Æthelstan Mannessune

Æthelstan Mannessune
Born	unknown
Died	c. 986
Residence	Isle of Ely (probable)
Known for	Patronage of Ramsey Abbey; father of Bishop Eadnoth
Spouse(s)	unknown (but a relative of Oswald, one time Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of York)
Children	Godric, Eadnoth, Ælfwaru and Ælfwyn; Ælfwae (uncertain)
Parent(s)	Manne the Priest

Æthelstan Mannessune (died c. 986) was a landowner and monastic patron in late 10th-century Anglo-Saxon England, coming from a family of secularised priests. Remembered by Ely Abbey as an enemy, he and his family endowed Ramsey Abbey and allegedly provided it with a piece of the True Cross. His children became important in their own right, one of them, Eadnoth, becoming Abbot of Ramsey and Bishop of Dorchester, and another becoming abbess of Chatteris nunnery.

Æthelstan came from a family of secularised priests in the Fens of the eastern Danelaw. He seems to have come from the Isle of Ely. His father, Manne, had owned land at Chatteris and Wold, both on Ely, while the Libellus Æthelwoldi Episcopi ("Little Book of Bishop Æthelwold") associated a priest named Manne with land at Haddenham, a place only a few miles distant. Æthelstan's recorded lands lay in Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Bedfordshire, with "outlying" [Hart] estates in Norfolk and Lincolnshire.

Æthelstan's reputation in church literature was varied. According to the Liber Eliensis he gave protection to a priest named Æthelstan in return for a payment of two marks after that priest had seized land from the monastery of Ely. According to the Liber Benefactorum Ecclesiae Ramesiensis, he donated a piece of the True Cross to Ramsey Abbey, though the Liber provides no information as to how Æthelstan acquired such a valuable relic.

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Wikipedia