CHAPTER Two

THE DOMESDAY MANOR OF KARI

The Norman Conqueror, parceling out the land of Devon among his followers, thereby created a number of honours or baronies, of which the fees were held, in feudal language, in capite, or directly of the crown. These honours were made up of the Saxon hundreds, which, in turn, included the ancient manors usually undisturbed as to name and boundary, but now held mediately, of the new tenant in chief, by the class which became a minor gentry. One of the most important of the Devon Honours was that granted to a Breton adventurer, Juhel, who assumed from his chief seat the place name "of Totnes." Translated de Totonais, this gave the name of Totton to the fee.1 When in 1086 the

1 Victoria County History, Devon, i, 558. The honour of Totton passed through the mailed fists of the feudal barons Nonant, Braose, Cantilupe, and Zouche, and was ultimately granted by Henry VII to a simple gentleman, Sir Richard Edgecumbe of Cothele, that fifteenth-century manor-house which still stands above the Tamar in Cornwall. This representative of the Devon family of Edgecumbe of Edgecumbe (near Crediton) was more fortunate in his loyalty to the Red Rose than his contemporary and neighbor from the other side of the Tamar, Sir William Cary. After romantic adventure in escaping the wrath of Richard III he risked

Domesday commissioners came to survey this honour of Totton they found included in it on the western limit of Listone (or Lifton) Hundred a manor of Kari,1 which had taken its name, no one knew when, from the stream on which it lay. This "pretty brook," as Risdon described it, flows from a fountain in the Broadbury Downs, which divide the valleys of Tamar and Torridge, and swells the Tamar on its way to

his life and fortunes with those of the Earl of Richmond and was present at Bosworth Field: his reward supports an Earl of Mount Edgecumbe to this day. See Collins Peerage, ed. Brydges, v, 306.

1 The spelling of the name. Beginning thus with Kari in Domesday, we find it in a twelfth-century document Cari and in the fourteenth still in the process of change from Kary to Cary. In the fifteenth century it is indifferently Care, Carre, Carie, Caree, and Carree. By the sixteenth century it has become quite uniformly Carye, and seemed destined to crystallize in that form; but towards the beginning of the seventeenth there is a distinct separation of practice which has persisted ever since. On the one hand the Devon and Bristol families, and the Falklands as well, then drop the final e and revert to Cary. The Hunsdons, on the other hand, then begin to transpose the final letters and spell Carey, which, with some inconsistency of practice, they maintained to the end of their history. This latter standard was apparently set by Sir George Carey, second Lord Hunsdon, after a preliminary essay as Careie. (See Holinshed, iv, 246.) His father represents the transition: thus in his marriage license, 1545, and when he first went to Parliament, 1554, he spelled Carye; later he fell into Carey, and so at last it appears on his tomb in Westminster Abbey. On the other hand, if we may rely on Lord Cork's transcription of his Memoirs (rather than Sir Walter Scott's subsequent edition), the youngest of Lord Hunsdon's sons, Sir Robert, who became Earl of Monmouth, spelled Cary, as did his sons (e.g., in the M.I. of Thomas Carey in Westminster Abbey, post, p. 390), while Sir Francis Knollys on his wife's tomb spelled the name of her father and of Lord Hunsdon Caree. (Dart, Westmonasterium, ii, 113, pl. 13.) No other recognizable branch of the Devon stock has at any time deliberately followed the Hunsdon precedent, but they have all had it imposed on them more or less. As the Hunsdons were the first Carys to take a conspicuous place in the world their spelling has not only

Plymouth Sound. It has always been called Cary or Carywater. The name is derived from the Celtic: perhaps from the root car, a pool, as represented by carth, a scouring stream, though more probably from caer, a fort, with reference to some early British earthwork on its banks.1

In describing this property the Domesday been followed by the families of northern and eastern origin which have the name (though no other relation to the Devon stock), but has entered largely into the literary tradition. Thus the editors of Clarendon, whose trumpet has given the name its widest fame, had their historical and political memory fixed on the Hunsdons of the preceding generation when they spelled the name of the second Lord Falkland Carey, although Falkland and Clarendon himself (Nichol Smith, Characters of the Seventeenth Century) spelled it Cary. Sir Walter Scott made the same mistake with respect to another of the Falkland family. Finally, the crowning inconsistency is that modern official usage has settled upon Carey as applied not only to the three streets in London called after the Devon family, but, on the ordnance map, to the very manor from which they derive their patronymic.

1 Whether the Celtic caer is in turn derived from Roman castra, like the Saxon chester (e.g., Colchester) and the Anglian caster (e.g., Tadcaster), or whether caer may not have affiliations with the Phoenician car, a town (e.g., Carthage, and the Etruscan city settled by the Phoenicians, Caere), the learned Isaac Taylor (Words and Places, 197 and 82) is willing to conjecture but not to assert. It is not impossible that the place name Cary in Devon relates back to Phoenician commercial relations with the Damnonians, but such a conjecture is painfully far-fetched; we are on safer ground in assuming that the name is purely Celtic, especially as that race left it inscribed on the map of Brittany as well as in several parts of the west of England, in Scotland, and in Ireland. Thus we find Castle Cary in Somerset, Castle Cary in Dumbartonshire, Scotland, the barony of Cary in Herefordshire, and the barony of Cary in County Antrim, Ireland, all independent manifestations of place names having their origin in a similar, but not the same, fact-the site of a fort of a Celtic people. Illustrations could be multiplied by citation of the numberless compounded variations of the root surviving in other forms in the same sense, from Cahir in Tipperary, through Wales, to Carlisle in Cumberland.

The modern Carys who have named their habitations in several parts of the world Carysbrook have their justification in the

book1 gives us an enduring picture of a typical Devon manor as it was twenty years after the Norman conquest:

JUHEL has a manor called Kari which Chenestan held tempore Regis Edwardi [1066] and it paid [Dane] geld for 11⁄2 virgates. This 6 ploughs can till. Waldin now holds it of Juhel. Thereof Waldin has 1⁄2 virgate and 1 plough in demesne and the villeins 1 virgate and 31⁄2 ploughs. There Waldin has 8 villeins, 6 cottars, 3 serfs, 8 beasts, 42 sheep, 20 goats, 20 acres of woodland, 40 acres of meadow and pasture 2 furlongs in length by 1 in breadth. Worth 40 shillings a year: when Juhel received it it was worth 50 shillings.

The land listed as virgate consisted of the curtilages lying immediately about the manor-house and village, used for gardens, etc.; that listed as plough was the arable land. A virgate was in area say 30 acres, and a plough 120; so that the total area of the manor of Kari at the Domesday survey, including woodland and pasture, was about 645 acres, not to speak of the adjacent waste land later to be taken under cultivation.

The Saxon system of manorial communistic agriculture, under which the lord and each villein had his proportionate share of unfenced ribbands of plough in the "common fields" (which can still be seen in practice in the Isle of Axholm

Devonshire stream Carywater rather than in the castle on the Isle of Wight. Taylor (p. 66) says that Carisbrook derived its name from the Saxon Gwiti-gara-byrig, "the burgh of the men of Wight," and has nothing to do with any caer or any brook.

1 Exon Domesday, fol. 3168. The translation is that of O. J. Reichel in the Victoria County History, Devon, i, 467.

on the River Trent in Lincolnshire, where John Wesley grew up), may have once obtained in Devon, but was probably abandoned there 'before the Conquest, under the influence of the damp climate. The characteristic Devon landscape, of small fields divided by earthworks faced with stone on which tall hedges flourish, is, then, as old as Domesday.1 The peasants, once freeholders, but now paying rent in agricultural labor on the lords demesne land, in customary tributes of produce and in fines on marriage, etc., here appear almost at the nadir of their long process of social depression, as their gradations, villeins, cottars, and serfs indicate; it has been well said that their very liberty "was trembling in the balance when King William came to England.”

Until the fifteenth century, when brick (or "cob") and stone came into general use for building purposes, the manor-house was doubtless much such a simple wooden structure as harbored the first Cary of Virginia in the seventeenth century. We can picture the surroundings:

On a manorial estate at the beginning of the thirteenth century only the church, the manor house and perhaps the mill rose out conspicuously. There were no detached isolated farm houses: but the remaining buildings of the village grouped together in a sort of street were the homes of the

1 See Curtler, History of English Agriculture, 1909, i; Prothero, English Farming Past and Present, 1912, i; and Hall, A Pilgrimage of British Farming, 1913, 356 and 101.