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had no intention of selling, but told his guest, “If tomorrow at dawn you give me fifty golden marks, I will turn the village over to you.” The bishop called on the king’s secretaries to witness the offer and asked if Dacus’s wife agreed to it. The wife gave her assent. Host and guests retired, but Aetheric mounted a horse and rode to Nassington, where he found the king playing chess “to relieve the tedium of the long night.” Cnut listened sympathetically and ordered a quantity of gold to be sent to Elton. At dawn Aetheric wakened Dacus and triumphantly presented him with the money. Dacus tried to renege, on the grounds that a contract damaging to an heir—his wife—was invalid. But the witnesses swore that the woman had ratified the pact, and when the dispute was submitted to the king, Cnut pronounced in favor of Aetheric. The wife made a last protest, that the village’s two mills were not included in the sale and merited another two golden marks, but her claim was rejected. Packing their furniture and belongings, the outwitted couple departed with their household and their animals, leaving “bare walls” to the new lord.

What Aetheric had initially intended to do with his acquisition we are not told, but he soon found a use for it. Obtaining the king’s permission, he left the retinue and visited Ramsey. There, to his dismay, he found the monastery in a turmoil. The current abbot had neglected the discipline of the monks and allowed them to fall into “error” (the chronicler gives no details). Aetheric entered the chapter “threatening and roaring and brandishing anathema unless they amended their ways.” The monks “threw themselves at his feet with tearful prayers.” In reward for their repentance, Aetheric assigned them the village of Elton “in perpetuity for their sustenance.”12 Thus Elton came to belong to Ramsey Abbey as one of its “conventual” or “home” manors, designed for the monks’ support.

Danish political power ceased in England in 1042, but the Danish presence survived in many details of language and custom. Danish suffixes—thorpe (hamlet), toft (homestead), holm (water meadow)—were common in the Elton neighborhood, including the names of Elton’s own meadows and field divisions. The local administrative area was Norman (Northman) Cross Hundred, after a cross that stood on Ermine Street in the center of the hundred (district), probably marking the site where the hundred court met in the open air. The hundred was a division of the shire or county, part of a system of administration that had developed in the ninth and tenth centuries. Theoretically containing 100 hides, tax units each of about 120 acres, the hundreds were made up of “vills”—villages or townships. The village represented a physical reality alongside the institutional reality of the manor, the lord’s estate. The two did not necessarily coincide, as they did in Elton. Throughout Huntingdonshire only 29 of 56 villages were identical with manors.13 The village remained a permanent political entity, a territorial unit of the kingdom, subject to the royal government for military and police purposes.

The Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian invasions had involved mass movements of peoples. The Norman Conquest of 1066 was more like the Roman conquest, the intrusion of a small power group. Where the Anglo-Saxons and Danes had displaced whole regional populations, the Normans at first scarcely disturbed the life of the peasants. Ultimately, however, they wrought an alteration in the social and political system that affected nearly everybody.

Both the feudal and manorial systems were present in some degree and in some regions of England at the time of the Conquest; what the Normans did amounted to performing a shotgun marriage of the two and imposing them on all parts of the country. William the Conqueror appointed himself landlord of England and deputized a number of his principal followers as tenants-in-chief to hold most of it for him, supplanting the Anglo-Saxon nobles who formed the pre-Conquest elite.

The great ecclesiastical estates, such as Ramsey Abbey, remained