The Domesday Survey (1086)

• Domesday Lowestoft (1) 
• Domesday Lowestoft (2) - Original/Latin 
• Domesday Lowestoft (3) - Akethorp

Domesday Lowestoft (1)

The further back in history that any researcher tries to go, the more difficult it is to make progress because of diminishing, usable, documentary sources. This is what makes Domesday Book so valuable. 

It gives insights into the past, which wouldn’t otherwise be available and, given the point at which it was created, it leaves the user nothing but the greatest respect for the people who created it. Yes, there are apparent inconsistencies in the way that some of the data was collected and recorded (particularly matters relating to the presence of churches), but overall it gives a picture of England at the time which contains information that goes far beyond the mere factual content of statistics relating to the economic structure of the realm (based on agriculture) and who held all the thousands of individual land-holdings great and small.      

IMAGE CREDIT: British Library Board

          Lowestoft is represented in William I’s great survey of the country (carried out in 1086) as Lothu Wistoft. The monarch wished to establish the taxable value of his realm   deriving from his own vast Royal Estate and from the lands held by his many Tenants-in-Chief and their own sub-tenants. But he died a year after the national enquiry had been carried out. The information gathered by his commissioners took two written forms, known as the Great Domesday Book and the Little Domesday Book - the former covering nearly the whole of England and the latter the eastern shires of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, which formed the wealthiest part of the realm. The information in Great Domesday was set out in summarised final form, but not (for reasons unknown) in Little Domesday - which means that there is a greater amount of information available in it. 

            The whole of the Domesday material is delivered in Latin, with much abbreviation used to record the information required. This related directly to use of the land in each community, with agricultural activity, other functions of the soil and the number of adult males present noted down in great detail. An Anglo-Saxon observer of the time is said to have grudgingly remarked that William’s commissioners did not miss “a single pig” in their collection of data - indicating the thoroughness of the operation in every shire of the country. The whole process was an amazing achievement and, nearly a thousand years on, the Domesday information provides a precious insight into the recently conquered Anglo-Saxon English kingdom. That is especially true of Little Domesday, with the greater amount of available information to be had there.

            The latinised name Lothu Wistoft may be translated as “Hlothver’s toft”, with the toft element being a Scandinavian word meaning “homestead” and the former one being a Scandinavian personal name probably dating back to the period of “Danelaw” (late 9th to early 11th century), when England was partitioned into two sectors, following the victory at Edington (878 AD/CE) by Alfred of Wessex’s forces over those of Guthrum, one particular leader of the invading Danes who had more than one army operating in different parts of England at the time. Following this crucial and influential battle, the country was “split down the middle” (to use a convenient expression), with the Danes having control of these fifteen shires: York, Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Lincoln, Northampton, Huntingdon, Bedford, Cambridge, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertford, Buckingham and Middlesex. King Alfred, as he is commonly known (and other leaders of lesser status), ruled over the rest of the kingdom.

            There is argument among historians as to when England became a truly unified kingdom under one monarch. Some historians choose Aethelstan (grandson of Alfred), who reigned 927-39, and others Edgar (959-75) - following recovery of parts of the kingdom from the Danes. But a good case can also be made for Cnut (al. Canute) - 1016-35 - a Dane himself, who also ruled over the country of his birth, as well as Norway and part of Sweden. Leaving national-level politics aside, the importance of the Danelaw period can still be seen in the number of Scandinavian words which eventually became part of the English language and in the various place-names which have their origins in one particular area of North-western Europe. Lothu Wistoft (“the homestead of Hlothver”) shows a Scandinavian incomer - perhaps even as early as the “Great Invasion” of 869 (the year which saw King Edmund of East Anglia meeting his death following capture after a battle he had lost) - taking control of an existing Anglo-Saxon settlement and replacing the name of its founder with his own. And it is strange how (or why) the Norman commissioners carrying out the Domesday Survey chose to split the first element of the place-name into two, since Lothu Wis is the latinised form of the genitive case of Hlothver, which would now be shown as Hlothver’s with use of an apostrophe s.

            Returning to the matter of local place-name derivations, it is worth noting that about half of Lothingland Half-hundred’s seventeen settlements recorded in Domesday have Scandinavian elements in their make-up: Akethorp, Belton, Corton, Flixton, Herringfleet, Lound, Lowestoft and Somerleyton. Major boundary changes in the century following the Survey saw the disappearance of five communities as places in their own right (Akethorp, Browston, Caldecot, Dunston and Gapton) and their replacement by six new ones: Ashby, Blundeston, Bradwell, Gunton, Oulton and Southtown. Three of these (Ashby, Gunton and Oulton) have Danish personal names as the first element in their make-up. Ashby was formed from land located in Herringfleet and Lound; Blundeston from areas of Corton, Lound and Somerleyton; Bradwell mainly from Gapton, with part of Browston; Gunton from Corton and Lowestoft; Oulton from Dunston and (mainly) Flixton; and Southtown from the northern sector of Gorleston. It is not really known, exactly, when parish boundaries became fixed during the late medieval period - and, even as late as the 1260s, a demarcation between Southwold and Easton Bavents hadn’t been definitively decided and established.

            Similar features are also to be noted in Mutford Half-hundred, where three of its twelve settlements (Barnby, Carlton - later to become Carlton Colville - and Kirkley) have Scandinavian elements in their names and where four of them (Beckton, Hornes, Rothenhall and Wimundhall) ceased to function in their own right and became subsumed by neighbouring communities, rather than seeing their land taken to form new entities as sometimes occurred in Lothingland. Beckton became part of Pakefield; Hornes was absorbed by either Carlton or Rushmere (two possible locations existing as to where it was situated - with the latter place seeming perhaps the more likely); Rothenhall was divided between Kessingland and Pakefield; and Wimundhall became part of Kirkley.

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Domesday Lowestoft (2) 

The information which follows is set out, as near as can be achieved, in the original format of the Domesday Survey (1086), as presented in the Phillimore edition of the Suffolk data published in 1986. It is in original, abbreviated, medieval Latin of the time, on the left-hand page, with the English translation opposite on the right-hand side. In this article, the entry relating to  Lowestoft has the Latin text shown first, with the translation following beneath. The introductory numbers shown here are not those of the Survey itself, but ones used in the publisher’s modern editing practice aimed at enabling easier reference to be made to the original text. 

            So, what does this tell us about Lowestoft in the year 1086? Taken in sequence of information, the first thing we learn that it was a berwick (bervita), or outlier, to the Lothingland Half-hundred manor (located in Gorleston) - along with Lound and Belton, named as such in the entries immediately following and with all three places coming after Gorleston itself. No annual taxable value is given for any part of the manor - for which there is no ready explanation. But Lowestoft, the largest and most important of the three outliers, had 450 acres of arable land - a carucate(the Latin terrae meaning “lands” being shortened to trae/tre) - with the word carucate preceding it (abbreviated here to car) being a Norman-French word for the old Anglo-Saxon term hide, which was 120 acres in size. The XXX ac min following is the abbreviated form of XXX acrae minus, meaning “less thirty acres” - which has to be subtracted from the four carucate area of 480 to arrive at the required 450. The manpower consisted of three villans, ten smallholders and three slaves - a total of sixteen adult males, with the start of adulthood at the time being loosely placed within the age-range of twelve to fifteen years. If these men had all been of more mature years and were married (which they may not have been), and using an approved demographic multiplier of 4.75 per family unit, a notional population of seventy-six people is arrived at.

            Villans (a word later often rendered as villeins), in its abbreviated form of vill, were the highest tier of bondsmen (unfree workers tied to the manor), who had a holding of land - often twelve acres in area - to work for themselves and their families, in return for labour services due on the lord of the manor’s own personal lands (known usually as his demesne). Bordars, abbreviated to bor and paraphrased as “smallholders” in modern terminology, were of lesser status and held less land - while servi, abbreviated to ser, were slaves who probably had little land or no land at all on which to subsist - but which might have been made available to them by other bondsmen of superior status, and probably at some kind of price to be paid. Slavery was not introduced by the Normans, following their conquest of England, but was part of the feudal system they inherited from the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian people they had succeeded as overlords. And, in fact, slavery diminished during their period of dominance. The women on a manor were also bonded to it and would have carried the family status of their menfolk - slavery included.

            Three interesting abbreviations emerge in the account of the Lowestoft male personnel: Tncand Tc for the Latin word tunc, meaning “then”; mofor modo, meaning “now”; and Sep for semper, meaning “always”. Quite a lot of the recorded Domesday data, as a whole, seeks to make comparisons between the state of affairs at the time of the Survey and how things had been in 1066. Presumably, to ascertain whether there had been improvement in the running and value of estates or whether the reverse had occurred. As far as Lowestoft’s population is concerned, the number of villans and of slaves had both dropped from five to three, while the bordars (smallholders) had remained the same at ten. If the arithmetic cited two paragraphs above is used, then the local population in 1066 would have totalled ninety-five people. Hence, there had been definitely been a decrease in numbers - though the reason for this cannot be established.

            Continuing with the information revealed above, the next thing in the overall sequence to be mentioned is the matter of ploughing capacity for the 450 acres of arable land present. We learn that there were two ploughs belonging to the lord of the manor - the abbreviation in dnio standing for in dominio (“in lordship/demesne”). And this was the same situation as that of 1066, when Gyrth Godwineson - younger brother of King Harold and killed with him at Hastings - had been Earl of East Anglia. Then, there were three belonging to the men (the Latin homini being represented by hoz - the last letter of this being a symbol to show abbreviation of the word. The men in question were the villan tenants, of course, and their decrease in number is reflected in that of ploughing capacity also. Again, abbreviations feature in the data recorded, with car now serving to represent caruca - the medieval Latin word for “plough”. Each plough would have been pulled by a team of eight oxen (castrated male cattle) and an acre per day was the required area to be cultivated per team, in furrows of 220 yards length (the word furlong being an abbreviation of “furrow-long”). With five teams available in 1086 and with two men required for each (one to lead the oxen and one to control the plough), an area of 450 acres would have taken ninety days to cultivate. And it has been worked out that in order to plough an acre a day, with the width of furrow drawn at the time being about nine inches, the ploughmen would have each walked a distance of eleven miles - as had their oxen also! 

            Following the information relating to ploughs comes a reference to woodland (silva being Latin for “wood” or “timber”), with the ad VIII porc meaning “for 8 pigs” - thus, referring to an area of oak or beech trees (or both, mixed) able to support that number of animals, particularly in the the autumn with the fall of acorns and beech-mast. And this is how areas of woodland are mainly represented in Domesday: their capacity to feed pigs, left to roam and forage - which has been worked out at a notional acre to acre-and-a-half per animal. Which means that Lowestoft’s area of standing woodland was something like eight to twelve acres in extent - a long, long way from Lound’s 112-168 acres (112 pigs), but superior to Belton, Burgh [Castle], Caldecot, Gapton and Newton having none at all. Throughout the whole of the late medieval period, Lowestoft never had any significant stands of managed native hardwood, with around twenty to twenty-five acres revealed in a Manor Roll of 1618 (admittedly, double the amount of Domesday). And this would have been the result of much of the surface soil being of a light, acidic nature and proximity to the sea creating high atmospheric salinity.

            The woodland data revealed is followed by V acr pti, meaning “5 acres of meadow” - acrae being Latin for “acres” and prati (abbreviated to pti)meaning “of meadow”. This probably refers to good quality, managed grassland for the production of hay (highly valued as winter feed - especially for horses where these were kept), rather than an area given over to grazing - most of which would have been of the “rough” kind, with the livestock turned out on to the extensive areas of heath present in all communities and left to browse whatever vegetation was available. Lowestoft had no horses to record and their presence in Lothingland is mainly to be found in those communities which had a notable presence of freemen - some of whom are even named as a reflection of their status. And Lowestoft had no freemen at all among its population, largely because it was the main outlier to the Lothingland manor and all of its manpower and production were geared to supporting that particular entity and supplying it with agricultural crops - of which grain was by far the most important.

            The last three references of all relate to farm livestock, with the first of these being cattle. The Domesday text repeats abbreviations noted earlier in connection with the human population of the settlement (Tnc and mo , meaning “then” and “now”) - from which we learn that in 1066 there had been fourteen (the largest number kept in the Lothingland) communities, which had decreased to eight by 1086 - which placed it third, after Lound (ten) and Hopton (nine). The word animal, abbreviated here to an is identical in form in both Latin and English - and in the Domesday record it refers specifically to cattle. These small herds, spread around the different communities, would have consisted mainly of milking cows (probably with a single bull for breeding purposes), whose primary function would have been to produce the animals needed to pull ploughs. With a natural life-span of perhaps around twenty years or so and calf-producing capacity from two years of age to ten or twelve, an average of about four to five births per animal would have been the norm. And once they were no longer able to give birth, slaughter would have followed. Any surplus milk produced beyond suckling requirement was probably used to make cheese. 

            Oxen would, of course, have had longer lives than their female counterparts, though no guesses can be made as to how long this would have been. If the seven cows listed for Lowestoft at Domesday (presuming that the eighth animal was a bull) each had had an optimum five-year period of reproduction, then the number of calves born would have been thirty-five - with perhaps eighteen of these being male and seventeen female, allowing for the slightly higher number of live births at attaching to the former. There would have had to have been an important input of livestock management at work in order to balance the numbers of cattle reared and control the uses they were put to and that, really, in the absence of specific recorded evidence, is as much as can be said.

            The last but one type of livestock refrerred to is pigs. Use of the abbreviation Sep (for semper, meaning always) attached to XI porc shows that there were eleven of these animals present in 1086 - just as there had been twenty years before - with the abbreviated porc standing for the Latin plural porci (“pigs”). This is more than the number given in the estimate of woodland capacity to support these animals, but other local settlements are found with fewer of them present. The recording of the estimated size of woodland, in terms of feeding potential for swine, has never really been explained. So, there is little more to be said about it. Pigs would have undoubtedly been turned out into woodland during the autumn, but were probably otherwise kept enclosed for much of the year to limit the damage they would otherwise do by rooting up the ground they occupied. Their use in any community at the time would have been mainly for food, but with their hides and bones also serving other useful purposes after slaughter.

            And so to the last animal of all: 160 sheep: CLX ov (Latin, ovis singular, oves plural). These were usually the most numerous farm animal, by far, in any community at Domesday - and those in Lothingland Half-hundred were no exception. Flock sizes ranged from forty-eight (Akethorp) to 300 (Gorleston), so Lowestoft - along with Belton, Burgh and Fritton - was somewhere halfway between the extremes. Use of these animals would have been primarily to produce wool, which would have been shorn each summer and used first to spin into yarn and then woven into cloth. Ewes, during modern times - after centuries of improved breeding methods and feeding regimes - can produce lambs up to about the age of ten. During medieval times it was probably up to about six years, followed by slaughter for food. Commercial rams, today, are usually culled at about the age of five to six, as fertility rates decline - but they may have been left to live a little longer in earlier times. Again, once their breeding capacity was noticeably in decline, they would have been killed for mutton.

            During life, animals would have grazed on the extensive areas of heathland available at the time, both in coastal and inland parishes, and also on agricultural land rested from continuous annual cropping to allow some recovery of fertility. While the classic three-field system (preceded by a two-field one) -  arranged in strips and made available to members of a community commensurate with their status - became widespread during the 11th and 12th centuries, it was not universally adopted. And Lowestoft seems to have kept to the older one - at least until the township moved to the cliff during the first half of the 14th century, when the much smaller North Field was probably created to meet the needs of a growing population and provide a cultivated area closer to where people lived. It occupied land to either side of what is now St. Margaret’s Road, with the roadway itself likely to have started life as the central baulk, which gave access to the arable strips aligned on a north-south axis to either side of it.

            The earlier and much larger South Field and South West Field (in that order) are basically represented today by two of the main built-up components of Lowestoft’s inner urban core. The first is the London Road North shopping area and the whole of the residential district to the west of it, bounded to the north by St. Peter’s Street and to the south by Bevan Street/Norwich Road. The second is most of what is located between Rotterdam Road and Normanston Drive - using the bottom of the Park and the edge of Lake Lothing as the southern limits. And both of these areas are where the 450 acres of arable land, as recorded in Domesday, would have been situated. One of the fields would have been left fallow each year (in whole or in part), with whatever vegetation grew upon it being grazed by sheep, which in turn fertilised the soil with their droppings. Reference was made earlier to an area of 450 acres requiring ninety days work by five teams of oxen in order to plough it. This, of course, would have been proportionately less, depending on the amount of land left unploughed. Both common fields were roughly the same size, with the South slightly larger than the West South.

             The township itself was probably located close to the junction of these (their meeting-point being what is today the southern section of Rotterdam Road) - somewhere, perhaps, in the north-eastern part of the Lowestoft Cemetery, as it now is, and certainly no great distance from it. Just to the south, a track referred to in Early Modern times as the Old Way crossed both common fields. One end of it lay in the far south-western corner of the West South Field (in what, today is the Harbour Road area) and skirted the edge of Lake Lothing, before continuing in a north-easterly direction to the north of Leathes Ham (a peat-digging before it flooded) and then turning fully eastwards along an alignment now represented by the southern boundary of the Cemetery. From there, it went up the slope of land occupied by Halcyon Crescent and then along Love Road and Milton Road (West and East), before descending to the Denes and beach via a score which was to become known as Frost’s Alley about 800 years or more later!

            In a completely different direction, the two other cardinal points (north and south) had tracks running in each direction: one going northwards up the slope of land to the outlying, smaller settlement of Akethorp, heading towards the location where St. Margaret’s Church was later built; the other, running southwards down to the marshland bordering Lake Lothing. The alignment of what eventually became Rotterdam Road during the mid-late 19th century represents these two tracks fairly accurately, but no comment can be made as to the actual layout of the settlement’s houses in relation to them nor to the east-west track found later referred to as the Old Way. And although the emphasis of the Domesday Survey is very much focused on arable land (and to a lesser extent on woodland and meadow), the presence of marshland close to the Lowestoft township of the time would have had value as a further source of grazing for livestock, as well as providing reed and sedge for thatching and other uses. Peat would have been dug from the margins of the lake, to use as fuel, and the coarse fish living in its waters would have made a source of food - in addition to the shoaling herrings and sprats available close in to shore during the autumn and early winter.

            The assembly of small, timber-and-thatch, one-room houses would have probably been clustered fairly closely together in some kind of layout mainly determined by the configuration of the tracks. And, in the absence of any significant archeological evidence ever having come to light, that it is about as as much as can be said. Adult life-expectancy at the time was probably mid- to late-thirties on average - this being mainly the result of the high rate of child-mortality. And the everyday lives of people would have been dictated by the rising and the setting of the sun, by the demands and conditions of the four seasons, and also by those of the weather. Land and its varying uses were the focal point of life for the peasantry of the time, simply because most things needed emanated from the ground - whatever its geological structure. And far from being the main element only, in sustaining human populations by feeding them, it was also a main provider of materials used in producing manufactured goods of one kind or another. In his classic book, The First Industrial Nation: the Economic History of England 1700-1914 (2nd ed., 1983), p. 29, Peter Mathias was able to describe land as “the single greatest flywheel of the economy”, prior to factories and their mass-production processes changing things for ever as the 19th century progressed.

            And, as a final comment on land, in this section of the work, something must be said about the local landscape itself in terms of the coastal erosion which has taken place over the last 900 years or more. It is known from details recorded in a survey of military defences carried out in May 1545 by Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, that the North Denes at Lowestoft were 960 yards wide - the measurement probably having been carried out from Whapload Road to the shoreline. The width today is about 200 yards. It is therefore possible (perhaps even likely) that, since 1086 - and allowing for a similar rate of attrition which preceded the Duke of Norfolk’s survey (which may or may not have been the case) - the coastline could have receded by up to a mile. And not just locally - but along practically the whole of the Suffolk coastline. Which means that the communities of the time along the littoral fringe would have extended much further eastwards. 

            Much of the land would have been heathland, from Gorleston all the way down to the Orwell estuary - and, even in recent times (historically speaking), this was still a major feature of the country’s overall topography and often referred to as the Suffolk Sandlings. Not a great deal of this is left, now, with the three main areas at Dunwich, Tunstall and Rendlesham greatly altered by the planting of conifers during the 1920s by the Forestry Commission. The local Lowestoft area does, of course, have one very small vestigial piece left in the form of Gunton Warren, where the gorse, heather, some of the bush-scrub and other vegetation, serve to give some idea of the type of landscape which once existed. But not the large clump of introduced holm oaks (Quercus ilex) which dominate the warren visually and which were possibly planted during the late 19th century by Jeremiah James and Caroline Colman, whose summer residence stood about half a mile away on Corton cliff.

            Before leaving the Domesday township of Lowestoft, it is worth considering how the place would have fitted into the overall management and governance of Lothingland Half-hundred itself - the manor of which was a Royal one centred on Gorleston. William I’s estate, nationally, was massive (the largest of all) - but his major tenants-in-chief, as they were called, many of whom had fought with him at Hastings, were also rewarded with significant areas of land. A man called Roger Bigot was Sheriff of Norfolk & Suffolk - based in Norwich and responsible for the control of both shires (the word sheriff being a contraction of shire-reeve) - and his would have been the enormous task of maintaining order and seeing that both the Royal Estate and his own considerable land-holding were efficiently managed. He would have done this with the help of reeves (stewards or bailiffs) of lesser status, a number of whom were Anglo-Saxon freemen able to be trusted by their Norman overlords. And they, in turn, might well have had surrogates below them engaged in the work of inspecting both Royal and Bigot lands and making sure that the running of these was a being conducted in the required manner.

            The manorial hub in Gorleston had 600 acres of arable land - worked by twelve villans, five smallholders and four slaves - and there was a further ninety acres attached, in the hands of twenty freemen. Independent of this, there were a further four Royal freemen working 120 arable acres of their own. Also attached to the manor were its three outliers, at Belton (120 acres). Lound (240 acres) and Lowestoft (450 acres) - with a further ninety acres located in Somerleyton - all of this arranged topographically within the half-hundred in such a way that it gave the hub four subordinate holdings set in a north-north-west/south-south-east alignment and running across the half-hundred from end to end. All part of the mechanism of control. The formation of hundreds, as internal administrative divisions of a shire (this, later, to acquire the name of “county”), seems to be associated particularly with the 10th century and to have consisted of areas of cultivated land roughly 120 hides (12,000 acres) in size. Lothingland, in having 6,265 acres recorded at Domesday, was classified as a half-hundred. Its near-neighbour Lothing Hundred (which changed its name to Mutford, at some point after Domesday) had only 3,209 aces, but was still referred to by the same name.

            The hundred and half-hundred served a number of useful functions, with all of its families arranged in units of ten (sometimes twelve) known as tithing-groups. Each group had an elected leader, entitled the headborough, and he acted as spokesman for it. All members of a group were responsible for the good behaviour of each other - a system of social and legal control known as frankpledge. The hundred court met monthly (usually, in the open at a prominent feature in the local landscape) to adjudicate upon a range of matters, under the leadership of an elected hundred reeve. Attendance of the headboroughs would have been obligatory and the attendance of other male heads of family possibly encouraged. The matters dealt with would have included various criminal acts, personal disputes, land management, maintenance of boundaries and fences, marriage arrangements and other matters of local interest and importance.  The sheriff’s court for the hundred and half-hundred (known as the tourn) took place twice a year - usually after Easter and Michaelmas - and dealt with reviewing the frankpledge system   and adjudicating upon the more serious criminal cases passed up from the hundred court. While the shire-court itself, as the forum for what would today be termed the county, dealt with serious offences such as murder, rape and arson, which had usually been passed up from the tourn. 

            Interestingly, the tourn, as a particular component of the legal system - though greatly changed in nature -  was still in operation for the half-hundreds of Lothingland and Mutford during the late 16th and early 17th century. Surviving minute books for 1588-94 and 1595-1612 (Suffolk Archives 192/4 & 194/C1/1) show that the sessions were a joint affair for both jurisdictions, held usually in April or October at Motforth Bregge (Mutford Bridge) in a building which stood more or less where The Commodore public house is now located. The crossing-place between the two stretches of water, the broad and Lake Lothing (as they now are), was the meeting-point of the two half-hundreds - with Motforth meaning “the ford at which moots were held” and bregge (or bridge) referring to the reinforced earthen causeway which once provided passage between both meres. Scrutiny of the court minutes shows that the offences dealt with were largely infringements of local manorial law - ones which had possibly slipped through the annual leet courts (which dealt with such things) or had been flagged up after the date by which such matters had to be reported. And so, the deposition of rubbish in the streets, failure to keep fences and hedges in good order, allowing ditches to become blocked, disturbing the peace, brawling, selling goods by short weight or measure, allowing livestock to roam (especially pigs), and failure to mark and maintain parish boundaries were all very much the order of the day. 

            It was all a long, long way from what this element of the legal process had once been within the system of dispensing local justice.  

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 Domesday Lowestoft (3)

The small, nearby Domesday settlement of Akethorp - to the north-west of the Lowesfoft township and situated mainly on the higher ground now occupied by the Gunton Estate and later residential development - is worthy of inclusion in this account because of its becoming part of the late medieval ecclesiastical parish of Lowestoft, once that had formed at some point during the post-Domesday period. The first element of the place-name, Ake (as seen) has two possible derivations - the Danish personal name Aki or the Old English ac (pronounced “ake”) meaning “oak” . The second component, thorp, has these two possible origins also, with the Danish meaning of “hamlet” (always used in the sense of being the off-shoot of a larger nearby settlement) and a relatively rare Old English one meaning “farmstead”. Either way, the inference is that Akethorp was connected with Lowestoft, in the role of an outlier of some kind.

            It is probably true to say that, among place-name specialists, Danish origins for the name Akethorp are the more favoured choice. And this would certainly fit in with the fact of East Anglia having once been part of the Danelaw (as referred to in the fourth paragraph of this article). But, there is also a valid topographical argument to be made for Old English linguistic origins, in that the higher ground on which Akethorp was mainly situated had heavier soils overall than those on the lower levels to the south. And this would have suited the growth of oak trees more than the conditions provided by lighter, acidic, heathland ones. It is perhaps significant that a highly detailed Manor Roll of 1618  (Suffolk Archives, 194/A10/73) shows that nearly all of Lowestoft’s twenty to twenty-five acres of managed woodland was to be found in the north-western sector of the parish and that a twelve-acre plantation here belonged to the Akethorpe Estate, which had long been in the possession of Magdalen College, Oxford. It stood where the Benjamin Britten Academy of Music and Mathematics is now located. 

            This is what the Domesday Survey has to say about the Akethorp settlement.   

            As with the question asked earlier, regarding the data given for Lowestoft, what is to be learned here about Akethorp? The first thing is that an Anglo-Saxon freeman priest called Aethelmaer (to give the ethnic spelling of his name) held a manor of eighty acres of arable land. The abbreviated lib ho stands for liber homo, meaning “free man”, while prb is a shortened form of presbyter(us), a Greek word sometimes latinised with a -us suffix and meaning “priest”. The LXXX is well understood as the Roman numerals for 80, with ac again being the abbreviation of acrae, meaning “acres”. The information that this estate was a manor is conveyed by the abbreviation P I M, standing for Pro I Manerium and literally meaning “for one manor”. Its eighty acres of arable land was not an extensive area, but a number of manors recorded in Domesday have arable land just thirty acres in extent - a measure known either as a virgate or yardland and reckoned at one-quarter of a  hide or carucate (120 acres).

            In addition to Aethelmaer himself, were three bordars - the Sep III bor meaning (as with Lowestoft) that this number of smallholders remained as it had been previously, in 1066. The & in dnio car abbreviation shows that the manor itself had one plough (with a full team of eight oxen), while the following hou dim car indicates that the smallholders had only half a plough (meaning, of course, a half-team of four oxen, which was sufficient to pull a plough of the time). All the abbreviated words (Sep for semper, bor for bordar, dnio for dominio, hou [sic] for homini, dim for dimidium, car for caruca) mean the same as previously encountered: “always”, “bordar”, “demesne/lordship”, “men”, “half” and “plough”. Which then brings us to the last ones, which are related to other aspects of the community’s nature not connected with its adult male population - its area of arable land and the ploughing capacity to service it.

            First of all, comes an area of woodland sufficient to sustain five pigs (silva ad V porc), followed by one acre of meadow (I ac pti), then three pigs (III porc) and forty-eight sheep (XLVIII ov). As before - with Lowestoft - silva means “wood”, ad means “for”, porc (porci)) means “pigs”, ac (acrae) means “acres”, pti (prati) means “of meadow” and ov (ovis/oves) means “sheep”. Last of all, comes something not present with the Lowestoft data (the annual taxable value of the estate), because the amount of geld due from the Half-hundred Manor is not stated. Hence, Akethorp’s val X sol, meaning “ten shillings” - with val being an abbreviation of valor, meaning “value”, and sol standing for solidus, meaning “a shilling”. Somewhat ironically, perhaps, this last word derives from a classical Latin expression for a “pound” in terms of monetary worth! 

            The reference to the priest, Aethelmaer, might well lead one to expect that a church would have been recorded also. But Lothingland Half-hundred only has three mentioned (those at Burgh [Castle], Flixton and Somerleyton) - the lowest number for a Suffolk jurisdiction, in a shire that had a total of 448 noted by William I’s commissioners. But, it has to be remembered that, in Christian teaching, the Church is the people - not the building where they meet. And in many cases, before the Norman Conquest, it is known that Anglo-Saxon congregations gathered outside at key points in the landscape - perhaps such as the high ground in the vicinity of St. Margaret’s Church and the nearby water-tower on Hollingsworth Road. During the century following Domesday, there was a massive programme of church building over the whole of England - probably carried out as much to reinforce Norman authority as well as consolidate the Christian faith - and the presence of Aethelmaer would have drawn in believers from the local area - including Lowestoft, with its township just half a mile or so to the south. St. Margaret (of Antioch) was a popular Norman dedication and the great, Perpendicular Gothic building seen today is the successor of an earlier one, probably raised in the locality where Aethelmaer met and ministered to his flock.

            In being given his name (as was his counterpart Wihtred, at Somerleyton). Aethelmaer is shown to have been a fully independent freeman - one of a number found in Lothingland. Others of lower status, not named, are found sometimes referred to as sokemen (soc in Domesday Book) - a soke being an area of jurisdiction under the control of a manorial lord, which might refer to the hundred or half-hundred manor itself (and often did) or - depending on local custom and arrangements - to a large individual private one. Many of the independent freemen were under commendation, as it was termed, to a social superior, who acted as a kind of patron and could call upon his subordinates for military activity, if needed. This might have been a fellow freeman of higher status, or a local thegn (al. thane) - this being the social level between freeman and eorl (earl), with an accompanying estate of five hides of agricultural land (600 acres). It might even have been an eorl himself. There are a number of references in Lothingland (and in many other hundreds in both Suffolk and Norfolk, generally), where higher-status named freemen had been under the commendation of Gyrth Godwineson, Earl of East Anglia in 1066. 

            Reference was made earlier to the significant boundary changes which took place in Lothingland and Mutford half-hundreds during the century following Domesday, and these affected two of the churches recorded in the Survey - those of Flixton and Somerleyton. The former ended up becoming St. Michael Oulton, with a much smaller building dedicated to St. Andrew (still in existence as a ruin) raised in the northern sector of the diminished original parish. While the latter became St. Mary Blundeston, necessitating the construction of an identically named place-of-worship just over a mile away to the east, in order to serve Somerleyton. In 1086, Flixton was the largest community in Lothingland, in terms of its population of sixty-seven adult males (twenty-five freeman, four villans, thirty-four bordars or smallholders, and four slaves) and its area of 1,085 acres of arable land. Its church of St. Michael was one of the ten richest in Suffolk, with an endowed manor of 120 cultivated acres and other assets, including the valued possession of a watermill - the only one recorded in the half-hundred. The Mutford jurisdiction also had single one, located within the larger of Kessingland’s two manors.

            There were, seemingly, no windmills in England until the later part of the 12th century - the first recorded one (up till now) being located in a “disappeared” medieval village on the southern fringe of the East Yorkshire wolds, named Weedley (1185). The Flixton mill and manor were part of the Bishop of Thetford’s estates - that town being the centre of the East Anglian diocese until Herbert de Losinga moved it to Norwich in 1094-5. The source of water for the Flixton mill would probably have been from the tidal area of the River Waveney (the marshes of today not having been drained and formed in 1086) and its location probably close to that of the church, whose asset it was. While the one at Kessingland was probably connected in some way with the River Hundred. The mill at Flixton is recorded as a half-mill, which probably means that its profits were shared by two interested parties - one of whom was William de Beaufai (Bishop of Thetford) and the other, most likely, King William I (lord of Lothingland Half-hundred).

            With watermills being a scarce presence (and not just here, but nationally as well) and also perhaps expensive to use, much of the grinding of wheat and barley into household flour would have been done by the womenfolk at home using querns. These were made from a hard rock of some kind, with basalt perhaps the most durable, but granite, gritstone, quartzite, limestone and sandstone would all have been used - depending on what the local geology made available. And with East Anglia having practically no building stone of any kind (and with flint not being suitable), querns or the stone to make them would have had to be brought in from other sources. And the amount of time spent in using them can only be guessed at - but, it must have been a major domestic task (using children also) and perhaps analogous with the time spent by the men ploughing and tending the land. 

            In conclusion, and to keep this article within bounds - both Lowestoft and Akethorp remained closely connected throughout the whole of the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. By the year 1212 (and without any information as to the process), Lowestoft had become a manor in its own right, with Akethorp continuing as such but forming part of the ecclesiastical parish of its much larger neighbour. It also lost its manorial status in 1479, when it became one of the many estates in the local area belonging to Magdalen College, Oxford, via the will of Sir John Fastolf of Caister Castle. Two other significant changes earlier, locally, were the formation of Gunton and Oulton as individual townships - each, respectively, first recorded in documentary sources in the years 1198 and 1203 as Gunetun and Aletun. Their formation from Corton and Lowestoft, and from Dunston and Flixton, was referred to much earlier. What was not mentioned was the origin of both names from Danish antecedents: Gunni and Ali - these being added to the Old English word tun, meaning “homestead” or “village”. Whoever Gunni was is not known. But, Ali was the name of the freeman who held the small manor of Dunston (forty-five acres of arable land) in 1086 from Robert de Vaux - himself a sub-tenant of Roger Bigot, Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. And Dunston itself was located in what is now part of the northern sector of Oulton, in the Hall Lane area. [Back to TOP]

            More about the connected relationship between Lowestoft and Akethorp will follow in another article.

CREDIT:David Butcher

Special thanks to Anna Powell-Smith and the Open Domesday project

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