PASE: Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England

Domesday

• Home
• About
• Database
• Domesday
• Reference
• Contact
• Help

Summary

Aki 8 was a minor thegn in the wooded countryside of north Worcestershire and south Staffordshire. His two manors were assessed at 6 hides and worth £4.

Distribution map of property and lordships associated with this name in DB

Profile

The two holdings near the Worcestershire-Staffordshire border attributed to the name Aki are probably too isolated for identification with any other Aki to be likely. An outside possibility is that Rushock, a substantial manor of 5 hides, belonged to the housecarl Aki the Dane (Aki 4). The grounds for the identification would be, first, that Rushock fell into the hands after 1066 of Urse d’Abitot, sheriff of Worcestershire, and a good number of Aki the Dane’s manors passed to other sheriffs, evidently following some principle of royal policy, and secondly that Rushock was not much more than 10 miles from Worcester, where Aki the Dane’s father Toki 7 can be shown to have owned property. But Toki probably left all his Worcestershire lands to the cathedral, leaving Aki with no manors within 60 miles of Rushock. And Urse got his hands on so many Worcestershire manors by one means or another that we cannot presume an orderly succession to a designated sheriff. Romsley, 10 miles north-west of the larger manor of Rushock, was mistakenly recorded under Warwickshire rather than its true Domesday county of Staffordshire.