The Little History of Derbyshire (eBook)

2

NORMAN DERBYSHIRE (1066–1154)

When Edward the Confessor died at the beginning of 1066, he was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Harold Godwinson. On 14 October, King Harold was killed, alongside most of his thegns, at Hastings by Duke William of Normandy. Although it was later claimed that Derby was emptied of able-bodied men who followed the king to defend his crown, the people of Derbyshire may have expected that little would change even if there was a new king. For the peasants, 70 per cent of the population, who worked land they rented when they were not obliged to work for their overlords, this was true. For the earls, thegns and even ceorls who owned their own land, the Norman Conquest would have lasting consequences.

Norman society was based on a feudal system. Rather than landowners having absolute rights over their property as they had in earlier times, King William controlled all the land in his domain. In return for their fealty, he gave estates to principal tenants who, in turn, gave some of their property to lesser nobility and knights who offered them their own loyalty and service. A single manor, or knight’s fee, contained enough resources to provide for a knight, his family, and to equip him for all that he needed on the battlefield in order to fulfil his military obligations to his feudal overlord.

Even if families who owned property in Derbyshire before the conquest retained their manors and estates, they would not be able to do what they wished with them. They were expected to offer homage and service in return for their land holdings, either to the king himself or to one of the new men to whom he granted holdings. Instead of being landowners they became tenants or, even, sub-tenants. In 1069–70, men from the former kingdom of Mercia, including Derbyshire, rose under the leadership of Eadric the Wild against their new Norman overlords.

Resistance to the new order was put down with increasing savagery. King William adopted a policy of ‘harrying’ the north to deter further rebellion and to consolidate his regime. Circumstantial evidence points to Derbyshire suffering its share of reprisals. By the time of the Domesday Book, compiled in 1086, forty-three previously occupied settlements were described as waste, including, for example, the village of Hartington in the Peak District. At Eckington, to the north of the county, the value of the manor had dropped from £7 to 60s and the church was gone. Even some of the manors that William inherited from Edward the Confessor as royal estates, or Terra Regis, such as the ones at Ashbourne and Matlock Bridge, were described as partial waste. The majority of the Wapentake of Scarsdale, of which Chesterfield was a part and which belonged to the Crown, showed a reduction in value or was described as ‘waste’.

NORMAN DERBY

Of the 352 locations listed by the Domesday Book in the county, Derby was by far the largest town with 140 households. Even so, it had shrunk by almost half since the conquest. There were 243 householders or burgesses before 1066. It was believed that the total population numbered about 1,100 before 1066, but this had reduced to approximately 630 in the years following the Norman invasion. The number of mills that ground wheat to provide flour for Derby’s inhabitants dropped from fourteen to ten in the twenty years between the conquest and the Domesday survey.

Although the Normans built a motte and bailey castle at Cockpit Hill, first recorded in 1085, they did not erect a stone fortification on the same site, or elsewhere in Derby, at a later date. Instead, they consolidated their power at Nottingham, where the Sheriff of Nottingham’s appointment covered Derbyshire and its Royal Forests. It was only in 1566 that separate choices were made for the two counties. It meant that the shire, or county, court was held at Nottingham rather than Derby and that the former became a centre of commerce with its own charter. It was a severe setback for Derby, which lost valuable trade as a consequence. In addition, a third of all revenue, known as the ‘third penny’, was payable to the king or his appointed representatives.

NORMAN GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION

The Normans adopted the Saxon system of dividing shires into hundreds, which roughly corresponded to the administrative role of the Scandinavian wapentake. Each hundred was originally either defined as an area capable of supporting a hundred families or a particular area of productive land. Every hundred held its own court to deal with property disputes, keeping the peace and feudal dues. The Normans and their successors used the administrative system to collect tax based on the number of hides of land in each hundred. The sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire was required to work with a clerk, a representative sent by the king, and two knights from each hundred to assess what level of tax should be paid. It was then the responsibility of the knights and the hundred’s bailiff to collect the taxes and pay it to the sheriff.

DOMESDAY DERBYSHIRE

During the Christmas festivities in 1085, King William gave orders that royal commissioners should travel around his realm to make a survey of landownership and possessions. Enquiry was to be made about who owned property during the time of King Edward the Confessor, who owned it now that William was on the throne, and how much it was worth. The survey was carried out in 1086.

William the Conqueror was the chief landowner, or tenant-in-chief, in Derbyshire. As well as two thirds of the borough of Derby, he held a total of twenty-one manors throughout the county. Edward the Confessor and his predecessors had claimed many of them – for example Wirksworth, Hope, Bakewell and Melbourne – because they were of strategic importance or because of their mineral wealth. Each of the manors sat at the heart of a group of outlaying berewicks, or farms. Ashford-in-the-Water, which was also royal domain, possessed twelve berewicks. As well as land, meadows and woodland the manor controlled a mill and a lead mine, but it was not as wealthy as Bakewell, which was the wealthiest manor in the Peak District.

The king held mineral claims over the lead ore at Wirksworth. In AD 874, when Repton Abbey was destroyed by the Vikings, its lead mining rights were taken under the control of the Danish King Ceolwulf (who died in AD 879) and had remained a Crown right ever since. In 1086, the lead mining and smelting industries were long-established. The royal manor at Matlock was an important mineral resource, its limestone hills gradually turning into a honeycomb as miners followed the veins of ore. The Domesday Book also recorded that Bakewell and Ashford paid their duties to the Crown, in part, with smelted lead.

William also took lands for himself that had belonged to King Harold’s extended family, and another group of manors that were once the possessions of Earl Edwin of Mercia. The former were spoils of war and the latter were confiscated by the Crown when the earl rebelled in 1068. These estates are listed in the Domesday Book as belonging to Edwin’s father Earl Ælfgar, who died in 1062. Much of the earl’s former property lay in the strategically important Trent Valley at Walton-upon-Trent, Newton Solney, close to the Staffordshire border, Repton and Weston-upon-Trent.

WHO’S WHO IN DOMESDAY DERBYSHIRE?

In addition to the king, fifteen other men were listed as tenants-in-chief. Most of the county’s pre-conquest owners were dispossessed or became tenants of land they once owned.

Robert de Limesey, Bishop of Chester, held Draycott, Hopwell, the manor of Bupton in the parish of Longford 11 miles west of Derby, and land in Long Eaton. The bishop also held the manor of Sawley near Erewash, which boasted two churches. It had been in the hands of Lichfield’s bishop since as early as the seventh century and would remain the Bishop of Lichfield’s domain until the Reformation in 1536. De Limesey retained the manor when he was moved from Lichfield to become Bishop of Chester in 1075.

Leofric, Abbot of Burton Abbey held only six manors on behalf of the abbey in modern-day Derbyshire. The manor of Mickleover near Derby included farms at Littleover, Finerdern and Potluck. He also held Appleby, Caldwell, Stapenhill, Ticknall and Coton-in-the-Elms, all in the south of the county. In Derby, the king granted the abbey the income from two mills, three houses, 13 acres of meadowland and the right to appoint the priest at St Mary’s Church, one of the six churches in the town.

Hugh d’Avranches, 1st Earl of Chester, who was also called Hugh the Fat or Hugh the Wolf because of his attacks on Wales, was one of the king’s companions as well as part of his extended family. By 1071, Hugh, who had a reputation for extravagant living, was an earl holding almost all of Cheshire. His Derbyshire holdings were confined to four manors, including Markeaton on the outskirts of Derby. He also acquired Kniveton, Mackworth and Allestree. During the 1070s he claimed one third of Derby’s revenue for himself. This ‘third penny’ tax was later claimed by the Ferrers earls of Derby.

Hugh’s son, Richard, drowned on the White Ship in 1120, along with King Henry I’s only legitimate male heir. Hugh’s estates and titles passed into the hands of a cousin. When the male line ended in 1237, the Crown took the opportunity to annex the earl’s property for itself where it remained until the...