A HISTORY OF ESSEX among the tenants-in-chief, are hardly represented at all in Essex. Count Alan, the head of the Bretons in England, had large interests in Suffolk, but a single page of Domesday suffices for his Essex manors. His chief tenant in the county was Hervey ' de Ispania,' who held of him at Willingale (' Spain '), Finchingfield, Bentley, Manhall (in Saffron Walden), etc. The name of Hervey is distinctively Breton. It is worthy of notice that at Canfield, and at one of the Rodings, Aubrey de Vere was tenant of the count, for there seems to have been some con- nexion between Aubrey and the Counts of Brittany ; l and when the priory was founded at Hatfield Broad-Oak, half a century after Domes- day, by his namesake and successor, it was given as a cell to St. Melaine of Rennes, the count's capital. One is glad to be able to establish the fact that ' Edeva,' whom the count had succeeded in several Essex estates, was no other than Edith 'the beautiful' (pu/cbra), Edith 'the fair' (faira), Edith 'the rich' (dives), whose vast estates in the adjoining counties of Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk had been largely bestowed on Count Alan. 2 The one Breton fief of which the head was in Essex was that of ' Tihel the Breton.' He is so entered in Domesday under Essex, except in a stray passage (fo. 24), where he occurs, as in Suffolk, as Tihel ' de Herion.' This name is but a variant of the ' Helion ' in Helion Bumpstead, and the house which bore it derived it from what is now Hellean, a canton of Josselin near Ploermel (Morbihan). Their barony, which was afterwards held by the service of ten knights, lay in the three eastern counties and largely in the Haverhill neighbour- hood. 3 As Tihel de ' Heriun ' or ' Heliun ' its Domesday lord was one of the ' barons ' or commissioners (legati) appointed by the Conqueror to determine the rights of Ely Abbey in io8o. 4 'Gilbert the son of Salomon ' also must, from his name, have been a Breton. In Essex he had but a tiny holding, and his only other estates were at Meppershall and Felmersham. No distinctively Flemish name is found among the Essex tenants-in-chief, but Walter de Douai (' doai '), a great baron in the south-west of England, held three manors. Of the remaining fiefs that of Hamo the ' dapifer ' or the sheriff (of Kent) is chiefly remarkable for his succession to Thurbern at Faulk- bourne, Totham, etc., and especially at Colchester, and to a woman called ' Gotild ' in several manors. The widespread succession of Henry de Ferrers to the lands of Bondig the ' staller ' enables us to identify the latter with the former holder of Steeple, Butsbury and Woodham (Ferrers). Otto 'the goldsmith' (aurifaber, aurifex) deserves mention, 1 See my Calendar of Documents Preserved in France, p. 423. 2 See, for this mysterious person, Freeman's Norman Conquest (1875), iii. 792. It is clear from the Suffolk entries of Earl Ralf's manors which Godric dapifer was ' farming' for the king (fos. 284^ et seq.) that some of Edith's manors had been secured by Earl Ralf (of Norfolk), and had passed on his fall to the king. Among these, we thus learn, was Great Sampford in Essex, which ' tenuit Edeva ; post Radulfus comes ; modo Godricus dapifer in manu regis ' (see p. 436 below). The identity of the Essex ' Edeva ' has never, I believe, been noted. 3 See for all this my paper on ' Helion of Helion's Bumpstead ' in Essex Archeeologcal Transactions, [n.s.] viii. 187-91.
- See Inquisitio comitatus Cantabrigiensis, pp. xvii., xviii.
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