Æthelstan Mannessune

Æthelstan Mannessune (died ) 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.

Origins and reputation 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 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. He had two sons named Godric (died 1013) and Eadnoth (died 1016), and two daughters named Ælfwaru (died 1007) and Ælfwyn. It is possible that a woman named Ælfae was also his daughter, though this is uncertain. After Eadnoth founded a nunnery on his family lands at Chatteris, his younger sister Ælfwyn became abbess. Subsequently his widow agreed to pass her manor of Slepe (what would become St Ives) This led to a dispute as Æthelstan Mannessune's own kinsman, a priest named Osweard, claimed this inheritance, and even though Ramsey kept the land, the agreement they came to between 992 and 1006 involved handing two estates over to Osweard's son.