Village History Bardwell in Norman Times
| Bardwell in Norman Times |
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Domesday Book was completed in 1086, twenty years after William of Normandy took the throne of England, and it gives us our first real picture of Bardwell village. Lying in the administrative district of the Blackbourn Hundred, the village was part of the lands held directly from the king by the wealthy Abbey of St.Edmund in Bury, although an additional holding of thirty acres had been granted to Richard Fitzgilbert, who was friend and Chief Justice to King William. Bardwell, which at this time was not held as a manor, had a church, with a relatively small endowment of eight acres of free land, and a water mill, though the Abbey only owned two parts of this mill. Between them, eight free men held about 270 acres of land, and there were eleven acres of meadow, and woodland for eight pigs. There were four cottagers and two slaves also living there, no doubt working on the farms. Then there were another twenty lesser land-holders, with about 90 acres between them. Of the three other Bardwell people mentioned, it is interesting to note that one was a woman, farming ten acres, which she held from the Abbey. Bardwell was granted as a manor to Ralph de Berdewell in 1097, by Abbot Baldwin of Bury Abbey. The Abbey, in return for the land it held from the King, was required to provide him with an allotted quota of men for military service, and it was customary for the rich religious houses to grant land to their retained knights, rather than keep them domiciled in the Abbey precincts. It is probable that Ralph, who has a Norman name, was one of these knights, and in return for his holding, he owed the Abbey a knight's fee, forty days military service a year. Domesday Book also has entries for two manors in Wyken, in the Hundred of Bradmere, which by 1100 had been incorporated into Blackbourn. Before the Conquest, these manors were held by Saxons called Aki and Aethelstan, and afterwards they were awarded to the Normans Peter de Valognes and Robert Blund. Neither of these entries includes a church, but Robert Blund had the fourth part of a mill, so it is possible that this might relate to Bardwell Mill. The location of the Domesday Wyken is open to question; although Wyken Hall became one of the three manors of Bardwell, the amount of land described, the mill, and the names of the Norman lords involved, all suggest this may actually be the manor of Wykes, which confusingly is also sometimes known as Wyken. We can gain an impression of the population at this time, as Domesday Book records 82 inhabitants for Bardwell and Wyken together; most of these would have had families, suggesting a total population of about 400 people. Researched and kindly provided for this web site by Ruth Stokes |