DOMESDAY SURVEY abbey by Earl Ralf of Hereford, the Confessor's nephew, who had possessed a considerable estate in Leicestershire; the former, according to Hugh Candidas, the twelfth-century historian of Peterborough, was the gift of a certain ' Frane of Rockingham.' 88 Domesday, however, says of East Langton that ' Ailmar held it freely in King Edward's time.' Either then Frane succeeded Ailmar and made the grant to Peterborough during the short reign of Harold, or we must see in the former an Englishman who retained his land for a short period at least of the Con- queror's reign, but died before Domesday. It may also be noted that the Northamptonshire Domesday makes no mention of Frane of Rockingham, and that, since his name represents the old Norse Frani, he was pre- sumably of Scandinavian descent. 89 The possessions of Coventry Abbey, which follow in the survey, had all been granted to the abbey by Earl Leofric of Mercia. We have already noted the circumstances under which the abbey obtained a confirmation of its tenure from King William, and the fief does not call for further remark. The small estate of Crowland Abbey in Button Cheney, Stapleton, and Beeby, concludes the list of the church lands of Leicestershire. With the possible exception of the bishop of Lincoln's estate in Leicester and Knighton, there is not a carucate of land in the county which we can assume with the slightest probability to have belonged to an ecclesiastical owner before the beginning of the eleventh century, and the fact itself is significant. It has been well remarked that ' richly endowed churches mean an enslaved peasantry,' so and there are features which we shall remark in the tenurial organization of the county in the period immediately preceding the Conquest which find a partial explanation in the fact that the incipient manorialism developed elsewhere on ecclesiastical lands had no place for its growth in Leicestershire. The same remark applies indeed to the whole Danelaw, but with the exception of Derbyshire to no county in this district with the same force as to the one with which we are here concerned. Between the lands of lay and ecclesiastical tenants in chief, the Leicester- shire Domesday inserts a small paragraph devoted to 'the king's alms.' Three priests, Godwine, Ernebern, and Aluric, an Englishman called Ingald and a woman described as ' Quintin's wife,' held in severally estates varying from half a carucate to four carucates, in Peatling, Shearsby, Sutton Cheney, Illston, Swinford, and Wigston Parva. No fact is recorded concerning any of these people which would explain the bounty, small as it was, which they enjoyed at the king's hands, and these humble folk are the nearest represen- tatives, in Leicestershire, of the considerable class of king's thegns which in the counties of Nottingham and Derby continued the tenures of the old English period to the date of the survey and beyond. The first lay tenant in chief whose fief is treated in the Leicester Domes- day is Robert count of Meulan, who became in or shortly after 1 101 the first earl of the shire. As yet, however, his estate in the county was but small, and it is made to appear smaller than it really is by being described in two divisions which are separated by nearly the whole of the county survey. The lands which the count held in demesne are entered on folio 231^, those which 19 Hugpnis Candldi Hist. (ed. Sparke), 43. 19 Napier and Stevenson, Crawford Charters, 75. See also below p. 293. M Dom. Bk. and Beyond. i 289 37
