Where exactly was Tollington? The placename survives in various forms around Holloway but according to the fine people of @vchlondon.bsky.social, the settlement itself was probably around the lower end of Seven Sisters road.
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I think what I love most about this is not just that the site is a thousand years old, but the implication that the *crossroads* is a thousand years old. Those roads were there, in some form, all along.
And since the crossroads is there, we went for a look at it tonight, and sat on what might have been my great-35x-grandfather's half virgate, and had dinner.
The landlord, Ranulf brother of Ilger, had a lot of holdings, a whole hundred pound's worth, but only the one in the London area - the others mostly off in Essex and East Anglia, and some subtenantries around Huntingdon. https://pase.ac.uk/domesday/person/40479/
And here he is in the Prosopography of Domesday Book (thankyou JSTOR): Sheriff of Huntingdonshire, died c. 1100, presumably no direct heirs. And Ilger may have been a courtier - if he was a tutor, and did not hold any lands himself, but was prominent enough to be named, maybe a cleric?
"Ilgerio pedagogo ipsius Roberti filii comitis" witnessed a charter by Robert promising to protect the lands of Marmoutier Abbey, in 1066, "when William count of the Normans was about to cross the sea"
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