Oger the Breton

flourished circa 1086

The biggest landowner in the history of Bourne was undoubtedly Oger the Breton. He was a Frenchman, also known as Ogerus Briton, who came to Britain with the invading army of William the Conqueror in 1066 and was rewarded for his loyalty with holdings dispossessed from the English. When the Domesday Book was published in 1086 giving the results of the new king's great land survey, he had a total of 19 entries, all in the Bourne area and so the indications are that he was a very important Norman knight.

The Bretons were held in great esteem by the Norman and Plantaganet kings for their faithfulness and were consequently preferred to many offices of trust in the royal household. Oger was the founder of a family which appears to have survived for several generations in Lincolnshire. His lands were mainly in the Bourne area and in the immediate neighbourhood but his descendants extended the family possessions into Lindsey, one of the adjoining divisions of the county, and there are records of Simon, son or grandson of Oger the Breton, exchanging lands with William de Romare.

There is no documentary evidence that he actually lived in Bourne but owning so much land would make supervision almost obligatory and therefore he would have had a home in the locality, most likely a manor house and the most obvious situation for this would be alongside St Peter's Pool, now occupied by the Wellhead Gardens, a site popularly believed to be that of a castle although the solid stone foundations that have been discovered would also fit the proportions of a moated and fortified manor house which is a far more likely explanation.

The men who actually worked the land at that time were divided into three categories of peasant or land workers: 

The sokemen enjoyed great independence because they were not serfs bound oppressively to the soil and to their lord. They were freemen who held their own lands and paying customary rents and attending the manorial courts although they may also have performed certain labour services for the Lord of the Manor such as working for him at hay time and harvest.

The villeins did not have the same independence but were not of the low status of the unfree tenants of later centuries and often described by the same term. In 1086, the villein was a free man but whereas the sokemen were responsible for the taxes on their holdings, the villeins had these paid by their lord and were therefore more dependent on him.

The bordars were of inferior status to the two previous classes, cottagers with up to five acres of arable land as their holdings but owning no plough or beasts and working as hired labourers or followed some craft such as that of blacksmith or wheelwright.

The total number of sokemen, villeins and bordars living in Bourne at this time as documented by the Domesday survey was 53 and so that would be the approximate number of families. A priest is also mentioned and so if Oger had in fact been resident in Bourne itself, there would almost certainly have been a manor house containing him and his household. 

The Lord of the Manor immediately before the Norman Conquest was Earl Morcar but the coming of the Normans to England involved the transfer of much land from its previous owners to the new men, largely the compatriots of William, and within a few years of his conquest, Oger had became the principal landowner.

Land areas at that time were calculated in carucates and bovates, a carucate being eight times larger than a bovate and assessed as the amount of land that could be cultivated by an eight-ox plough. The actual area of a bovate differed throughout the country but in Lincolnshire was reckoned to be around 20 acres and this would make a carucate 160 aces. Oger had 2½ carucates in Bourne alone and his total holdings in the district were 27 bovates or 540 acres including land at Dyke, Cawthorpe, Haconby and Spanby. There were other Norman landowners in the area, notably Ivo Taillebois who held 58 manors in Lincolnshire and who had 100 entries in the Domesday Book. He owned three bovates in the Bourne area and these were let out to a tenant called Odo, a normal procedure, and a similar arrangement was practised by other landowners such as Alfred of Lincoln and Robert of Stafford who also had tenants in the Bourne area although the sum total of their lands was still far less than that owned by Oger.

There is evidence that Oger's interests extended to other parts of Lincolnshire and the neighbouring counties. The Domesday survey also mentions that he held land at Thrapston in Northamptonshire, then a settlement known as Trapestone together with another Norman knight called Odelin, and that he derived a profit of 40 shillings a year from land he owned at Morton and Hanthorpe in the manor of Edenham that was let to 14 sokemen and three bordars.

Oger's land was mainly arable but included a certain amount of meadow although his holdings also extended to water mills, a most important source of revenue for the lord of the manor in Norman times. He had three mills producing an income of thirty shillings a year, a comparatively large sum. He also had two parts of the profits from a fourth mill, producing five shillings a year. Other landowners in Bourne were also recorded as having "parts" of mills but it is impossible to know how many more there were beyond the three owned by Oger.

The fisheries were also a source of revenue at this time. Ivo Taillebois had three fisheries producing 8d. a year and Alfred of Lincoln had six producing an annual 16d. but the revenue from the six fisheries on Oger's land is not recorded in money but in terms of produce, in this case 2,500 eels a year. Fifteen other fisheries are also mentioned in Bourne at this time.

The amounts of revenue quoted here may seem small in these days of decimal currency but money values 1,000 years ago were totally different to ours and those quoted here were a considerable regular income. For an example of the valuations made in the Domesday survey, we can compare the entry of Earl Morcar's holding in Bourne that passed to Oger the Breton after the Norman Conquest:

"In Bourne, Earl Morcar had 2½ carucates of land assessed to the geld. There is land for 2½ teams. Oger the Breton has 2 teams there in demesne, and 4 sokemen on 4 bovates of this land, and 14 villeins and 4 bordars with 5 teams. There is half a church there and a priest, and 3 mills rendering 30 shillings, and 6 fisheries rendering 2½ thousand eels, and 19 acres of meadow. There is woodland for pannage [feeding and pasturing for swine], 1 league and 8 furlongs in length and 1 furlong in breadth. In the time of King Edward [the Confessor], it was worth 100 shillings; now it is worth 8 pounds."

It is therefore quite obvious that Oger the Breton was a wealthy and influential man during the Norman period of Bourne's history.

Go to:     Main Index     Villages Index