A HISTORY OF RUTLAND us little of its bearer, for it probably represents the common female name Godwifu (Godiva), and Domesday makes no note of the lady's rank which would enable us to identify her with the famous Countess of Mercia. The name, in fact, may equally well stand for Gytha, a name borne by the wife of Earl Ralf of Hereford, whose manor of Stockerston lay only a few miles from Cottesmore, over the Leicestershire border. Of lesser people, Godwine the predecessor of Robert Malet at Teigh had preceded this baron in all his Lincolnshire manors ; Bardi, the former owner of Liddington and Essendine, was a wealthy Lincolnshire thegn, whose lands had all been bestowed upon Remigius, the first Norman bishop of the great Midland see ; Fredgis, whose land at Empingham had passed to William Peverel, appears in the Nottinghamshire Domesday as holding land of the latter in 1086 ; and the Siward who had been succeeded at Thistleton by Alfred of Lincoln may be identified with the man of that name who appears as the former owner of five of Alfred's Lincolnshire estates. The former owner of the Peterborough manor of Tinwell is not given by Domesday, but Hugh Candidus tells us that Archbishop Cynesige of York, who died in 1060, bestowed the vill on the abbey out of his private estate. The only other fact which deserves notice in this connexion is the possession of Tolethorpe in 1066 by eight sokemen. The ownership of an entire vill by men of such humble rank is a rare event in this part of England, but the sokeman as manorial lord was not an infrequent figure in pre-Conquest East Anglia, and Tolethorpe, after all, was only a little place. Some remark should certainly be made here as to the bearing of the facts contained in Domesday Book upon that obscure question of administra- tive geography — the origin of the shire of Rutland. In 1086 the process which was to create the modern county had undoubtedly begun ; whatever the reason may be, the wapentakes of Alstoe and Martinsley were being held apart from all the neighbouring shires by some administrative force, although the hundred of ' Wiceslie ' was still, for all we know to the contrary, regarded as an integral part of Northamptonshire. By 11 30 the process had gone a stage further, for in that year William de Albini ' Brito ' rendered account of all the money due to the Crown from both parts of the modern shire, although a long time was yet to pass before Rutland appeared as a fully constituted county. With regard to earlier times there are two main questions to be considered in connexion with this problem — the cause which first produced the differential treatment of the district to which Domesday bears record, and the name of the neighbouring county of which Rutland originally formed part. In regard to this second matter our choice must lie between Lincoln- shire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire. The claim of Nottinghamshire need not be considered, for we have already arrived at a possible explanation of the attribution of the Rutland geld to that county ; and whether that explanation be true or not, there is evidence which, as we shall see, makes it certain that this arrangement was a matter of no long standing. The decision between the claims of the three remaining counties, in default of external evidence, must turn on the question — With which of these shires is Rutland most plainly connected by the details of its fiscal history as displayed by Domes- day Book ? And in regard to this matter the one possible clue is supplied 134
