DOMESDAY SURVEY granted after Henry de Ferrers had come to an agreement with King William II. at Marlborough, although four later Latin verses added to the document as there printed ascribe the foundation to the year 1080. Here then, as in other cases, the monastery would seem to have been in being before it received a formal confirmation of its possessions. The original endowment in the county consisted of Marston on Dove, which was given by Henry, and Doveridge, a former estate of Earl Edwin which was the gift of Bertha, Henry's wife. Together they bestowed Little Brough- ton or West Broughton in Doveridge, which is not mentioned in Domes- day and must be distinguished from Church Broughton, which the monks obtained later in part exchange for Stanford. 1 They also obtained by the foundation charter the tithes of many of Henry's Derbyshire manors, and we have seen the extent to which the new foundation was supported by his undertenants. Following Henry de Ferrers in the Derby Survey comes William Peverel. His estates in Derbyshire were less extensive than might have been expected in view of the immortality which his name has gained in connexion with the Peak. Nothing certain is known of his origin, although a seventeenth-century antiquary 2 started the very improbable theory that he was an illegitimate son of the Conqueror himself. The possessions entered under his own name fall into two groups, one consist- ing of a number of manors scattered down the eastern border of the county from Bolsover to Codnor, the other making a compact block of territory on the edge of Peak Forest. It is to this second group that special interest attaches as it includes Peak Castle, 8 the site of which is described vaguely as ' the land of William Peverel's castle in Peak Forest,' the structure being evidently too recent a creation in 1086 to have given rise at that date to the modern name, Castleton, of the village in which it stands. It is one of a class of fortresses which at the time of the Survey was somewhat rare in England proper, those namely which were wholly in private hands. In many castles, especially those situated in boroughs, the lord appears at this time rather as the king's lieutenant than as a private owner ; others again were the personal property of the king. But even before the death of the Conqueror many castles had arisen which were simply the residence of their lord and the head of his fief, and Peak Castle, like those of Tutbury and Berkhamstead, belongs to this class. It was moreover situated very conveniently for a castle which was to be the centre of the royal manors of north-west Derbyshire. We have seen already that William Peverel held these manors in 1086 simply on the king's behalf as his representative or bailiff, and that they had become part of his own property before 1 108. The foundation charter of Lenton Priory, 4 from which we obtain a limit of date for the change, gives us other information about his possessions in north Derbyshire. From it we gather that they extended to the 1 In Leic. Glover the Herald. See V. C. H. Northants, i. 289. 3 For a description of Peak Castle, see Engl. Hist. Rev. Ixxv. and Mr. St. John Hope's paper in Arcb<eologcal Journal, be. 88. 4 Dugdale, Mm. v. ill. 303
