THE DOMESDAY SURVEY of earls of Northampton, followed their lords to Scotland. The most striking case, perhaps, is that of the house of Oliphant, the ancestor of which must have owed his connection with the Scottish realm to his holding Lilford of the earls of Northampton/ The name can be carried far back, for Roger ' Olifard,' like Walter Fitz Winemar, witnessed the foundation charter of St. Andrew's Priory. As for Walter's own descend- ants. Baker seems to have shown clearly that they were the Prestons of Preston ' Deanery,' whose lands there had been held by Winemar, as an under-tenant, in Domesday. Suddenly, under Henry VI., they revived the name of their Domesday ancestor ; but a Winemar was the last, as he was the first, who held the lands of Preston. Parting with these and his other lands, he disappears from view. Next to Flanders lay Picardy, whence there came the founder of a race of Northamptonshire barons. The Vidames de Picquigny were among the magnates of medieval France ; hereditary officers of the bishops of Amiens, their house in that city is still called le Vidame? Two members, it is clear, of their house followed the Conqueror to England. These were Ansculf de ' Pinchengi,' as the Bucks Domesday styles him (fo. 'ib)^ and Ghilo, his brother. The former, who received what was afterwards the great barony of Dudley, had died before Domesday, leaving a son and heir, William, who succeeded to his only Northamptonshire manor, that of Barnack.* Ghilo obtained a barony of which the caput was at Weedon, which heads, in the Domesday Survey, the list of his manors in the shire, and which took from his descendants its name of Weedon 'Pinkeney.'" This barony, which was held of the Crown by the service of fifteen knights,' comprised lands also in Berks, Bucks, and Oxon, some of which, as in Northamptonshire, had been previously held by ' Siward.' At Weedon Ghilo founded a priory as a cell to St. Lucien of Beauvais, his choice of that house being clearly due to the fact that its monks had a small priory (' Notre Dame de Mont ') near Picquigny (in the direction of Ailly).' This confirms my view that Pinkeney is simply Picquigny, though the fact, owing to the change of form, has eluded the historians of the shire. Picquigny, it is interesting to learn, was a test-word for the English, who were never able to pronounce it. It was used as such for their recognition when they were expelled from Ponthieu, and, in 1489, a Frenchman, employed in London, could still use it as a test : —
- Feudal England, pp. 223-4.
- ' Les seigneurs barons de Picquigny itaient vidames de I'^veque d'Amiens et avou6s
de I'abbaye de Corbie' (Darsy's Picquigny et ses seigneurs [i860], p. 9). Fidame represented Vicedominus (Ibid.). ^ Baker, misreading this passage, declares that it 'establishes Ansculf's connection with, or residence in, England prior to the Conquest' {History of Northamptonshire, II. 105). But this is not so.
- Compare p. 269 above.
- As did Morton ' Pinkeney,' close by.
- Feudal England, p. 255.
' Darsy, p. loi. 291
