be traced in the form Wynther among people of Norse descent in the Shetland Isles[1] as late as the sixteenth century, and in England it can be traced from the Saxon age into the later mediæval period.
A considerable area in Dorset in the latter part of the Saxon period was held like the land in the Isle of Wight and the New Forest district, much of which, Domesday Book tells us, had been held collectively or in parage in the time of King Edward. At Wey, the Domesday Wai, there were three manors, which in the time of the last Saxon King were held collectively by nine, eight, and five thanes—a total of twenty-two landholders in parage in this place alone. At Hame the manor had been held by five thanes, at Ringstede by four, at Pourtone by eight, at Celvedune by nine, at Mapledre by seven, at Derwinston by five, at Horcerde by four, and at a place not named there were five hides held collectively by eleven thanes. At a place called Goda the land had been held by three free thanes, and the other places in which it had been held by brothers or by parceners are somewhat numerous. This system of land tenure, identical with that in the Jutish part of the south of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, points to a connection in custom and probably in race between some of the original settlers in Dorset and the Goths and Jutes of the adjoining county.
One of the most remarkable peculiarities which any English county shows in Domesday Book is exhibited by
- ↑ Proceedings Soc. Antiq. Scot., xxv. 189.
