THE DOMESDAY SURVEY Colchester, a writ of William Rufus directing the sheriff of Essex to give Eudo Dapifer seisin of those manors (' mansiones ') which the wife of Phyn the Dane (' Dani ') had held of his father on the day of the latter's death. 1 It should be added that the manor of Langham was held of Richard by Walter Tirel, whose name is so familiar, and who, like ' Eudo Dapifer,' had married one of his daughters.' The bulk of the fief of Peter de Valognes, lay in the south-west of the county, near the border of Hertfordshire, in which county, at Ben- nington, was the caput of his barony. 3 His importance, for Essex, lies in the fact that he was sheriff at the time of the Survey.* He was also then sheriff of Hertfordshire, 6 so that the arrangement of placing these two counties under one sheriff is at least as old as Domesday. Later evidence enables us to say that they were similarly combined under Geoffrey de Mandeville as sheriff, though that great Domesday Baron cannot have acted in that capacity until after the Survey. He appears to have 'farmed' the county of Essex for 300, and that of Hertford for jT6o a year.* Peter, whose fief extended into Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, married a sister of ' Eudo Dapifer.' Domesday mentions as his predecessors in the shrievalty of Essex, since the Conquest, Robert Fitz Wimarc, Suain * of Essex,' and Ralf Bainard, all of them Essex tenants-in-chief. Two other fiefs deserve some mention because they both reappear in 1 1 66 among those of which the caput was in Essex. The first is that of Roger de ' Rames,' which lay in the three eastern counties and in Middlesex. Morant confidently asserted that Roger ' took the sur- name of Raines or Ramis ' from Rayne in this county, where the manor of Old Hall was the head of his descendants' barony. But this view is clearly erroneous, and indeed he himself was confused on the subject. 7 As several Essex manors were held by this family, its history is of some importance. I have elsewhere shown in a paper on the subject " that the fief was originally one of twenty knights, but that we find it under Henry II. divided between two members of the family, each of whom owed the service of ten knights. The other fief is that of Walter the Deacon, of which Little Easton was the head, and which was of ten knight's fees ; it is subsequently found in the hands, successively, of the Windsor and the Hastings families. 9 The Bretons and Flemings, who in some counties are conspicuous 1 Ed. Roxburghe Club, p. 18. The attestation of 'the bishop of Durham' suggests 1099-1100 for the date. Peter de Valognes was sheriff at the time of the writ. See Feudal England, pp. 468 et seq. See the Victoria History of Hertfordshire, i. 176, 282. See, for instance, the entry under Havering (p. 430). Domesday, . 132, 133. This important information is derived from the charters granted by King Stephen in 1141, and by the Empress Maud in 1 142, to his grandson and namesake (see my Geoffrey de Mandeville, pp. 142, 166-7). 7 He went on to say that the name of Raines, or Rennes as it is sometimes written, might arise from this Roger coming from the ' city of Rennes ' (ii. 403). See my Geoffrey de Mandeville, pp. 399-404. 9 See my paper in The Ancestor, ii. 91-2, and pp. 393, 547, note 8 below. 349
