The complexity of medieval Soberton (1) by Carolyn Hughes

When, several years ago, I embarked upon writing the first of the "Meonbridge Chronicles", I read a lot of books in preparation. Most of the books were filling in the gaps in my knowledge of how ordinary people lived in the 14th century: their homes and clothes, their food and tools, what they did and what they thought. What, I now realise, I didn’t much investigate, was how the manorial society in which they lived was managed.

Of course, I knew something – I knew about the feudal system and that it was already beginning to break down by the time of the Black Death. I knew about lords and tenants, and manorial obligations. So in the first "Meonbridge Chronicle", Fortune’s Wheel, I imagined that my fictional Meonbridge had a “lord of the manor” (Sir Richard) and a couple of hundred tenants before the plague halved the population, all living together in a state of sometimes more or less harmonious equilibrium, sometimes uneasy tension. What I didn’t really think about was how Sir Richard had acquired his ownership of Meonbridge (and his many other estates across the south of England). Did he hold it (them) from an overlord, such as the king, or some ecclesiastical overlord, such as the bishop of Winchester or Beaulieu Abbey? Or perhaps he held it from his own “liege lord”, a fictional Sussex earl? I hadn’t worked that out, and, from the point of view of the story, it didn’t matter all that much.

But the third "Meonbridge Chronicle", which I am currently drafting, addresses matters of inheritance, and so it is interesting to consider how manors were held and passed on in the Middle Ages. So I’ve done a bit more reading…

My reading has been mainly confined to two sources: the Domesday Book, and one of my favourite resources, the Victoria County History (accessed from the British History Online (BHO) website, about which I have waxed lyrical on The History Girls before.

In that blog post, I talked mostly about Meonstoke, which lies about halfway along the length of the River Meon and is, in my mind, the village that “Meonbridge” aligns to most closely. What I read of Meonstoke’s manorial history was interesting and reasonably straightforward. This time, however, I chose to read about Soberton, a couple of miles downstream of Meonstoke, and the picture I have gained is no less interesting, but far less clear. The results of my reading have been both enlightening and confusing. I wanted to gain a general insight into Soberton’s medieval manorial structure and to discover some of the people who held, and disposed of, the manors. I have achieved that, more or less, but it is a complex picture.

This is the first of a two-part post about what I have learned of Soberton’s manorial arrangements. Because the picture is rather complicated, I have more information than I can possibly include in one month’s post. But I think it’s interesting enough to warrant telling all!

The parish of Soberton and Newtown is apparently one of the largest, geographically, in the United Kingdom. Today, the parish is still largely rural, or semi-rural, with several working farms, a few horticultural and industrial enterprises, and a population of about 1600. Its main church, St. Peter’s, was begun in the 12th century. A second church, in Newtown, was built in the 19th century, as was a Methodist Chapel in Soberton Heath (now a private home). The southern part of the parish (Soberton Heath/Newtown) contains a good area of the Forest of Bere, once a vast area of royal woodland stretching from Romsey, south towards Southampton, east to beyond the Sussex border, and as far north as Winchester. It is presumed that the Norman kings used Bere Forest for hunting, as well as the New Forest to the west in Dorset, and it is reputed that Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Charles I all hunted here. The oak woods provided timber for building, including warships and bridges, from the 13th to the 19th centuries. I have written more about the Forest in the wider context of “industry” in the Meon Valley, in an earlier History Girls post.

Most, though not quite all, of the modern parish lies within the boundaries of the South Downs National Park.

One of the constituents of the BHO website, the Victoria County History for Hampshire, provides extensive and fascinating information about the historical ownership, as well as the important buildings and features, of Hampshire’s manors. As I said in my earlier post about the BHO, it is intriguing to see how the ownership of quite small manors, or parts of manors, sometimes rested with quite famous individuals, like the bishops of Winchester, or the (in)famous third Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley.

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton,
portrait attributed to John de Critz [Public domain]

In the Meon Valley, many of the estates were originally owned by the Crown or by some illustrious ecclesiastical institution. But, as I have discovered, many of these estates were in practice held by aristocratic or knightly families, some of whom retained their manorial holdings for generations and centuries, although sometimes manors were subdivided to provide for multiple heirs, or sold off to meet liabilities. Families such as the Waytes, the  Newports, the de Venuz’s and the Wallops were long-standing “lords of the manor” in Soberton. In the case of Soberton, too, I have noticed how relatively often women seemed to inherit and hold – or dispose of – manors, giving the impression that, for several centuries at least, women had more power over their property than one might have thought.

I have discovered, too, how fascinating it is to see – or to try to fathom – how locations named in earlier centuries align with what we have now. I don’t know quite why I find this so absorbing… Perhaps it’s something to do with what I also said in one of those earlier posts: “It’s somehow wonderful, and somehow humbling, to remember, in these places where I take my walk, and where I sometimes stop to stand and stare, how very many men and women have been here in the centuries before me.” It’s about wanting to understand the shape of our ancestors’ lives.

According to the Domesday Book of 1086, Soberton (attached to the Meonstoke Hundred) had four main “estates”, which together had a population of about 35 households, or perhaps 150 or so people. There is also an entry in Domesday for [East] Hoe, which lies within the eastern boundary of the parish, with another nine households. Domesday also tells us of a place called “Benestede” (or Bensted), with 12 households, which lay on the western boundary of the parish of Soberton (the River Meon), though it no longer exists under this name. I am including a reference to it in this post largely because of its geographical proximity to the Soberton manors and it shares some of the same personalities.

The Domesday entries for Soberton "proper" show that two of the four estates belonged at that time to the king, William I. A major part of Soberton had, at the time of the Conquest in 1066, formed part of the estates of Godwin, Earl of Wessex. His son, King Harold Godwinson, made his father’s a crown estate. Domesday says:

“Harold took it from him and put it in his revenue; it is so still.”

These estates remained in the overlordship of the king.

The entry in the Domesday Book that refers to the estates once owned by Godwin.

A third Soberton estate at the time of the Conquest had belonged to “Wulfnoth”, who I assume was either Godwin’s father, Wulfnoth Cild, who held vast estates in Sussex and was possibly the thegn of South Sussex, or another Wulfnoth Godwinson, Godwin’s sixth son and Harold’s younger brother. By the time of Domesday, the estate was in the hands of Herbert the Chamberlain, who was chamberlain of the Winchester treasury.

The fourth Soberton estate was crown land in 1066 but, by Domesday, it belonged to Henry the Treasurer (about whom I know no more). 

[East] Hoe was again crown land in 1066 but, by Domesday, it had been transferred to Hugh de Port, a French-English Norman aristocrat who accumulated a great number of estates, perhaps as many as 53 by 1086, most of which were in Hampshire.

Bensted, which was located just outside Soberton parish, was owned by the bishop of Winchester both prior to and after Domesday, but the wealthy Hugh de Port held it (or part of it) in 1086.

So, that was the situation in 1086. But, in the decades and centuries that followed, it seems that the, perhaps initially quite clearly delineated, estates referred to in the Domesday Book became divided and subdivided, according to the practice of “subinfeudation”, by which tenants who held land from an overlord, including the king, sub-let or alienated part of it to heirs or others. As a result, says the Victoria County History, it became difficult to trace the subsequent history of some of the estates. The results of the “subinfeudation” in Soberton made its manorial structure really rather complex, and I have enjoyed trying – while not entirely succeeding – to tease out the details.

The manors of Soberton shown in relation to the existing settlements.
The dotted line is the parish boundary. © Author

From the information in the History, the five Domesday estates in Soberton parish were divided (eventually) into about seven manors:

•   Soberton
•   Longspiers
•   Flexland (Englefield)
•   Wallop’s Manor
•   Russell Flexland
•   Bere
•   East Hoe 

The History doesn’t mention a Bensted at this location at all.

[As an aside, on a website called Manorial Counsel Limited, I have found that lordships of the following manors exist: Soberton, Russell Flexland, Wallop’s Manor, Bere, Longspiers, East Hoe, but also Faulkner’s Pluck and Huntbourne. None of these titles are available for sale (which is partly the function of the website), so whether this means someone actually still owns them all, I really don’t know!]

Soberton

The Clere family held “a” (rather than “the”) manor of Soberton from the king from early times. In the reign of Edward III, the abbot of Beaulieu Abbey purchased “a” manor of Soberton. It seems unclear exactly where this manor (if indeed it was the same manor) was located, but perhaps it was where Soberton village is now, to the north of the parish, and maps to the two estates identified as belonging to the king in 1086? I can’t tell this from my reading of the History, but I suppose it is a reasonable conjecture.

Anyway, as early as 1229, the forests in Soberton that belonged to the Abbey were extensive enough to justify the king ordering the abbot to supply the royal navy with five hundred wickerwork baskets (cleias) and two hundred bridges. In 1359, the Abbey was granted free warren in Soberton, and in 1393 the king confirmed the right of common of pasture within the Forest of Bere for the animals of the tenants of Soberton. About this time, the Abbey began what seemed to be a common practice for overlords, to farm out the manor, and it was let to various tenants from then onwards. 

In 1411, the manor was leased to a Richard Newport and his heirs for two hundred years. This lease seems to have been equivalent to a sale, for no annual rent was mentioned in the indenture. In 1477, the manor was said to be the property of Henry Stafford, the second Duke of Buckingham, who was married to Catherine Woodville, sister of Elizabeth, the wife of King Edward IV.

Later in the 15th century, the manor and other premises in Soberton were passed to John Dale and Richard Kingsmill, apparently as trustees, rather than owners. Richard Newport’s grandson, John, who had inherited the manor, died in 1521 with no children to succeed him. John’s widow, Elizabeth, died six years later. They were buried together inside St Peter’s church, in a marble tomb that can still be seen in what was once called the Lady Chapel, and now the Curll Chapel. Elizabeth left fifty sheep, two cattle and ten marks in money to the church, and 3s. 4d. (about £70 or 5 days  wages for a skilled tradesman) to each of her Soberton tenants.

In 1544, William Dale, presumably a son or grandson of John Dale, and still a “trustee”, passed the manor of Soberton, together with those of Longspiers and Flexland Englefield (see next month’s post), to a Walter Bonham who, five years later, sold them to Thomas Wriothesley, the first Earl of Southampton. The earl died a year later. His grandson Henry, who inherited Soberton at the age of eight on the death of his father in 1581, became the infamous third Earl. Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, Henry was drawn into the Earl of Essex’s conspiracy and was sent to the Tower when the plot failed. In 1601 he was convicted of treason (and presumably deprived of all his estates). However, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil, had Henry’s sentence commuted to life imprisonment. But in 1603, he was released by the new king, James I, who also restored to him his Soberton manor (among many others, I presume!) and, four years later, granted him free warren, view of frankpledge, assize of bread and beer, and various other privileges. When Henry died on the king’s service abroad in 1624, his heir was his son Thomas, then aged sixteen.

Walter Curll, Bishop of Winchester (1632-1647)

However, within the next few years, Soberton was sold to Dr. Walter Curll, who was bishop of Winchester from 1632 to 1647. When, in 1645, the Parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell captured Winchester, Walter went into exile to his manor in Soberton. It was said that he “led a retired life there in a sort of obscurity for a year and a half or thereabouts in a declining state of health. He was brought up to London for advice, but died 1647 about seventy two”. After his death, the manor was taken from the family but, in 1651, Walter’s widow and his son petitioned for its restoration. It was restored, and passed eventually to Walter’s grandson, another Walter. Then, in 1678, this Walter’s daughter, Anna, married Thomas Lewis, and brought the manor to her husband. 

And it wasn’t long before Thomas became the owner of nearly all the manors of Soberton parish.

I will continue Soberton’s manorial story in next month’s post.

The Domesday Village – East Meon

In my series of posts on some of the communities of the valley of the River Meon, I have arrived close to the source of the river, at East Meon (Mene or Menes 11th c; Meonis 12th c; East Menes 13th c; Estmune, Estmunes, Moene and Estmeone 14th c; Estmene 15th c; and Estmeane 16th c).

The River Meon rises just south of the village and at first flows north, winding through the village itself before heading off into the countryside towards West Meon, where it turns and flows south, making its short, twenty-one miles, journey through the Meon Valley, to Titchfield and the sea.

For 1,000 years, East Meon was a hundred, a parish and a manor. It was the largest of the estates of the bishops of Winchester, with the magnificent All Saints Church and the bishops’ Court House to reflect its importance. For centuries it knew only one industry, farming, and only one owner, the Diocese of Winchester.

It seems that, initially, no distinction was drawn between East Meon and West Meon (about 4 miles north-west as the crow flies and following the course of the River Meon). East Meon is first mentioned specifically in the mid 11th century, when the then bishop of Winchester, Alwin, granted both Meons to the monks of Winchester, retaining, however, the management of the lands. When Alwin died, in 1047, the manor was held by the new bishop, Stigand, and he continued to hold it after he also became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1052. He was apparently excommunicated for holding both Winchester and Canterbury, though that doesn’t seem to have affected his continuing to be bishop and archbishop. Stigand attended the deathbed of King Edward and the coronation of Harold Godwinson as king of England in 1066, but after Harold’s death, Stigand submitted to William the Conqueror. However, when William was crowned King on Christmas Day 1066, it was the Archbishop of York who carried out the coronation because Stigand’s excommunication meant that he could only assist!

HIC RESIDET HAROLD REX ANGLORUM. STIGANT ARCHIEP(I)S(COPUS).
“Here sits Harold King of the English. Archbishop Stigand”.
Scene immediately after crowning of King Harold.
By Norman or English embroiderers
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Stigand was eventually deposed in 1070, but held East Meon until his death probably two years later. At this point, it was seized by William I, and it was he who was holding East Meon in 1086, although, as Domesday tells us, Walkelin (Walchelin), the first Norman (as opposed to Saxon) bishop of Winchester, appointed in 1070, was also holding considerable property in East Meon (6 hides and 1 virgate, with a church). It was Walkelin who, in 1079, began work on a new cathedral church in Winchester, the current Winchester Cathedral, though little other than his transepts and crypt are still extant.

In the Domesday Book the hundred is represented by a single entry under Mene:

The entry shows that, in 1086, the “Mene” Hundred had 138 households, which was a large community of perhaps 500, and six mills, which also seems a lot, but perhaps their number reflects the extent of the Hundred’s lands.

In 1986, to celebrate the 9th centenary of the Domesday Book, the Hampshire Museums Service and the Sunday Times selected East Meon as the “Domesday Village”. In an exhibition at the Great Hall in Winchester, a model of the village was displayed, depicting it as it might have been in 1086. The simulation was created by Edward Roberts, then lecturer in Mediaeval Architecture at King Alfred’s College, Winchester, and Liz Lewis, curator at the Hampshire Museums Service. The model was later transported to Bayeux, where it is on display in La Musée de La Tapisserie, under the same roof as the Bayeux Tapestry. 

This part of the model shows the church and the Court house.Image courtesy of La Musée de la Tapisserie

East Meon continued to be crown property until some time between 1154 and 1161, when Henry II granted it, along with all churches belonging to it, to the diocese of Winchester. From this date, apart from a short period during the Commonwealth, when it was sold with his other lands in 1648 and 1649 as a result of the Root and Branch Bill, East Meon remained with the bishops of Winchester right up to the mid-19th century.

I imagine that it was not untypical that relations between tenants and their lords in English manors were not of the most cordial and, indeed, it is recorded that, in the reign of Edward III, there was a dispute between the then bishop, Adam Orlton, and his East Meon tenants. It seems that, in 1342 and 1343, the tenants wanted “clarification” of entries in the Domesday Book relating to “Menes” (one assumes they felt they were being short-changed in some regard). A century later, in August 1461, when Edward IV went on progress to Hampshire, the tenants of East Meon and elsewhere “in grete multitude and nombre” petitioned the king for relief from certain services, customs, and dues which the bishop, William Waynflete, and his agents were attempting to exact (presumably unjustly). According to one account the tenants seized the bishop, but the king rescued him from his murderous tenants and then arrested and tried the ringleaders, giving judgement in favour of his noble bishop.

East Meon is full of old buildings, including some delightful thatched cottages, strung out along the narrow streets, many of which follow the line of the River. But two of the buildings are of particular note. One is the church, All Saints, described by Nicholas Pevsner as “one of the most thrilling village churches in Hampshire” (The Buildings of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight). The other is the old Court House, the manor house of East Meon, built at the end of the 14th century, which stands opposite the church and is the best preserved of the residences of the bishops of Winchester.

All Saints church

Pevsner doesn’t explain exactly wherein lies the “thrill” of All Saints, but it is certainly a wonderful church. It was built in stages between the 11th and the 14th centuries, the original Norman church with its tower being completed in about 1150. The size and beauty of the church probably reflected East Meon’s importance in mediaeval times, both as a very large manor and as a centre for the bishops of Winchester.

The original church was cruciform in shape, consisting of nave, chancel, and transepts, and the original work is clearly identifiable in the round-topped arches typical of Norman or Romanesque style, and in the West and South doorways. The only major addition to the church was made in about 1230, when the South Aisle and Lady Chapel were added, in the new Early English style, with its pointed arches and larger windows. The spire was probably added at this time too.

All Saints’ greatest treasure is the Tournai font, one of only seven such fonts in the country (another, of the same period, is in Winchester Cathedral). The font was carved in the 12th century by the sculptors of Tournai from the hard blue-black limestone from the banks of the river Scheldt in what is present-day Belgium. The carvings on the four sides are illustrations from the opening chapters of Genesis, together with birds and animals, in a Romanesque style. It arrived in East Meon in around 1150, just as the original church was being completed, and was probably a gift from the then bishop of Winchester, Henry of Blois, who was a grandson of William the Conqueror. Henry was King Stephen’s brother, the Chancellor of England and the richest and most powerful man in the country after the king.

I will talk a little more about this font in a future post on some of Hampshire churches’ finest treasures.

The Court House

East Meon was the largest of the bishops of Winchester’s manors in Hampshire, and this manor house reflects that. It perhaps acted as the diocese’s administrative centre as well as being home to a number of monks who played host to the bishop whenever he visited East Meon.

About 20 years ago, an architectural historian called Edward Roberts identified pipe rolls for Court House (those for 1395-6 and 1396-7), which recorded the building of the house. It is thought that the works were carried out almost wholly in 1396, at a total cost of £109 15s 11d, at a time when a labourer’s daily wage was 4d.

The building, consisting of a great hall and a two-storey wing, was a replacement for a similar building, almost certainly Norman, which had stood on the same site. It was commissioned by someone I have mentioned before in previous posts, William of Wykeham, the then bishop of Winchester. His master mason for this building project was William Wynford. It is thought that Wynford might have first met Wykeham when the latter was a provost of Wells Cathedral, where Wynford had gone as master mason. He was made master of works at Windsor Castle in 1364, also under Wykeham. During the 1370s, Wynford worked at Abingdon Abbey, Corfe Castle and Southampton Castle.

When Wykeham founded New College, Oxford (1379) and then Winchester College (1382), it was to Wynford he turned for their design. There is a portrait of William Wynford in the stained glass in the east window of Winchester College. This shows an old man with thinning hair, with the words “Willms Wynfort lathomus” below. His last major work, in the 1390s, was the remodelling of the Norman nave of Winchester Cathedral in the latest Perpendicular Gothic style.

But it was also to Wynford that Wykeham turned for the design of his new manor house in East Meon. The Court House is apparently Wynford’s only surviving domestic (as opposed to royal or ecclesiastical) building.

Broadly, the structure of the original house was of a vast hall at the south end, built onto a wing of the earlier Norman building that contained the chapel and, upstairs, the bishop’s chamber. The hall itself is 48 feet long and 26 feet wide and is over 40 feet up to the peak of the roof. There would have been an open fire in the middle of the floor. The walls are 4 feet thick and 20 feet high and are constructed mainly of white malmstone (greensand) from Langrish (2.5 miles to the north-east) and flints from the downs above the village. The roof was constructed during the same months as the great roof of Westminster Hall. There are corbels set into the eaves of the roof that were carved in Winchester and represent heads of bishops and kings. It is thought that the one of a bishop might be William of Wykeham himself, by then in his seventies.

At the north end of the hall there is a service wing with a chamber above. Two doors lead from the hall into the buttery (where drink was stored and prepared for serving) and the pantry (where food was stored). The kitchen itself, as usual in these times when it would represent a considerable fire hazard, would have been a freestanding building to the east.

Above the buttery and pantry is the great chamber, 30 feet by 15, with a timber roof and a large fireplace. It is accessed by an external staircase. Off the great chamber was the garderobe with a drop down to a latrine below.

The new building survived virtually unaltered through six centuries. Under Wykeham’s successor, Cardinal Beaufort, the earlier wing to the south of the Great Hall, containing the bishop’s chamber and chapel, was rebuilt, but later demolished, probably in the early 17th century, when the timber framed farmhouse wing on the east of the hall was built. The farmhouse, for the 750 acre Court Farm, survives today. 

We must be very grateful to the mediaeval bishops of Winchester for what they brought to East Meon: a glorious manor house, much of which survives unaltered, a “thrilling” church which certainly survives, and of course that magnificent Tournai font. 

And isn’t it extraordinary to ponder upon how very many babies (and adults too) must have been baptised in that font, standing there in All Saints church for over 850 years – not much less than half a century since the writing of the Domesday Book!