Ingelric, Count Eustace and the Foundation of St Martin-Le-Grand

Summary

This paper attempts to examine the interrelationship of the church of St Martin-le-Grand in London, its pre-Conquest founder, Ingelric, and Ingelric's post-Conquest successor, Count Eustace of Boulogne, and to see if any further light can thus be shed on the other activities of the three protagonists. It centres particularly on three documents:William I's confirmation, made to St Martin-le-Grand in 1067–8, Count Eustace's restitution of some of its estates, made at some point between 1075 and 1085, and Domesday Book. The focus of the discussion, as of the documents, is therefore on landed endowments: ‘I think the answer lies in the soil’, one of the phrases immortalised in Beyond our Ken, has (with or without the Mummerset accent) always seemed an excellent motto for historians. This particular soil yields answers which, in emphasising the count's power and St Martin's weakness, seem reasonably consistent and convincing, but since much of the argument remains speculative, and includes a major attack on Domesday's reliability, the debate is likely to continue. Each of the three parties is examined more or less in turn, beginning with St Martin’s.

In the later middle ages St Martin-le-Grand was famous, or notorious, on two particular counts, as the country's leading royal free chapel and as a special sanctuary, but it ended with a whimper: appropriated effectively in its entirety to Westminster Abbey in 150 before final suppression in 1542. The appropriation had the benefit of saving some of the archive, which still lies at Westminster and includes two of my three documents. I begin with a comparison of the St Martin's estates as recorded in these and in Domesday (see Appendix 1).

William the Conqueror's confirmation to St Martin's was granted at Christmas 1067 but formally issued at his queen's consecration at Whitsun 1068. It survives only in later copies, but despite some early doubts is now accepted as fully genuine. The text is categoric that Ingelric and his brother Eirard built St Martin's out of their own income (redditibus) and that the lands being confirmed had been acquired by Ingelric in the time of Edward the Confessor. KingWilliam himself then also added some land (in fact part of Moorfields) immediately outside Cripplegate in London's wall. Excluding the foundation site, this gives a total of twelve estates from Ingelric and one from the king. .