THE DOMESDAY SURVEY distinctive feature of Odo's fief was the number of small estates that it contained, representing, as it did, not the possessions of any great English landowner, but those of a multitude of small ones. Of the lay barons, the names perhaps most familiar to our ears are those of Geoffrey de Mandeville and Aubrey de Vere. Their namesakes and heirs, connected by marriage, obtained earldoms in the days of Stephen, and the Vere Earls of Oxford were continuously connected with the county down to the extinction of the title only two centuries ago. The house of Mandeville became extinct in 1189, but its earldom of Essex continued as the style of its descendants in the female line, who also retained down to the year 1 372 Pleshey, the stronghold of the early Mandevilles, together with the bulk of the Domesday fief, the largest, after that of Count Eustace, of any lay baron in the county. As these two families and their fiefs played so large a part in the history of the county, we may deal with their Domesday possessions in some detail and together. Geoffrey was the recognized grantee of the vast but scattered estates of Ansgar (or Esgar) the ' staller,' ' to which he had succeeded in Berkshire, Middlesex, Herts, Oxon, Northants, Warwick- shire, Essex and Suffolk. 1 In Essex the bulk of Ansgar's, and therefore of Geoffrey's, estate lay in the heart of the county, where High Easter (with Pleshey) and Great Waltham formed around his stronghold a compact block of some 12,000 acres, and were in turn surrounded by his lands in Leighs, Terling, Broomfield, the Chignals, Mashbury, the Rodings, and Barnston. It is exceptional in Domesday to find the manors of a tenant-in-chief so compactly grouped as this. But Geoffrey had also succeeded Ansgar at (Saffron) Walden, where, as at Pleshey, existing earthworks bear witness to a stronghold of his house. Another English predecessor of Geoffrey, Friebern, whom he had succeeded fin two Essex manors, was clearly the thegn of that name whom he had succeeded in a Suffolk one (fo. 41 1^). Vast as were Geoffrey's estates in Essex, he did not scruple to add to them, in some places, by aggres- sion. 8 Aubrey de Vere, whose fief in Essex was much smaller than Geoffrey's, owed it almost exclusively to his succession to a certain Wulfwine, who had also been his predecessor in all his Cambridgeshire estates and in four Suffolk manors. (Castle) Hedingham appears to have been the chief seat of his house from the first, but his estates were much scattered. Both he and his wife are charged with a little wrongful increase of their extent.* Of the four great escheated ' Honours ' named in Magna Carta, the Honour of Boulogne was one. For the origin of this ' Honour ' we must turn to Domesday Book, where we find Count Eustace of 1 See for this notable man, a grandson of Tofig the proud (founder, in the first instance, of Waltham Holy Cross), Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. iii. passim.
- Ellis (Introduction to Domesday, ii. 43) omits Suffolk, but Geoffrey had succeeded Ansgar at Holton
and Reydon in that county. Ellis was also gravely in error in stating that in the other counties Geoffrey's lands 'are marked uniformly as having been, in former times, the property of Asgar or his homagers.' This was by no means the case in Essex. 8 See pp. 568-9 below. 4 See pp. 569-70 below. 343
