Sandridge Village History
by Reg Auckland

Norman Sandridge
© Reg Auckland all rights reserved, no copying without permission.

When William, Duke of Normandy, invaded England in 1066, Frederic, the Saxon Abbot of St. Albans journeyed to Berkhampstead Castle to plead with him to retain the old Saxon laws. But after a dispute with the King he later fled to Ely Cathedral where he died in 1077. On Frederic's death King William installed Paul of Caen as the first Norman Abbot of St. Albans (1077-1097).

The famous Domesday Book was compiled on the order of William who wished to know the extent of all the lands and buildings he had conquered or seized, their worth, their
owners and all relevant information. The survey was taken in 1086 and finished within twelve months. Each entry in the Domesday listings has a valuation which is generally considered to be the monetary tax for which the holding is worth. When it was acquired in 1066 by King William the local jury swore that the value of Sandridge manor was £12 and had been so in the time of Edward the Confessor. But twenty years after its acquisition the value had risen by 50% to £18 indicating that Sandridge might have been enjoying some sort of profitable agricultural growth.

The entry under SANDRIGE is :

The manor consisted of several small farms which were probably Waterend, Bridehall, Hill End, Robinstowe (near Ayot St. Lawrence) and possibly others.

A 'Hundred' was a judicial court area probably comprising of one hundred vills, ie, villages, townships, hamlets, settlements, one of which would be the administrative centre. Several Hundreds made a County or Shire. Albanestow was later much extended in area and renamed Cashio and remained so until quite recent times. It is not easy even for the learned scholar to define an accurate meaning to the majority of the nouns found in Domesday, but as a general guide they have been interpreted as under.

Car(uca) was a plough, together with the oxen who pulled it usually reckoned as four to eight. It was also known as a 'ploughland' or 'plough'. The word is of Danish origin and was adopted in the writing of the Book.
Villein was a villager who held between 30 and 100 acres.
Cot(arius) was the inhabitant of a cottage sometimes working up to four acres, but more often without land.
Servus was a slave or serf who was owned by another person. Probably reduced to this state by debt.
T.R.E. - Tempore regis Edwardi: In the time of King Edward, ie, before 1066).

The Hide was originally a measurement of land which is difficult at this remote day to determine an exact definition, but it is reckoned to be about from 40 acres in Wiltshire and much less in difficult arable country, to 120 acres in Hertfordshire. The variation in the size of hide depended on the goodness or badness of the soil, the terrain, its climate and other factors. A hide was composed of a huge open field of cultivatable land and landowners would have individual strips scattered all over the area and not juxtaposition. Hide exists in modern local names as Beech Hyde and Simonshyde.

However, it is generally accepted and fairly conclusive that by the time Domesday Book was written the number of hides for which a manor or settlement answered was purely an abstract word used only as a means of assessment for paying the King's tax. Later it eventually gained another meaning as commissioners began assessing counties in round numbers of hides as the most convenient method of a basis for tax; so much geld - or tax - for so many hides. A County was reckoned to be worth so many hides and its equivalent in tax. Down through the Hundreds and Wapentakes (modern District and Parish Councils) the assessment was divided and the money found. But the word hide always retained its physical meaning of a measurement. Thus Sandridge manor was assessed at 10 hides but this does not mean that the manor had an area of 1200 acres, more or less. The clue to the actual land worked probably lies in 'land for 13 ploughs' and which also gives an indication of the number of hides involved. A 'plough' is the amount of land a team of eight oxen could plough in a year. Like the original size of a hide, it is difficult to give the measurement of a plough which also relies on the nature of the soil, location, etc., for a definition. All the 'ploughs' in Sandridge represent all the possible arable land being cultivated, the remainder of the manor being forest, woods and clearings (such as the large natural clearing of Nomansland) some of which was given over to hunting by lease from the Abbot. As two 'ploughs' could manage the meadow land, this probably means that about 200 acres along both banks of the river Lea were utilized for growing grass, grazing and making hay. In addition there was sufficient pasture for domestic cattle, and not surprisingly, enough woodland for 300 pigs.

The Monastery at St. Albans is thought to have worked 360 acres in Sandridge, ie, three hides, with two teams of eight oxen and further land was possibly for another team. The three hides probably constituted the 'home' farm (that is, worked exclusively for the Abbey's benefit) which was mostly on the northern side of the Lea valley and the farm buildings and homesteads concentrated around the ford. The bulk of the land, say 1200 acres, or 10 hides, was leased or rented to twenty-six villagers who used ten teams of oxen between them, but their individual holdings probably varied considerably. Although they were growing produce and rearing stock for their own families and for some to be sold at local markets for profit, they were nevertheless bound to the Abbey for certain services, obligations and had to give it 10% of what they grew or raised. These farmers were working small acreages spread around the parish and living in single homestead which, in the course of time, became established farms. The two cottagers probably had no land and were working as employees.

The word villager and cottager do not have the same meaning today as they did in Norman times. A villein - or villager - was bound to the soil and sold with his family whenever the land changed hands. He worked three days a week on his lord's land plus extra days such as harvest time. No wages were paid but he was given about thirty strips of land on which he could work on his free days but had to supply his own oxen. In Anglo-Saxon times he was also given protection by the lord against marauding bands of Danes, Saxons and others. The cottager worked one day a week for the lord and had five strips in addition to a cottage garden. For the rest of the week he could hire himself out as a labourer. Wheat, barley, oats and root crops were grown. The meadows were for hay, the pasture land for cattle and other domestic animals, and the woodland given over to swine. All these facilities were commonly shared with the lord.

The Domesday Book is not a census but it is nevertheless possible to gauge the size of the population. If we say that twenty men worked on the 'home' farm in various capacities such as ploughmen, swineherd, shepherd, ditchers, etc., plus the thirty cited and each was head of a household of three, then we arrive at a figure of one hundred and fifty men, women and children living in the parish. Spread over the whole area of the parish (which in the first quarter of the 19th century was an area of just over five and a half thousand acres and a census population of 810) this figure does not seem unreasonable after 900 years. Most parish boundaries were established by the Church in the 6th and 7th centuries. Not until the close of the 19th century did Sandridge begin to become urbanized and eventually lose a large portion of its lands.

There is a piece of land mentioned in Domesday as belonging to the Manor of Sandridge although it is physically detached from the Hundred. It is St. Paul's Walden lying some three to four miles beyond the old western boundary of the parish, but in the time of William may have been joined to Sandridge by a narrow corridor. Many 19th century legal documents refer to Sandridge as Sandridge-with-Walmonds, which sounds like a corrupted pronunciation of Walden coming down the ages.

During the troubled times of Richard I and John which almost amounted to civil war, Abbot William of Trumpington complained that he managed to keep everything intact at St.

Albans Abbey, ie, furniture and fittings, lands, endowments, grants and the like, but only at the expense of ransom payment which he raised from tenants. There is reference to 14 marks paid by Robert de la Marc for Sandridge and 'to the same again 100 shillings over Walden', inferring that both places belonged to one man. In 1538 Abbot Richard of the Monastery granted to John Byng of Hounslow 'the messauge called Seint Peters graunge, of old time called Walmons Fee'. With the grant went the parsonage of St. Peters and Sandridge together with a part of the tithe within Sandridge, in Bridlehide. As Bridehall is the nearest farm to Walden it shows another possible connection between the two places.

The Monastery of St. Albans held all rights to grind corn and no private person was allowed to have even his own handmill. All produce had to be taken to the Abbey's mills where it was processed for a fee. There was much disaffection about this arrangement which led in about 1280 to a request to Queen Eleanor, widow of Henry III, from the wives of local farmers that their husbands be allowed to use their own mills. It was also the cause of much local agitation against the Abbey during the Peasant's Revolt of 1381.

The Abbey farm was undoubtedly at Waterend on the river Lea where the mill worth 10s was supposedly sited. One hundred and fifty years later a water-mill, together with a fishery, was leased to Robert Albyn of Hemel Hempstead and at the end of the 1300s was rebuilt. Mills were the property of the Abbey and no one else could own or operate one. Quite locally to the parish, the abbey owned three mills at St. Albans, two at (St. Paul's) Walden, two at Codicote and two at Redbourn. Of these, those at St. Albans and Redbourn were on rivers, the others probably being animal-powered. The mill at Waterend could have been a corn-mill and the presumed presence of a tithe-barn there to store the Church's one-tenth of the produce grown by everybody would support this. In the 18th century a 100' long Tithe Barn was built at Waterend which in 1939 was removed timber by timber to St. Albans where it was re-erected to become the Waterend Barn Restaurant. However, there is always the possibility that the mill was used for some purpose other than grinding.

Author: Reg Auckland

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