Earnwine the Priest and Earnwig the Sheriff: King’s Thegns in Nottinghamshire and Beyond in the Eleventh Century

Domesday Book is a valuable source for studying royal clergy in England between 1066 and 1086. This paper focuses on two of these clerics, both with landholdings in Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, to explore what these can show us about the services they carried out for Edward the Confessor and William I. The first, Earnwine the priest, held strings of landholdings, mostly small and sited at intervals along major routeways across the dioceses of Lincoln and York, while the activities of the second, Earnwig the sheriff, were more closely focused on the north-east Midlands. Earnwine probably acted as a confidential royal messenger along major routes, while Earnwig, the post-Conquest sheriff of Nottingham and Derby, operated within a more narrowly defined area. Both assisted kings to communicate with peripheries.