A HISTORY OF HEREFORDSHIRE And now we come to the vast estates of the historic abbey of Leomin- ster. To say that more than a page of Domesday is devoted to the lands of this dissolved house gives but an imperfect idea of their extent, or of the commanding position that it must have occupied in the county. Alleged to have been founded as far back as 660, and to have been re-established by Earl Leofric of Mercia after destruction by the Danes in 980, the house doubtless fell, as Mr. Freeman conjectured, in consequence of the misconduct of its abbess, in 1045 or 1049, with Earl Swegen, son of Godwine and brother of Harold, although for our knowledge of the fact we are wholly dependent on Domesday, or rather on the inference to be drawn from the Domesday record. As Mr. Freeman justly observed, 'the abbess' is found pensioned off with the possession of Fencote, one of the estates of her house, while the maintenance of the nuns was a charge on the great manor of Leominster itself.^^* The arrangement is thus, as he pointed out, curiously parallel with those on the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. But if the abbess alone was guilty, it seems almost incredible that the saintly Edward should have taken so violent a step as to dissolve the whole sisterhood,^^ and to confiscate to lay uses the hallowed endowments of the church. For that he did so is clear from Domesday, which shows that the Leominster estates passed into his queen's hands, and thence, in due course, into those of King William. It is extremely difficult to disentangle the constituent portions of the abbey's holding, but certain facts may be said to emerge. One of these is that this holding was still considered to form a corporate whole. Yet even to this rule an exception is afforded by the manors of Marcle and Stanford, which appear separately in Domesday as King William's lands, and as having been held respectively by Earl Harold and Queen Edith, but which, we read under Leominster, used to belong to that manor.^^* Where the corporate character of the abbey's lands is manifest is in the mode of entering the lands, parcel ' of the manor of Leominster,' which Norman lords were holding in 1086. When these or other barons had added to their holdings at the expense of a royal manor, the lands they so obtained are entered under their own fiefs as well as under the royal manor ; but in the case of Leominster, which had thus lost 20 out of its 80 hides, their holdings are grouped together under that manor alone, and are not recognized as theirs on their respective fiefs. ' Leominster ' stands first on the list of ' gigantic manors ' discussed by Professor Maitland.^^^* Berkeley and Tewkesbury, to the south, were similar aggregations, and, during his brief but restless career, William Fitz Osbern was doing much, by shifting in kaleidoscopic fashion the manors under his control, to produce fresh combinations. But Leominster has this peculiarity : it was not only farmed and assessed as a whole, it was also assessed at the even sum of 80 hides; and these large round sums are usually characteristic of ancient crown or church estates. The great Gloucestershire manor of the church "* ' Hoc manerium est ad firmam de LX llbris praeter victum monialium.' '" In the case of the action of Henry II towards Amesbury, rightly compared by Mr. Freeman, ' the mis- conduct of the Abbess seems to have been worse than that of Eadgifu, and to have extended itself to the sister- hood in general. The house was not dissolved, but the visitors sent away the offending nuns.' "' It is one of the strange contradictions of Domesday that it adds, of these two manors, that ' they now render to the king j^jo, as stated above,' though their renders had been given 'above' as ^^30 and ^^5 blanch respectively (Marcle, ' Valet ; ' Stanford, ' Reddit '). "^ Dom. Bk. and Beyond, 112. 284
