district, to which he came with riches which he used in order to purchase firstly from King Henry, and afterwards from King Stephen, large grants of land that had escheated to the Crown in the time of the last-named King, or that had accumulated in the hands of his predecessor; manors from which neither Henry nor Stephen could obtain benefit, partly because the wars had made the lands unproductive, by withdrawing from them their cultivators, and partly because the royal necessities were in each case urgent, and could not await the due return of the rent season.

Asolf never adopted a second or territorial surname, though his sons used his name, with the prefix of sonship, thus making him, as it were, the root of the title. But his descendants in the second generation, his grandsons, almost uniformly followed the newer practice, and at least from the commencement of the reign of Henry II., called themselves after the name of the place at which they settled, so that the link between his grandchildren and himself is seldom apparent, and is never easily traced, while that between the cousins themselves was almost wholly lost.

Asolf lived in the generation of which our records are most scanty. There was no Survey; the Assize Rolls have been lost, and Feet of Fines did not exist. Only from such documents as the monastic chartularies could we have obtained any information concerning him. But these also fail us to a large extent; for either he was no lover of the monkish life or system, and therefore made no grant to any monastery such as would have perpetuated his name, or, his grant being renewed and confirmed, and therefore superseded, by one of his sons, the original charter was not preserved; so that when the compilation of the various chartularies commenced in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, there were none from Asolf in any of the monastical muniment-chests.

Nothing, therefore, is known of him from this source, though his shadow dominates very much indeed, in an indefinite way; and when once attention has been called to his existence, in a way which is most tantalizing. He might indeed have assisted, as did so many of his contemporaries, to build up the monastic possessions, and perhaps he did; but if so, the succeeding generations renewed the different charters as if they were their own original gifts, and the primary record has in each case perished.

Asolf became a large proprietor of what was not necessarily, and at first, very productive, but which if well and wisely administered,

ASOLF OR ESSOLF

under patient and prudent management, was capable of returning an ultimately enormous revenue. Asolf evidently administered the properties wisely, and he did this in such entire abnegation of his Own name and fame, that these have been so completely lost to posterity that the learned Joseph Hunter himself was compelled to confess that "he knew not how the existence of Asolf was to be proved" (South Yorkshire, ii., 263). This obliteration and effacement of so remarkable a name was perhaps only possible by reason of the method of distribution of his estates which he adopted, and which I will shortly explain.

In the first place, it is probable that he married when but a young man, when the reign of Henry I. had not more than reached its middle term. He was in due course blessed with a large family of male children; and though I trace no daughters, either as receiving dower, or as being sent to a convent with a dowry as a suitable contribution to its funds, or indeed in any other way, they might have been equally numerous. Finding when yet not of middle age, this family of many sons growing up around him, and being either unwilling that they should hanker after his estates before he was ripe to leave them, or being swayed by a more statesmanlike policy, he thought it best that, in homely phrase, the eggs should not be all in one basket, in either case, he determined not to make himself too conspicuous a mark, and liberally apportioned his substance among his sons, of age or minor,-" divided his living among them," in the scriptural phrase,--so that in the not unlikely event of a reverse of fortune, on the part of the grantor, or in the case of any other public trouble, the interests in his property might be diverse and various, and in any contingency the whole of it could hardly be confiscated at a single blow.

This his policy was so much of a success that all the district which had been possessed by Asolf, and which was by him, as I have supposed, divided among his sons, or designated by him to become the future property of each, continued in the hands of his descendants : each held his own proper share, through all the civil troubles of the twelfth century, with no dispossession, and with only the usual occasional fine. Thus, as all the Saxon Kings looked up to Woden as their common progenitor, so did a very large and widespread group of the secondary tenants of Barkston-Ash, Osgoldcross, Staincross, Skyrack, Agbrigg, and Morley, turn their eyes to the now almost forgotten Asolf.

This partition, or designation of the intended descent of his lands, was effected quickly, some time before 1140, in which year the process had probably been completed, and the interests in the immense estate made diverse; and unless part of the manor of Liversedge, called till very recently Liversedge Asolf, derives the affix from him, the name of this great tenant was not, so far as I can learn, attached to any of his land. Indeed, his personality has become almost entirely obscured.

If it is wished to trace the possessions of a landowner of the twelfth century, one resort is to apply to the monastic chartularies, and to search in them for his grants to the monasteries established on his manors, or in their neighbourhood. But in the case of Asolf, this resort fails us. In his time the fashion of founding or making grants to monasteries had hardly extended to the secondary tenants, the earliest instance of such a founder being that of Adam fitz Swain fitz Ailric at Monk Bretton; and when smaller grants are searched for, it is found that either Asolf held himself entirely aloof from the great monastic movement,-in his days it would have been the later stages of the Augustinian, or the earlier of the Cistercian,—or those donations which he made being subsequently renewed by one of his sons, the original deed of the original grantor was superseded and withdrawn. from the muniment-shelves as useless. Curious instances of this practice spring up everywhere, we shall meet with many in the course of this paper, and I shall shortly instance one of Peter fitz Asolf to the monks of Rievaux, of which no mention is extant anywhere except in a papal confirmation. But to a very large extent this was the lot which befel the less eminent grantors of benefactions to the monks in the two generations immediately preceding the compilation of the various chartularies. These commenced in the early days of Henry III., apparently as an effect of the last Lateran Council, in 1215, and among them that at Pontefract was one of the earliest. For the most part, as I have said, except in very occasional instances, these chartularies recognized only the charters which happened to be in full force, ignoring, except for special reasons and in the cases of royal and seigniorial grants, those of the dead which had been renewed and superseded by the grants of still living men. And not only are their own grants thus unrecorded, but their names, except in one instance, that of Saxe (378 P., S.Y. ii. 221), are not to be found attached, even as witnesses, to such deeds. There is indeed evidence, especially in the Rievaux Chartulary, that the possessions in Flockton and Shitlington of Adam grandson of Asolf, and of Matthew son of Saxe

adjoined, on which account they mutually witnessed each others' deeds (93 R, 101 R.). But there are very many of a later generation which being tested by Jordan fitz Asolf, John fitz Asolf, Elias fitz Asolf, &c., preserve the shadow of the great name, but the shadow only.

Asolf was dead in 1165; and having apparently divested himself of all, or almost all, he left no great property to be inherited or scrambled for. His eldest son Peter, who died within a few months, seems to have been with him at Fairburn, which Adam the eldest son of Peter inherited. His younger sons were all thriving, each in his own way, and in his own sphere, some of them like Adam, adding to their possessions by a judicious marriage. Asolf himself had lived an active, honoured life in this part of the country for forty years, a full generation; but as I have said, he was so careful for his posterity, so anxious to preserve his property for his children, and so thoughtless for himself and for his own reputation, that he left hardly a mark by which he can now be recognized, and has in fact been almost forgotten. He did not appeal to the reputation of a father; he did not assume a second name; nor did he adopt one from any locality, or attach to his simple cognomen a distinguishing qualification, whether of mind or body; he prided himself upon being simply Asolf. But he founded many families, and left an example of separating the interests which had centred in him that was imitated by various members of his family with equal success. No successor, however, could do this to so great an extent, for none of his posterity had so large a family, and none so large a possession; while a subsequent fashion arising of taking a family name from a locality rather than from a progenitor, his descendants did not become known as the Asolfs, or, except on rare occasions and for hardly more than one generation, as sons of Asolf; but rather by the name of one of the manors which they themselves owned, ignoring altogether that of the shrewd founder of their race. They were Birkins, or Tongs, or Thornhills, not Asolfs; and there was little evidence to show how closely such large families were allied.

At Asolf's death those who managed the royal revenues seem to have become suddenly aware that the dues on a large portion of his estates had eluded them; and they inflicted a series of fines for what they considered an attempted fraud,-" concealing a plea," as the special offence was called: among others in Morley wapentake, Adam son of Peter son of Essulf, 40s.; John de Huuerum, one mark; Richard de Tweng (or Tong), one mark; William de Preston, one mark; Helias son of Assulf, one mark; Hugh son of Essulf, one mark. And

intermixed with these names are a few others, some of whom were probably concerned in the offence as husbands of the daughters of Asolf or Peter: such as William de Bollings, one mark; William de Wirchelai, one mark; Ralph de Insula, two marks; Richard de Yeland [Eland], 40s.; Richard Grammaticus, 40s.; Roger de Tilli, two marks; Robert, son of Hugh, four marks; Ralph de Niuhale, one mark; Ligulf de Heckmonwic, one mark.

I have said that Asolf had a large family of sons, and I assign to him at least eight. But to these sons I can only attribute the following imperfect succession of seniority, which I gather from the order in which some of the names occur when two or more are witnesses to, or are named in the same document :-PETER, JORDAN, JOHN, THOMAS, WILLIAM, [ELIAS, HUGH, RICHARD]. I have found no instance in charter evidence of this order not having been followed, though such a false precedence occasionally occurs on the Pipe Rolls.

(1) Peter fitz Asolf was in early life, in some way, a dependent of William Paganel, the founder of Drax, and the son of Ralph, who refounded Holy Trinity, York. Peter first appears as head and chief of the witnesses to the foundation charter by William Paganel of the monastery of Drax towards the close of the reign of Henry I., about 1131, or a little later, and we might ascertain more of him in all probability if the chartulary of Drax were accessible. His name is followed in the charter to which I have referred by those of his two elder sons, Adam and Thomas, who at the date of this document must have been little more than infants, for Adam lived seventy-six years afterwards. This perhaps points to an approximate date for the marriage of Asolf as being between 1120 and 1125, probably soon after 1122, when the great changes I have indicated were passing over the tenantry of the land, consequent on the final dispossession of Robert de Lascy. As Peter, again "filius Essolvi", he also witnessed with Matilda, mother of Henry de Lascy, a gift to Selby Abbey (289 S.) by John de Lascelles of lands at Brayton; and I have found two (only two) instances of his having been in actual possession of property, or making grants to a monastery. The first instance of Peter's possession of property in his own right is that he had been enfeoffed by his old patron, William Paganel, of two carucates in Keighley, which with a carucate in Horsforth, Peter's son Adam gave to the priory of Haverholm as a conventual provision for his daughter Juliana and his niece Maud. The second is that of a grant to the monastery of Rievaux; and although, as is so frequently the case with