THE DOMESDAY SURVEY between them, and reconciled them, because that the abbot was a good man ; and then he gave the king forty marcs of gold [>r24o] for recon- ciliation.' Mr. Freeman assigned this event to the very beginning of William's reign, and his charter confirming the abbey in its possessions ' at the request of abbot Brand,' which I have been for- tunate enough to identify, confirms, by the names of its wit- nesses, Mr. Freeman's conclusion.^ Since then much had happened. In 1069 abbot Brand died, and William seized the opportunity of ap- pointing a warrior monk from Fecamp, Turold by name, to guard the abbey from a threatened attack by Hereward and his outlaws in the fens. ' By the splendour of God,' the king exclaimed, ' as he is more of a soldier than a monk, I shall place him where he will find his match ; he can there prove his valour in the fight.' Turold hastened to ' the Golden Borough ' with ' ealle his Frencisce menn.' His arrival at Stamford was the signal for a dash by Hereward ' and his gang.' The bewildered monks were scattered to the winds, and the English outlaws, with their Danish allies, looted and wrecked the minster, and hurried back with priceless treasure of sacred objects and 'red gold.'* With a hundred and sixty ' French ' warriors, Turold reached his abbey, only to find it a blackened ruin, silent and abandoned. Its in- mates, of course, had to be recalled, its buildings replaced, its services restored ; but, over and above all this, the ' Frencisce menn ' had to be provided for ; the knights who had come with abbot Turold had come to stay. When the Conqueror fixed the military quotas to be provided by the bishops and abbots, he made Peterborough Abbey liable to find sixty knights, a total equalled only by those of three bishop's sees and exceeded by none.' In this, I think, we see that his hand lay heavy on the house. Even Turold, though glad to provide for his own friends and followers, would have no wish to impoverish his abbey by quartering on its lands the king's knights. The enfeoffment of military tenants on the lands of the religious houses was a constant grievance with the latter in the days of the Nor- man Conquest. In Northamptonshire we find it well illustrated on the manors of Peterborough Abbey. The whole of those on which knights had been enfeoffed, to discharge the military service of the house, are entered together in Domesday under a separate heading (fo. 2211^) ; and Peterborough records enable us to identify their holders and the service they performed. Anschitil de St. Medard, for instance, had received a fee which, although entered as ' Witheringham ' (Wittering) only in Domesday, extended right across the neck of the county, from Easton, on the Welland, to Wansford, on the Nene, with an outlying portion ' See my Commune of London and other studies, pp. 29-30.
- See further, for all this, Freeman's Norman Conquest, IV. (1871), 56, 335, 457-461.
' See my Feudal England, p. 278. According to the abbot's carta in 1 166, no fewer than 63I knight's fees had been carved out of the abbey's estates by 1135 (for these were all of ' the old feoffment '). 283
