Caville Manor and the Enterprise of the Twelfth-Century Bishops of Durham

Abstract

Historical notes discovered on a fifteenth-century Yorkshire rental allow us to reconstruct the astonishing level of investment made by Bishop Hugh du Puiset of Durham (1153–95) in organising the drainage of the carrs in southern Howdenshire, and the way the process was managed. These notes and other evidence reveal that the bishop financed the cutting of at least three major drains in the 1160s or 1170s, and then made preferential grants and sales of parcels of land to clerics and laymen, who undertook the completion of the scheme. In doing this he transformed the wetland landscape of the north bank of the Ouse, built up his manor of Howden’s rent roll by fee-farms, and created a new group of minor gentry within his lordship. The notes also have something to say about the maintenance of episcopal rentals in Howden in the twelfth century, parallel to the famous Boldon Book which Bishop Hugh compiled for his diocese.

Keywords:

• Durham diocese
• agricultural improvement
• drainage
• wetland
• lordship
• manors
• rentals

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the kindness of my colleague Dr Helen Fenwick at the University of Hull in commenting on a draft of this article and for her assistance on the wetland topography of the Humber basin, and Professor John Marriott for discussions on Howdenshire’s drains. The article is a consequence of the research project sponsored by the Victoria County History of England towards a volume on Howdenshire. Geoffrey Martin kindly provided the maps.

Notes

a provided from B.

b vtgang BC.

c text of A damaged here, provided from B.

1 Nottingham University Manuscripts and Special Collections, Ga. 11847.

2 Nottingham Univ. MSC, Ga. 9258.

3 Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense, ed. T. D. Hardy, 4 vols, Rolls Series (London, 1873–8) I, pp. 203, 503.

4 Early Yorkshire Charters I–III, ed. W. Farrer (Edinburgh, 1914–16); IV–XII, ed. C.T. Clay (Huddersfield, Leeds and Wakefield, 1935–65) II, p. 324; Calendar of the Charter Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office (6 vols, London, HMSO, 1923–7) II, p. 447; Nottingham Univ. MSC, Ga. 9204.

5 Feodarium Prioratus Dunelmensis, ed. W. Greenwell, Surtees Society, 58 (1872), p. 256.

6 He was one of four knights to investigate an essoin in 1250, Curia Regis Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, 20 vols (London, HMSO, 1922–2007) XIX, p. 352.

7 These were overlooked in the recent editions of the Durham episcopal acta up to 1237.

8 Surveys and rentals survive for the house of nuns at Caen, for instance, from the early-twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Charters and Custumals of the Abbey of Holy Trinity, Caen, ed. J. Walmsley (British Academy, 1994). The great Templar survey and rental of 1185 includes a large section concerning its Yorkshire lands, Records of the Templars in England in the Twelfth Century, ed. B. Lees (British Academy, 1935). For the Winchester Pipe Rolls in context, B. M. S. Campbell, ‘A Unique Estate and a Unique Source: the Winchester Pipe Rolls in Perspective’, in The Winchester Pipe Rolls and Medieval English Society, ed. R. H. Britnell (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 21–43.

9 Boldon Buke, ed. and trans. W. Greenwell, Surtees Society, 25 (1852), p. 1 (my translation). The problems in interpretation are sketched out in P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Boldon Book and the Wards between Tyne and Tees’, in Anglo-Norman Durham, 1093–1193, ed. D. Rollason and others (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 399–405. The textual complexities are dealt with in H. S. Offler, ‘Re-reading Boldon Book’, in North of the Tees: Studies in Medieval British History, ed. A. J. Piper and A. I. Doyle (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 1–38.

10 Domesday Book seu Liber Censualis Willelmi primi regis Angliae, ed. A. Farley and others, 4 vols (London, 1783–1816) I, fo. 304c.

11 Charters of Peterborough Abbey, ed. S. E. Kelly (Anglo-Saxon Charters, 14, Oxford, 2009), no. 14, pp. 240–7; and see also K. M. Hall, ‘Pre-Conquest Estates in Yorkshire’, in Yorkshire Boundaries, ed. H. E. J. Le Patourel and others (Leeds, 1993), pp. 34–5; D. M. Hadley, The Northern Danelaw: its Social Structure, c. 800–1100 (Leicester, 2000), pp. 119, 153–4.

12 Place Names of the East Riding of Yorkshire and York, ed. A. H. Smith, English Place Name Society, 14 (Cambridge, 1937), p. 248.

13 For berewicks, R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (Leicester, 1997), pp. 42–8.

14 The phenomenon was the subject of an astute and early analysis by Col. Philip Saltmarshe in the 1920s, ‘Ancient Land Tenures in Howdenshire’, Transactions of the East Riding Antiquarian Society, 26 (1926–8), 137–48.

15 Thomas of Caville is known to have had younger siblings, Roger and Adam, who also took the Caville name and appear in the bishop’s entourage as late as 1195: English Episcopal Acta 24, Durham 1153–1195, ed. M. G. Snape (Oxford, 2002), nos 42, 43, 128.

16 In 1804 the Caville estate was surveyed for Viscount Galway as measuring around 523 acres (woodland included): Nottingham Univ. MSC, Ga. 12150.

17 R. Van de Noort and others, ‘Conclusions’, in Wetland Heritage of the Vale of York, ed. R. van de Noort and S. Ellis (English Heritage, 1999), pp. 269–78, esp. pp. 270, 276–8.

18 The pioneering study by Philip Saltmarshe, ‘Ancient Drainage in Howdenshire’, Transactions of the East Riding Antiquarian Society, 23 (1920), 16–27, rehearses some of these arguments.

19 The National Archives (Public Record Office), JUST1/1045 m. 46d, a digest of an otherwise unknown episcopal grant.

20 TNA, CP25/1/261/1/21, 22; Feet of Fines for the Tenth Year of the Reign of Richard I (Pipe Roll Society, 1900), nos 288, 298.

21 West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, WYL 156.

22 Bodleian Library, ms Top. Yorks b 14, pp. 319 ff. Henry was acting for his brother, the Yorkshire antiquary Dr Nathaniel Johnston of Pontefract; for the manuscript hand and attribution, see P. E. Sheppard-Routh, ‘A Gift and its Giver: John Walker and the East Window of Holy Trinity Goodramgate, York’, YAJ, 58 (1986), 115–16. The cartulary is not listed in G. R. C. Davis, Medieval Cartularies of Great Britain and Ireland, rev. C. Breay, J. Harrison and D. M. Smith (London 2010).

23 P. Saltmarshe, ‘Some Howdenshire Villages’, Transactions of the East Riding Antiquarian Society, 15 (1908), 72. Saltmarshe believed that the notes were copied from seventeenth-century legal papers originally kept at Metham itself. His grandfather had obtained a copy of them in 1842 from a Metham descendant, a John Traherne of Coedriglan, Glamorgan, who must at the time have possessed the now lost papers.

24 The 1316 account for keepers in the minority of Thomas of Metham (II) still reflects this core estate, with rents drawn from customary tenants and free tenants at Metham with its manor house and dovecote, Howden and Skelton making up the bulk of the revenue of the manor of Metham: TNA, SC6/1085/11 m. 1.

25 TNA, CP25/1/261/1/19; Feet of Fines for the Tenth Year of the Reign of Richard I, no. 269.

26 Early Yorkshire Charters II, p. 324.

27 TNA, CP25/1/261/1/22; Feet of Fines for the Tenth Year of the Reign of Richard I, no. 298.

28 English Episcopal Acta 24, no. 52 (no. 53 has a similar clause, talking of the enterprises being funded out of his own pocket or through church taxes). G. V. Scammell was misled in the interpretation of the passage by reading novales as novalia, which in a deeply confused passage he interpreted as an episcopal due: Hugh du Puiset (Cambridge, 1956), p. 109.

29 H. M. Dunsford and S. J. Harris, ‘Colonization of the Wasteland in County Durham, 1100–1400’, Economic History Review, 56 (2003), 34–56, observes episcopal activity in reclaiming land in the liberty of Durham between 1143 and 1208 from episcopal grants of waste (pp. 48–9), but does not go beyond the general in its analysis of the twelfth-century process, though the paper makes the interesting observation that reclamation lapsed there in the first half of the thirteenth century, as it did in Howdenshire.