A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE Of other than local religious houses, St. Neots (Hunts) had lost to Richard de Clare some of its lands in Eaton Socon across the Bedford- shire border, while it still held, as tenant to his wife, some land on the Huntingdonshire side of the river. The evidence of Domesday here affords an interesting confirmation of the statement in the Liber Eliensis that Richard (who is there erroneously styled Gilbert) de Clare took advantage of the Ely revolt to despoil the lands of Einulfsbury — as St. Neots was then termed — and to expel the Ely monks by whom it was then held. These, it alleges, he replaced by foreign monks from Bee. 1 St. Alban's again appears to have lost a hide at Stotfold to Hugh de Beauchamp. From other sources we learn that it lost more than this. Oswulf the son of Frane, a wealthy thegn, had given to Abbot Leofstan under the Confessor land at Studbam, 2 which is found, however, at the time of the Survey, with the rest of Oswulf s estates, in the hands of the Norman lord of Belvoir. The gift had been witnessed by a neighbour- ing lord, Leofwine ' Cilt ' of Caddington, who himself held his lands at Caddington and Streatley for life only with reversion to St. Alban's under the gift of his father Eadwine. 3 Domesday ignores the gift under both these places, and shows us his Streatley land in the hands of Nigel ' de Albini.' The cathedral church of London had acquired his estate at Cadding- ton ; and the great abbey of St. Edmund at Bury, which flourished under the Conqueror's rule, had received from Earl Waltheof and his wife a substantial addition to its endowment. Foreign monks had obtained as yet strangely little in the county, Nigel of Albini alone bestowing on those of St. Nicholas, of -Angers a small portion of the manor that he held at Henlow. 'The nunnery of Elstow, however, was an addition to the local hou$, es , being founded since the Conquest by Countess Judith. As to the layn^en holding lands, at the time of the survey, in the county, we must not expect to find their names or even their descendants in the male line am^ n g the local landowners of modern times. Even of the list of local gentry in the reign of Henry VI., Fuller, its editor, wrote in the seventeenth century : — Hungry ';r;; m e hath made a [Gluttons Meal] on this [Catalogue of Gentry] and hath left but ?, ver y lj tt ] e [morsell for manners] remaining ; so few of these are found extant in thr s [Shire], and fewer continuing in a [Gentile Equipage]. The name of o n ^ the Mordaunts of Turvey, is still found in the Baronetage (creatr on of i 6 i i), and, although no longer connected with the county, invites mention here on account of the assertion still found 1 Liber ETiensh (Ed. Av, g n a Christiana Society), pp. 239-40 : ' Quam violenter locus de Enulfos- bury abstractus sit Elyensi efdesis.' The Sudbury land in Eaton Socon, which belonged to St. Neots, had been wholly annexed U y Richard ; while at Wyboston, which the house had formerly held ' in almoin,' it now held only as Ri CMar J's tenant. Kemble, Cod. Dip!, iv. 2 8 -i (No. 945). 3 Ibid. iv. 259 (No. 920) ,
