Baumber has had some interesting associations in the past. In Domesday Book it is reckoned among the possessions of the Norman Ivo Tayle-bois, nephew of William the Conqueror, Earl of Anjou, and chief of the Angevin auxiliaries of William’s army. Through his wife, the Lady Lucia, the Saxon heiress of Earl Alf-gar, who was given to him in marriage by the Conqueror, he acquired very large possessions in Lincolnshire and elsewhere. He was of a very tyrannical disposition; his chief residence being near Croyland Abbey. The Historian Ingulphus records of him, that he “tortured, harrassed, annoyed, and imprisoned their people”; that “he chased their cattle with his dogs, driving them into the marsh pools, where they were drowned; cut off their ears, or their tails; broke their backs, or their legs; and made them useless.” When the world was relieved of him by an early death, he was not mourned by his Saxon wife, or anyone else. Another historian, Peter de Blois, says, “Hardly had one month elapsed after his death, when the Lady Lucia married that illustrious young man, Roger de Romara, and entirely lost all recollection of Ivo Tayle-bois”; and he bursts into a volley of imprecations, to this effect:—“What does it now profit thee, O Ivo! ever most blood-thirsty, thus to have risen against the Lord? Unto the earth hast thou fallen, numbered with the dead; in a moment of time thou hast descended to hell, a successor of the old Adam, a frail potsherd, a heap of ashes, a hide of carrion, a vessel of putrefaction, the food of worms, the laughing-stock of those who survive, the refuse of the inhabitants of heaven, the avowed enemy of the servants of God; and now, as we have reason to suppose, an alien and exile from the congregations of saints, and for thine innumerable misdeeds, worthy to be sent into outer darkness.” {19} Such was one of the proprietors of Baumber, but he was not the only one; as Domesday mentions another, and larger, and more worthy, land owner in the person of Gilbert de Gaunt, who succeeded, “by right,” or, more strictly speaking, by confiscation, to all the property of the Saxon Tonna; while another Saxon, Ulf, had also an estate in the parish. This Gilbert de Gaunt founded Bardney Abbey; and, when he died, was buried there.