His birthplace is supposed to be in or near Bourne in Lincolnshire. The Domesday Book shows that a man named Hereward held lands in the parishes of Witham on the Hill and Barholm with Stow in the southwestern corner of Lincolnshire as a tenant of Peterborough Abbey; prior to his exile, Hereward had also held lands as a tenant of Croyland Abbey at Crowland, east of Market Deeping in the neighbouring fenland. In those times it was a boggy and marshy area. Since the holdings of abbeys could be widely dispersed across parishes, the precise location of his personal holdings is uncertain but was certainly somewhere in south Lincolnshire.