Enderby Early History

ENDERBY 840 YEARS AGO.
WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM NAMES
BY
M. PAUL DARE (Mem. Soc. Prom. Roman Studies, Member of Historical Association and of Leicestershire Archaeological Society).
DECEMBER 1925 (from the parish magazine)

"WHAT'S IN A NAME?"
" What's in a name ?" is a question that is often asked, more in jest than in earnest, and frequently in connection with some poor unfortunate who has been doomed since his first acquaintance with the font to bear a designation which is the butt of the unfeeling, sound and sensible though its owner may be But to us who spend most of our days with eyes strained far back into the mist-often, alas, a thick fog-which surrounds the early history of the world, names both of people and places have an immense significance, though to guage that significance one has frequently to run the range of ancient languages and races from India to Ireland.
To bring our opening question nearer home than either of these places, however, we may enquire what meaning there is behind the name of your own charming village of Enderby. As most of our readers know, the termination " by " to a name is generally a sign of occupation by the Danes, who first made their appearance in England when they raided the country in the year 789 A.D.

HOW TO DODGE CORRUPTIONS
The occurrence of this syllable "by" in the name of Enderby, however, must not make us jump to the conclusion either that the place was a big Danish settlement, or that the whole word is Danish, for names become corrupted to an extent scarcely believable in the course of centuries, so that we cannot be content with these modern forms, but must search back till we find the earliest written mention of them, which is in nine cases out often the least corrupt. To give a case in point: Thurcaston, 800 years ago, was called Turchiteleston, from which early spelling emerges the interesting fact that it was the settlement of The Thor-Kettle (Turchitel), a personal name derived from some original ritual official who tended the sacred cauldron of the god Thor. But who would have thought it, to look at "Thurcaston?"
Precisely the same is true of Enderby, only the case here is even more interesting. To find its earliest written, and therefore purest form, we have to go to that great compilation (to which I referred in my article on Lubbesthorpe), known as Domesday Book. This, dating from A.D. 1086, was an inventory of the lands, their value and owners, made for the purposes of taxation, and it is thus a most valuable work of reference when we are setting out to write the history of a place. Perhaps some readers may wonder why we do not go back still further to get at the earliest form of " Enderby," by consulting the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. But as the documents composing the Chronicle have been carefully edited, we know that there were only three Leicestershire names given in it, and Enderby is not of the number. You may be surprised to know that if you searched for your village in Domesday under its present name you would never find it. It is disguised under the forms " Andretesbie" and " Endrebie," and was a manor of Hugh de Grentesmesnil in the then Goscote division of the shire.

AN UNPLEASANT GODDESS
There is much more in the " Andretesbie " than appears to meet the eye, and it certainly is not Danish as regards the first part of the name, even though the last syllable is. It is an uncommon experience to find that a name is compounded of origins from two, or even more, of the races who have successively peopled England. One very notorious example in our own county is Billesdon Coplow. Each part of that, "bill," "don," "cop," and "low" mean the same thing in four languages, being the word for "a hill" in Keltic, Saxon, old Netherland, and Danish respectively !
Bearing the fact of such combinations in our mind, we are in a position to examine more closely " Andretesbie." From various sources, we know that in the mythology of the Kelts, the people whom the Romans found in possession of Leicestershire when they conquered it, there was a somewhat unpleasant Goddess who went by the name of Andraetes, or Andraste ; from what I have been able to make out, she appears to have been a kind of deity of the moon and of slaughter. Now it is a remarkable fact that in Charnwood Forest, there is a spot called Bawdon Castle to-day, to which a strong tradition points as the site of a lost settlement known as Andraetesberie, the Camp of Andraetes, not far from Beacon Hill, which we know to have been a settlement of Kelts in the Bronze Age.

FINDING SUPPORT FOR IT
If, then, we make a start by admitting that the first half of the name Enderby may be derived from a dim connection with this deity in the far past, we must look around the district to see if we can find any more material traces of the Kelts. Luckily, such an enquiry does not prove by any means fruitless, for on examining the records of pre-historic remain; found in the county, we discover that a very early form of the "celt," a bronze implement used by these Kelts, turned up some years ago at Croft. I had better explain that the word "celt" applied to these articles, is not in any way connected with the name of the Keltic race, but is derived from a Late Latin word meaning " a chisel."
Moreover, at Ayleston, a Bronze Age urn has been found, and the Roman Fosse Way, which runs by both Ayleston and Croft, is considered to be a pre-Roman roadway. At High Cross, too, where the Fosse joins the Watling Street, relics of the Bronze Age are not lacking, and in villages somewhat further afield from Enderby in this part of the county, indeed, they are relatively numerous. While boring for granite at Stoney Stanton, not so far away, another celt, this time of stone, came to light.

In conclusion, as regards the form "Endrebie" given also in Domesday Book, I am inclined to regard it as a corruption, even then current, of the ancient and somewhat clumsy " Andretesbie." These things happen easily enough in rapid speaking at the present day, and we have to remember that both forms of the name would sound strange to the ears of the foreign Norman scribes compiling the Domesday record. Probably in despair as to which was the correct one, they set down both (for the two references are fairly far apart in the inventory).
Next month, if the Editor still tolerates my antiquarian dissertations, I will tell you something about the information given in Domesday, as to the state of Enderby after the first excitement of the Norman Conquest had died down.

ENDERBY AND THE NORMANS.
HOW DUKE WILLIAM REWARDED HIS FOLLOWERS.
BY
M. PAUL DARE, Mem. Soc. Prom. Roman Studies, Member of Historical Association and of Leicestershire Archaeological Society.
MARCH 1926 (from the parish magazine)

You will remember how, in the December Magazine, I attempted to show the wealth of interest which lies hidden beneath the name of "Enderby," and how some of that interest can be the more easily brought to light by going back 840 years to find the earliest occurrence of the name, in the Domesday Book.
Out of a study of that great compilation, there emerge many other interesting facts, and not the least of them concerns the earliest recorded owner of your village. Here a few words are necessary on the subject of how Domesday came to be written. After Duke William of Normandy had completed the subjugation of England, and had become William the Conqueror, he most faithfully adhered to the promises of reward which lie had made at the ouiset of his expedition to all who would enter his service. A great number of the feudal lords of Normandy had brought their swords, men and wealth to his aid, and as a result, they reaped richly the lands of England once William was firmly established on the throne. Among these warriors was one Hugh de Grentemesnil, who became the first Norman governor of Leicester, and acquired some sixty holdings in Leicestershire. Then, twenty years after the Conquest, in 1086, a work known as the Domesday Survey was cormpiled, mainly for purposes of taxation. To us, it throws much light - and raises many problems - on the subject of the land measures in use in different parts of England ; so puzzling are these in the case of Leicestershire, that one frequently finds it quite impossible to work out the area of an estate in terms of acres from the Domesday measures (the difficulty will be easily realised when we reflect how local custom affects measuring standards and that, in spite of modern uniformity, there are at least 25 different corn standards and 12 bushels in use at the present time). So our chief interest in Domesday is in its bearing on the development in England of the form of land tenure characteristic of the Middle Ages, and as a safe starting point in tracing the descent of property. We have always to remember that, as the inventory was made with an eye to taxation, much land that was "waste," i.e., yielded no income, was not entered up, and thus we might conclude in some cases that the area of a manor was less than actually was the case.

NOT A CROSS-WORD PUZZLE
We can now turn to the entry concerning Enderby itself. I give this in full below, expanded and put into English from the original crabbed and contracted Latin. It looks very formidable in print, almost a rival, in fact to some of the cross-word puzzles we see, but on a little investigation, the apparent jargon will become intelligible :-

" ULF holds of Hugh (de Grentemesnil) in ENDREBIE 6 carucates of land less 3 bovates. There is land for 4 ploughs. In demesne there are 2 ploughs with 1serf; and 10 villeins with 1bordar have 2 ploughs. There (is) a mill of 5 shillings and 20 acres of meadow. Wood 6 furlongs in length and 4 furlongs in breadth. It was worth 20 shillings ; now 55 shillings."

The first fact which emerges from this is that Hugh de Grentemesnil was the overlord of Enderby in 1086 ; he was the tenant-in-chief, holding his property-direct from the King, and his sub-tenant in the lands here was a gentleman with the brief name of Ulf. At that time, surnames were not in use; a man would either be designated after his father, or from his place of origin, or by a nickname, with sometimes combination of these. (Thus if there had been another Ulf in a nearby village, the Enderby man would have been called Ulf of Enderby, to distinguish him.)
The land, we read, consisted of " six carucates less six bovates." A carucate as a rule may be considered as 120 acres, and there were eight bovates to a carucate, so that one bovate is 15 acres ; thus the extent of the lands in Ulf's tenancy would be x 120-3 x 15 = 675 acres.

Taking the phrases of the entry in turn, we next see that there was "land for four ploughs." It was generally held, as a standard for estimating, that one plough team of eight oxen would answer for about 120 acres' working. Thus the amount which could be cultivated on the Enderby estate would seem to be 480 acres. The word " carucate" (120 acres), by the way, is connected with the word "caruca," a plough. The next item shows us how these plough-teams (referred to in Domesday as "ploughs ") were distributed. Two of them worked the demesne lands, with one man of the lowest peasant class, the serfs, while the other two apparently worked on that part of the land sub-tenanted by ten men of the villein class, who each had a small holding, and one bordar, a man of a class intermediate between the serf and the villein. From this, it would be fair to assume that out of the 240 acres worked by the latter two plough-teams, each of the ten villeins held about 235-acres, and the bordar the remaining five, as these are average proportions found elsewhere.
Then there was the woodland. The size of this, six furlongs by four, works out at 440 acres of the modern measure, which has 220 yards to the furlong and 2420 square yards to the acre ; but in ancient measurement, if we take the most common standard of a furlong as being 40 perches each of 16 feet (they always worked in long measure at this period) we get an area of 451 1/2 acres for the woodland.
Finally, the question of values. The mill receipts (presumably for grinding) were five shillings per year. We must multiply enormously to get present-day values, probably thirty-fold at this period, which would mean that the amount was ,£7/10/0. In the twenty years which had elapsed between the Conquest and the completion of Domesday, the lands of Enderby had been improved ; they had been worth 20 shillings, and had risen to 55/- (about £90 of modern value). This improvement was the case in nearly every instance, and is a tribute to the superior organisation of agricultural labour introduced with the feudal system.
Enderby has just one more notice in Domesday ; in the description of Hugh de Grentemesnil's possessions in Leicester itself, we read that he had some seventy houses which are assigned in tenure to the various scattered manors he held all over the shire. Of these, seven pertained to " Andretesbie," the interesting form of your village name on which I discoursed in my last article.
It will probably come as a shock to those inhabitants of Enderby who like to think of themselves as having at least a dim connection with that eleventh-century baron from over the sea, when I say that, as he was one of the great men in the councils of the realm, he probably never saw the hills of your district; but that was Hugh de Grentemesnil's loss !