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The English Nobility under Edward the Confessor (Oxford Historical Monographs)

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There's a tendency to look for contrast to the closely-held authority of the Norman rulers of England after 1066 by imagining the late Anglo-Saxon kingdom to have been a semi-democratic one of smallholders. But this is very far from the case. As Clarke shows, all the earls under Edward came from just four families: Godwine and his wife and sons (including Harold, defeated at Hastings), Leofric of Mercia and his wife and sons and grandsons (the latter becoming earls of Mercia and Northumbria, Siward of Northumbria, and Ralph of Hereford, a nephew of King Edward). Actually, I hadn't been aware the wives of the earls owned such extensive holdings in their own names, which may say something about the difference between Anglo-Saxon proto-feudalism and the Norman variety. The extent of the Godwine estate was nearly twice that of the other three families added together, and in fact was only slightly smaller than the king's estates. Obviously, when Harold II went off to fight the invading Duke William, it was, in part, as the largest single landowner in England. The following close analysis of the sub-earl class of landholders is drawn almost entirely from Domesday Book, the single source without the survival of which we would have no picture of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy at all. This volume being a reworking of Clarke's thesis at Oxford (which accounts for the slightly pompous style at times), about half the entire text consists of tables enumerating in great detail the lands assigned to the earls under King Edward and likewise the makeup of the "non-earlish" estates. A certain amount of lineage may be deduced from these. There is also a very good bibliography.