Monument record 727/33 - Nether End/Nether Manor?

{1} In 1086, in addition to the royal manor at Towcester, there was mention of the holding of Thomas the Sokeman, which consisted of half a hide and the fifth part of half a hide, for which he rendered five shillings a year. In the Northamptonshire Survey, Wybert atte church (ad ecclesiam) held six small virgates of the fee of St Fontanelle. It has been suggested that this must have been the holding of Thomas the Sokeman, because half a hide and one tenth of a hide equate exactly to six small virgates. It would seem likely, therefore, that William the Conqueror had granted this small manor to the abbey of Fontanelle, in addition to the advowson of Towcester church. Indeed, the name ‘ad ecclesiam’ may perhaps signify ‘belonging to the church’. The property was later exchanged with Bradenstoke Priory who held the fee until 1484 when it was sold to John Ashby and William Colyngton. In 1501 John Ashby, son and heir of John Ashby, sold the Nether Manor to Richard Empson ; by 1530 it was held by the Fermor family under whom it was merged in the main manor.
The manor maintained a court, to which its tenants owed suit, but no location is known for a manor house serving the Nether Manor. Presumably it lay in the Nether End of Towcester, the area of ribbon development along Watling Street to the south of the Silverstone Brook, where those manorial tenements which have been identified were located. Indeed, if the manor had been granted to Fontanelle Abbey by William I and if it were the holding recorded in Domesday, then occupation in the Nether End may have originated in the pre-Conquest period.
Bradenstoke priory owned the Nether Manor until 1530. An account roll for this Towcester property survives, and the customary tenants are named. Several names are familiar from the deeds discussed above, but the document gives no details which shed further light on craft activities in the Nether End.
(Ref 3.5.4)The first specific reference to ‘Netherende’ dates from 1381, but the messuages and tenements of that property transaction were already there in 1369, and perhaps in 1296.
In most medieval towns it was normal for tanners to work at a distance from the main residential areas. Two deeds suggest that the Nether End may have been a focus of tanning activities in the 15th and 16th centuries. The tanner Laurence Latymer was granted a messuage and garden here in 1477, and the same property may have been occupied by the tanner Richard Marryat in 1530. It was then described as abutting Watling Street on the west and extending to the close of William South. In 1477 Richard South and John South the younger, both of them coopers, had shared the messuage with Laurence Latymer. Further suggestions of tanning activities in the Nether End can be found in the naming of the tanner John Fage among the witnesses to property transactions in that part of Towcester in the 1330s, and an agreement of 1451 in which a son took over a messuage in the Nether End from his parents, undertaking in return to provide them with food and clothing, together with a cartful of wood and 100 barkers’ turves each year. (These references cannot be applied to individual mapped messsuage).
(Ref 3.5.4) Shearing may have been a craft which focused on the Nether End in the medieval period. The tenement of John the Clipper (retonsor) was here in 1303, adjoining the messuage once held by John ‘le Blextere’. This property, or one close by, was granted to Thomas Possel in 1335; later members of this family were certainly shearmen. The documents did not specify that the property extended to the river. In 1383 a widow passed over to her son a brewhouse and adjacent court. When the son granted the messuage to Roger Mylleward of Lillingstone in 1389, it was described as being in the Nether End next to Cuttle Bridge. Brewing was another activity which needed good supplies of water.

<1> Taylor J.; Foard G.; Laughton J.; Steadman S.; Ballinger J., 2002, Northamptonshire Extensive Urban Survey: Towcester, 3.1.1.2, 3.5.4 (checked) (Report). SNN103132.

Record last edited

Nov 22 2007 6:07PM