Ailid, the Saxon free woman who held the estate before the Norman settlement. She is associated with Æthelgyth, also rendered Aelgyth or Ailid, wife of Thurstan son of Wine, otherwise identified as Thurstan son of Lustwine.

Thurstan belonged to the older Anglo-Saxon landed world of East Anglia. His will places him among the substantial landholders of the mid-eleventh century, with estates in Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire