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In his book, "Lincolnshire and the Fens", Mr. M.W.
Barley gives a summary of the research which had been carried
out by 1951 into the peopling of Lincolnshire, which was for
many centuries the home of the West family. The area had its
very early settlements down to the time of the Roman invasion
but it did not assume any great importance until the coming of
the Angles, who have left as their memorials place-names such
as Healing, Hinting, Steeping and Spalding. It seems likely that
the chief points of entry for the English invaders were the Humber
and the Witham and that the first comers pushed inland, leaving
the peopling of the line of the Wolds and the Cliff by a regular
pattern of villages to a movement by younger sons among later
generations of English settlers. In the ninth century, these
communities experienced the danger and destruction which their
ancestors had brought to the Britons. The Saxon monasteries of
Bardney, Barrow and Partney disappeared without a trace. The
end of the warfare brought a division of the land among the Danish
settlers, who took over the English farms and villages, making
them their own. Not all of these Danes were warrior Vikings;
there was, indeed, a popular migration of farmers and their wives,
though the Danes kept a military organisation in being for purposes
of defence. At first, the Danes avoided the Fens, which contain
very few typical Danish place-names, but in course of time approached
them more closely.
F.M. Stenton, in his introduction to "The Lincolnshire
Domesday", points out that in the time of William I, Lincolnshire
was one of the richest counties in England. It had not been affected
by The Harrying of the North, and the preponderant number of
free peasants, registered by Domesday as sokemen, could transmit
their independence to their successors. Stenton quotes many characteristics
of the Domesday records in Lincolnshire denoting the overwhelmingly
Danish element, in particular, the constant use of the duodecimal
system of reckoning. His own conclusion is that Lincolnshire
was largely settled by Danes themselves among the remaining English
and was not a case of the establishment of a relatively small
number of Danish chiefs over an alien English subject race. Stenton
gives his conclusion in Vol.l9 of The Lincoln Record Society,
1924 (p.xx).
- The Lincolnshire sokemen as a class had inherited their independence
from their predecessors, the Danish invaders of the ninth century,
and the facts which have just been quoted are in their way evidence
of the thoroughness of the Danish settlement. The existence of
a large class of peasants who maintained their personal independence
with a very modest agricultural equipment proves that this settlement
was not merely the establishment of a few Danish chiefs over
a subject English population. It was also the settlement of a
Danish army among the people whom they had conquered.
Of the relative freedom and independence of the Lincolnshire
sokeman he is equally emphatic. There is still unresolved argument
over the significance of the Manor in the organisation of the
country generally, but Stenton is of opinion that in Lincolnshire
in 1036 it meant nothing more than the dwelling place of some
theyn or other important person and that it did not necessarily
imply seignorial rights. (p.xxiv. Ibid)
- For the Lord's rights over his sokeland were far from amounting
to ownership. In the twelfth century, and probably also in the
eleventh, he held a court for men who dwelt upon his sokeland,
did justice between them, in money or in kind. He may sometimes
have required them to assist in the repair of the house which
was the centre of the manor, and there is good evidence that
before the Conquest they had helped him to perform the military
service which was due from the estate.
Click here for full
scale view.
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In Sibsey, where we have the first evidence of ancestors of
the West family, at the time of Domesday there were 51 sokemen,
16 villains and 10 bordars. There also, Ivo Taillebois, nephew
of the Conqueror had a team of oxen and demesne land. Sibsey
already had a church and 120 acres of meadow, which was unusually
large for a fenland parish. For our purpose, the important point
is the preponderance of sokeman, for there was an essential difference
between sokemen and villains which Stenton notes. (p. xxvi).
- The sokeman must have enjoyed a much wider freedom of alienating
his tenement than can have belonged to the villain. Here again,
it is necessary to invoke later evidence to explain the terminology
of Domesday, but on this point the later evidence is conclusive.
Wherever there is adequate later material for the history of
a district where there were many sokemen in 1066, the successors
of these sokemen can be seen alienating their land by written
instrument .... These men cannot have acquired during the twelfth
century a power of alienation which did not belong to their predecessors
in 1086. The eleventh century was a time of general depression
for the peasantry, a period in which ancient liberties were often
lost. As a class, the Lincolnshire sokemen were fortunate in
retaining an exceptional measure of the liberty which they had
inherited from the time before the Conquest. The power of alienation
was perhaps the most notable sign of their inherited independence.
The Wests could, of course, just as easily have descended
from the villains of Sibsey as from the sokemen. The name is
quite undistinguished. There were Danish farms named Wickenby
(the farm of the Viking), Somerby (the farm of the summer warrior),
and Westlaby (the farm of the west traveller), but it can be
nothing more than conjecture that the Wests were descended from
a Danish "west-traveller". All that can be said is
that they first appear in a predominantly Danish area and that
three centuries later, Robert West of Sibsey paid 18d to the
Lay Subsidy of Edward III in 1382/3. It is almost certain that
the Wests held land in Sibsey in the intervening centuries.
The popular view of the fen dweller, expressed by Macaulay
as a "half savage population" and Samuel Smiles as
"an amphibious race largely employed in catching eels",
dies hard. "Fen dodgers" of both the near and distant
past have been described mainly by "upland" men or
by writers who have gathered their information from a safe distance.
They have invariably been described as a wild and lawless race,
confirmed by their isolation in their resistance to all kinds
of improvement. Research of various kinds has corrected this
view. H.C. Darby in "The Medieval Fenland" shows very
clearly the intricate and detailed organisation of life in the
fenland villages - their causeways, waterways, drainage, intercommoning
among the villages, rights of turf cutting, reed cutting, salt
production and fishery - all of which demanded and received constant
local regulation. Of course there were constant breaches of the
regulations and interminable squabbles, but these were not peculiar
to the fenland but to an age which lacked adequate machinery
of enforcement.
Yet Darby insists that all these things were really "extras"
and that the real work of the fenman was agriculture. A study
of extant documents, confirmed by aerial photographs, leads him
to the conclusion that in the course of the 250 years after Domesday,
the fenland had become the wealthiest part of Lincolnshire -
and that its wealth was based upon agriculture. He says (p.141)
- Comparison of the Domesday statistics with those of the early
fourteenth century brings out a remarkable change in the circumstances
of the Fenland. The data for Lincolnshire are particularly clear.
In 1086, the prosperity of the upland was many times that of
the Fenland. By 1332, the situation was reversed, and the greater
part of the Fenland seems to have been many times as prosperous
as that of the upland. The Fenland is seen to have gained relatively
very considerably indeed. This relative gain can hardly be explained
in terms of deterioration of the upland; it must therefore have
been due to actual improvement in the fen - an improvement that
is measured clearly enough in the contrast between these two
sets of data. One point must be mentioned - the greater part
of the Lincolnshire Fenland was silt; and the prominence of the
silt area of Norfolk Marshland is no less outstanding.
Speaking particularly of the Lay Subsidy of 1332 (p.137),
he concludes, "It is evident that the Fenland villages of
Lincolnshire ... were large, scattered and prosperous communities",
and in a footnote to p.141, he adds, "The Poll Tax Returns
of 1377 confirm the superiority of the Fenland over the upland
in Lincolnshire."
The Danish Invasions left large pockets of population In various
parts of Eastern England, not least in the fen areas of Lincolnshire.
There is, of course, no means of proving that a family with such
an undistinguished name as West is of any particular origin,
but as Wests who are sokemen are found among predominantly Danish
populations, it is fair to assume that the family is Danish in
origin.
There has been no inspection of early documents to establish
the continued presence of the West family in the fenland areas
of Lincolnshire during the three centuries that followed the
Norman Conquest, but there was a Robert West of Sibsey who paid
18d to the Lay Subsidy of Edward 111 in 1382/3, and Pishy Thompson
in The History and Antiquities of Boston, 1856, notes on page
557,
- The parish of Leake was taxed £21 to a subsidy of a
tenth, by Edward III (Subsidy Rolls) and again £20 - 14
- 4 1/2 to a subsidy of a fifteenth in the same year. It is evident
that these subsidies were levied upon different persons or different
species of property, or upon varying assessments, for the subsidy
of a
fifteenth amounts to nearly as much as that of a tenth. The fifteenth
was levied upon 164 persons. In the list are found the names
of Tonnhyrd (Tunnard), Brett, Bussy, Harrald, Thorald, King,
Meres Hart, Ermyn, Munk, Palmer, Graves, Wayte, West, Fendyk,
Cullyour, Spencer, Sherman, Hundegate, Grimescroft,
Chapman, Pynson, Godwin, Elred, Gerard, Clay, Clement, Hook,
Bandrick, Leek, Moss, Pedwardyn, Pyndar and Turner.
The family name also occurs quite regularly in the Fines and
Concords relating to the sale of land, but there has been no
inspection of these at the time of writing.
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