The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (10 page)

Figure 6: Bradfield Woods, Suffolk
. These woods, which belonged to Bury St Edmunds Abbey in the medieval period, have been continuously managed as ‘coppice-with-standards’ since the thirteenth century. The stumps (‘stools’) in the foreground have been coppiced to produce the ‘poles’ which either lie on the ground or are propped against remaining standard trees.

The other woodland type was wood-pasture: woodland which certainly yielded fuel and building materials but also served as pasturage for livestock, in other words ‘pasture with trees’. Because animals grazed the young shoots, woodland regeneration was sparser and more intermittent than it was in coppiced woodland, but pollarding was often practised to combat this and could lead to the woodland cover persisting for centuries even if no new trees grew. In many rural communities, wood-pasture was, in essence, a particular form of common pasture, to which the peasant farmers had communal rights of access: Ebernoe Common and The Mens (both in Sussex) and Naphill Common (Buckinghamshire) are three survivors from
their medieval communities’ mixed farming regimes, and may be added to the examples of extant common pasture mentioned above.
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Wood-pasture was also found in parks, forests and chases, whether or not there was any common access to this resource. Essentially, forests were the king’s hunting reserves (especially for the hunting of deer) and they extended far beyond his demesne holdings. Settlements practising mixed arable and pastoral farming were certainly located in forests, their inhabitants living with restrictive laws, accompanying payments and the threat of damage from hunting parties passing through. Chases were similar private hunting reserves held by lords other than the king, again with a good deal of farming going on within their bounds, the Bishop of Lichfield’s Cannock Chase (Staffordshire), where he received hunting rights within the royal forest in the late thirteenth century, being a case in point. Practice was not, however, fully consistent, for the term ‘forest’ was and is sometimes used in preference to ‘chase’ for the hunting reserves of a subject, especially one of the royal family such as a Duke of Cornwall or Lancaster. Examples of surviving wood-pasture in this context include Birklands and Bilhaugh within Sherwood Forest, where there are late-medieval pollarded oaks still to be seen; at its maximum Sherwood covered a fifth of Nottinghamshire and seems to have been the ‘shire wood’ with
pasture available to everyone with common rights in the county. Parks were generally more wooded than forests or chases in proportion to their total area, certainly by the time of maximum population pressure on resources by the close of the thirteenth century, but also had a crucial role to play as pastures for the herds normally kept within them awaiting slaughter for sport and for meat.
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The word ‘forest’ derives ultimately from the Latin
foris
, meaning ‘outside’. They were areas set aside outside normal jurisdiction, and in many ways belong in a book on the law rather than the landscape. As Rackham has put it, many of the 142 forests and chases he has identified (82 of them royal forests) extending at their maximum under Henry II to a third of the landed area of England, covered ‘ordinary farmland’ and ‘ordinary countryside’; despite the importance of some forests as wood-pasture, others had very few trees, being primarily moorland (like Dartmoor, Exmoor and those in the Peak District and Lake District), heathland (like Wolmer, Hampshire) or fenland (like Kesteven, Lincolnshire).
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The traditional belief that William the Conqueror introduced forests in this legal sense to England is now under challenge; hunting itself, for wild boar and hares as well as for deer, seems to have been popular in pre-Conquest England and there were certainly areas where entitlement to do so was restricted to the privileged few. But if the Normans were building on late-Saxon precedents they certainly took them to a new level in terms of rigour and extent: as the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
explained in the Conqueror’s obituary, ‘he loved the stags as dearly as though he had been their father’ and ‘set up a vast deer preserve and imposed laws concerning it’.
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Domesday Book duly mentions forests in over a dozen shires, though often in passing because they did not fit easily into the schedule of the inquiry. Subsequent kings extended the designated area (by the process of ‘afforestation’) without changing the landscape other than indirectly through the introduction of deer, but such was the inconvenience which resulted, to the detriment of lords’ incomes as well as peasants’ livelihoods, that they bred seething resentment. Henry II’s Assize of the Forest of 1184, for example, placed restrictions on the clearance of woodland and the pasturing of cattle within the king’s forests, even where these were not part of the royal demesne, and made provision for officers to patrol and protect his forest rights in a way which must have been seen as highly intrusive by those who lived there.
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In practice, even Henry II was prepared to see some of his forests cleared of woodland for an appropriate payment – his annual exchequer accounts, the pipe rolls, are full of payments for ‘assarts’ to create clearances for cultivation within the royal forests – and his successors went further, regarding the sale of charters of ‘disafforestation’ as a means to bring in much-needed income. Thus, Richard I received 200 marks (£133.33) for the partial disafforestation of Surrey and £100 for the total disafforestation
of Ainsty wapentake, Yorkshire, thereby lifting the legal restrictions imposed on these forests and facilitating the subsequent removal of trees. King John extended the process to Lancashire, Yorkshire, Devon, Cornwall, Essex, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Lincolnshire. But popular antagonism towards the forests and their officials remained so strong that concessions had to be made both in
Magna Carta
in 1215 and in separate Charters of the Forest of 1217 and 1225 (promising for example to curb oppressive conduct), a clear signal that the tide had turned. The extent of royal forest early in Edward III’s reign was only about two-thirds of what it had been in Henry III’s and in the late middle ages the application of ‘forest law’ withered away
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– only to be partially revived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because of the potential for raising revenue. Indeed, tracts of designated forest survived well into the nineteenth century, when a drive to extinguish common rights and allocate portions to the crown as timber plantations led on the one hand to a series of enclosure measures and on the other to campaigns to save them, largely for recreational purposes. The New Forest and Epping Forest Acts of 1877–78 were early examples of conservationist legislation.
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While medieval forests and chases were basically shared land – farmed by lords and peasants like the rest of the country but under the obligation of respecting the privileged hunting rights which pertained within them – parks were normally areas over which a lord had exclusive control, though even here some common entitlements might persist and grazing rights could be leased for an appropriate payment. The royal park at Woodstock, for example, supplied not only building timbers for the king and those he patronized (like the nuns of Godstow, who were given 15 oaks in 1275) but also fuel for the tenants of neighbouring manors who were allowed to collect it.
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Domesday Book recorded 37 parks, all in the hands of the king or great ecclesiastical and lay barons, a figure which was certainly too low, partly because there are occasional examples of known parks which were left out, partly because the northern Circuit VI chose to omit reference to them altogether, and partly because most of the features termed ‘hays’ – numbering well over a hundred – were evidently deer enclosures and thus, in effect, parks by another name.
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Thereafter, parks proliferated, to an estimated total of over 3,000 by the end of the thirteenth century, descending the social scale to embrace some of the more modest religious houses and lords best regarded as ‘country gentry’ although remaining disproportionately in the hands of the élite.
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Although various fish, fowl and other animals were kept within them, deer, especially fallow deer, were prized above all. In one sense, parks offered ‘subsistence farming’ at an élite level, for venison hardly ever found itself onto the open market, unless it was placed there by poachers. Lords valued the deer from their parks as meat for their own table, as means (dead or alive) to impress their guests and as a vehicle for patronage through gifts of stock to others.
But they did not always pay their way in strictly economic terms: it was the hunting they offered, as sport and as spectacle, which was their principal
raison d’être
.
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Many of these parks have left their mark in the landscape today, not least some huge royal parks, such as Henry I’s Woodstock, which later grew to over 11 kilometres in circumference, and Windsor Great Park, which under Henry III occupied just under 150 hectares, with a circumference of about 8 kilometres, but then doubled in size during the fourteenth century. A more typical size for a medieval park, especially one in private hands, was between 40 and 120 hectares, although the Bishop of Ely’s Hatfield Great Park (Hertfordshire) first appears in 1251 as at least 400 hectares in extent. Other survivals widely used today include Sutton Park, immediately to the west of Sutton Coldfield (Birmingham), first recorded in 1315 as belonging to the Earl of Warwick ‘enclosed and fenced, with a fishpond and outwoods’ but a corporation park since the sixteenth century; the formerly monastic Kirkstall Abbey Park in Leeds; and Ashbourne Memorial Gardens and Park (Derbyshire), within which the medieval manor house stood at the eastern end of the town.
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Park boundaries often continue, since with deer capable of leaping up to six metres in length and three metres in height, some massive banks with internal or double ditches were constructed. Examples range from the spectacular, like the 3.7 metre-high southern boundary bank at King’s Somborne (Hampshire), a park which at one time belonged to John of Gaunt, to the more subtle, such as part of the eastern boundary of the park associated with the Bigod family’s Framlingham Castle (Suffolk), where the bank now stands under one metre high
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– although it would originally have supported an additional pale, a structure for which oak was the favoured timber. Where stone was readily available, walls would typically be built on top of the banks, as may still be seen in the Yorkshire examples of the Home Park of Fountains Abbey (the ‘Monk Wall’) and Capplebank Park, West Witton, where the boundary bank and wall are sited along the top of a steep slope within the southern confines of the park, so denying the animals a run-up to leap out. Even if little else survives, park boundaries such as these may still be discernible in the landscape from large enclosures surrounding a group of fields or from the diversion of routeways – like the loop in the old road from Whitchurch to Telford as it passes through the village of Hodnet (Shropshire) and so skirts Hodnet Hall Gardens, successor to the park around which the diversion was made in 1256.
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The question still remains, however, of what exactly went on in a medieval park. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century park plans by the cartographer John Norden and others indicate the importance of wood-pasture but also show gardens nearest the principal residence, pools (attracting birds and fish), areas of open ground (the launds or lawns), coppiced woodland, and
sometimes arable or common land.
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There might also be some industrial activity. Iron mining and smelting were notable features of Yorkshire parks in the fourteenth century, such as Rothwell Park and the Old and New Parks at Wakefield, with lords being prepared to lease rights to tenants to undertake the work, although it is fair to add that this did have its drawbacks: at Rothwell in 1322 the parker reported that herons no longer nested there because of the forges, while in 1331 four tenants in New Wakefield Park were fined for failing to backfill 19 iron-mining shafts. Parks could also serve as quarries for stone, a well-preserved example being that from which Bolton Castle was built between 1378 and about 1396.
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Above all, however, parks should be seen as places for leisure and pleasure, especially that to be derived from hunting deer. Forests and chases, where the terrain might be unfamiliar, the quarry was wild and there was a sporting chance for the beasts to escape, probably offered a greater thrill, but declining numbers, at least of red and roe deer, made a successful outcome increasingly uncertain by the end of the thirteenth century. Despite some limitations on space, hunting in parks offered acceptable sport for the lord’s family and his guests, with an almost guaranteed end-product. ‘Coursing’, with small numbers of deer or hares – sometimes single beasts – being chased by hounds along a prepared course, was ideal as spectator sport: Samson, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds from 1182, liked to ‘watch the hounds run’ when entertaining guests in his parks and a sinuous route marked by earthworks and field-boundaries in a former park at Ravensdale (Derbyshire) has been identified as just such a course. Alternatively, deer could be driven towards stationary archers waiting to take aim, or hunting could be undertaken on foot. It has been suggested that, along with falconry, park hunting was regarded as suitable sport for women, whether or not accompanied by male suitors;
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parks must also have been the places where a lord’s children learned to ride and shoot.

Beyond this, some lords undoubtedly looked on their parks as a private retreat. This was doubtless part of Henry I’s motivation at Woodstock, for which expenditure on the ‘king’s buildings’ is recorded in the 1130 pipe roll. This was ‘a remarkable place which he had made a dwelling-place for men and beasts’, including his own menagerie of porcupines, camels, lions, and lynxes, forerunner of the collection of exotic species subsequently moved by King John to the Tower of London; from here, it eventually settled at Regent’s Park to become London Zoo in 1831.
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For most – from kings with rare animals downwards – parks also provided opportunities to display wealth, status and taste, and analysis of the approach from nearby Salisbury to the royal residence at Clarendon Park, as redesigned under Henry III, suggests a deliberate attempt to show off the elevated royal palace to best effect. The views from the residence might also be important. Examination of what could
be seen of the adjoining deer parks from the highest rooms within the castles at both Castle Rising (Norfolk) and Okehampton (Devon) show that the boundaries were invisible, so giving the impression that the parks extended much further. The balcony constructed in 1354 at Woodstock specifically to allow Isabella, daughter of Edward III, a better view of the park, and a fifteenth-century stone viewing platform at Harringworth (Northamptonshire) overlooking the centre of the park and an extensive lake,
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also testify to the significance of having a prospect of the park, whether to admire the landscape or to watch the hunting.