Deer and Deer Farming in Medieval England
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Deer and Deer Farming in Medieval England By JEAN BIRRELL Abstract The deer in the parks, chases and forests of medieval England were managed more actively, and with a greater skill and care, than is perhaps generalIy realized. Their owners derived considerable benefits from them, not only in the opportunity to hunt, which was often subsidiary, but in venison, a high status meat. Though deer were often privileged, deer farming was generally integrated into other agricultural or woodland activities; deer parks, in particular, were often efficiently managed units fulfilling a number of purposes, so much so that we should perhaps be cautious about dismissing them, as is so often done, as no more than status symbols. D rER parks have had rather a bad attention) The problem is partly docu- press from medieval historians. mentary. For a number of reasons, deer They have conventionally been tend to slip through the usual documen- seen as 'obvious luxuries: a manifestation tary net, so that their importance is easily of conspicuous consumption" and 'an underestimated. Another difficulty is that unprofitable use of land', ~ If they were parks served many purposes. Domestic abandoned in the later Middle Ages, this animals might graze alongside the deer was only 'a sensible economy'? But are inside the park, and park woodland pro- such judgements justified? Or, to put it vided timber, wood, and other valuable another way, do they help us to under- resources, all of which were, in general, stand the great wave of park creation of increasingly scarce and valuable as the the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? I thirteenth century progressed. The cre- want to argue in this article that, on the ation of a park tended to increase the whole, they do not. Part of the problem owner's power over the resources enclosed lies in the difficulty of assessing the impor- within it, as the complaints of many tance of the deer which the parks were ousted commoners testify. From a broader created to protect, and which alone perspective, this should make us cautious explain their impressive surrounding about what might be simplistic judge- banks, ditches, and fences (or hedges or ments about the profitability of parks walls). We have long been familiar with treated in isolation; more particularly it the concept of parks as 'larders for live further diverts attention from the deer, so meat', 4 rather than simply seigneurial elusive in the documents, and makes it hunting reserves, but the deer themselves difficult, not to say unrealistic, to try to have nevertheless received relatively little identify their specific contribution, or cost, to the park economy. ' Colin Platt, Medieval England, 1978, p 47. •SRecetlt conspicuous exceptions which I have found particularly -" Paul Stamper. 'Woods and Parks'. in G Astill and A Grant. eds, helpful include Oliver Rackham, especially his Ancient Woodland, The Countryside ,f Medieval Et(~land, Oxford, 1988, p 146. 198o, pp 188-95, where medieval parks are described as essentially JJohn Ftatcher, Rural Economy and Society in the Duch), ~f Cormvall 'a utilitarian enterprise producing meat', p '97; E Roberts, 'Tile t3oo-15oo, Cambridge, 197o, p 184, quoted in both Platt, op cit, bishop of Winchester's deer parks in Hampshire, ,2oo-~4oo', p 47 and Stamper, oi2 tit, p x46. Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Ch,b and Archaeological Societ),, 40 G S Crawford described them as 'enclosures for storing live XLIV, ,988, pp 67-86; and P Franklin, 'Thornbury woodlands ,neat in the form of deer and other animals' in his Ardmeolagy ht and deer parks; the earls of Gloucester's deer parks', Transactions the Field, ~953, P 189; the idea also permeates the work of Professor ~f the Bristol and GIoutestershire Archaeological Society, CVII, ,98a, Cantor, and many others. pp 149-69. Ag Hist Rev, 40, II, pp i12-I26 112 J DEER AND DEER. FARMING IN MEDIEVAL ENGLAND II 3 I farming', it was also practised over a much However, evidence about the deer exists, wider geographical area, in the royal for- even if it has to be sought across a wide ests and chases. These were institutions range of documents from different places with an active deer management policy, and sources at different periods, and it is and cannot be understood without this on the deer, the ultimate motive for the point of reference. Indeed, deer manage- parks, that this article concentrates. It is ment was sufficiently widespread, and on clear that parks could and did support a sufficiently large scale, to be seen as a considerable herds, and that their owners significant aspect of medieval agriculture. could draw on them for supplies of ven- There were some seventy royal forests in ison on a far from negligible scale. This medieval England, a large number of might be for their own household con- chases, or forests in private hands - per- sumption, in particular at festivals when haps as many as there were royal forests - guests were entertained, or simply to serve and a far larger number of parks - the as gifts, whose importance should not be number has been put as high as 3ooo. 7 underestimated in a society where largess Not all these parks were m existence and patronage were crucial attributes of simultaneously, and not all of them necess- lordship. Parks also provided the oppor- arily contained deer throughout their tunity to hunt. How often, in practice, existence; and, like the parks, the royal lords chose to hunt in their parks is open forests and chases were not exclusively to debate; it must have depended on the devoted to deer. But the fact remains that nature and size of the park, as well as on deer were receiving a degree of protection personal preference, and in any case habits and management over a very wide area, no doubt changed over time. The paucity and the history of medieval deer farming of evidence for seigneurial hunting has needs be integrated into the agrarian his- surprised some writers on deer parks; ~ it tory of medieval England, rather than seen may simply reflect the fact that it hap- as an unclassifiable and insignificant pened less frequently than is sometimes aberration. supposed. However that may be, hunting This is not to claim, of course, that deer there was, on a regular and systematic farming was simply another branch of basis, but by servants, charged with the agriculture, equivalent to, say, sheep farm- task of supplying their employers with ing. Throughout the Middle Ages, it deer, alive or dead, as required. retained a peculiar and ambivalent status, It also needs to be emphasized that it which is in itself not without interest. It was very far from being a matter of is, for example, noticeably absent from erecting fences round a suitable stretch of the discussions of agricultural methods, ground, discouraging poachers, and leav- estate management, and accounting in the ing the rest to nature. Deer were managed various treatises devoted to these subjects in the Middle Ages, skilfully and intclli- which were compiled in the Middle Ages, gently, using methods which showed con- mostly in the thirteenth century, s The siderable understanding of the animals' exception is the Husbandry; it briefly men- habits and needs. Further, though the tions parkers, along with haywards and management of deer reached its most grangers, when discussing estate officers, advanced form inside parks, where it can perhaps justifiably be described as 'deer M Bazeley, 'The Extent of the English Forest in the Thirteenth Century', TRHS, 4th set, IV, 1921, pp 14o-72; Stamper, op eit, ¢'For example, Roberts, op tit, p 70; Hatcher, 0p tit, p t84. A study p 14o, of seigneurial hunting on the basis of historical, as opposed to SD Oschinsky, ed, Walter of Henley a.d other Treatises on Estate literary, sources would be very useful. Management and Accounti,,¢, Oxford, 1971. 114 THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW and includes 'any wild beast' (that is, deer) animals for the brave and the skilled to in a list of creatures for which 'one does seek out and hunt down. '~ not render account', apparently on the No such reticence, however, inhibited grounds that 'many people do not have estate documents. For example, the so- or raise ... them'? Though perhaps odd called Tutbury Cowcher of I415, a survey grounds on which to base such advice, of the administrative system of the Hon- this was nevertheless an accurate obser- our of Tutbury, then part of the duchy vation, at least for its time: deer farming of Lancaster, treats deer management in was widespread, but at the same time an absolutely matter-of-fact way. Rules confined to an 4lite. Deer in the royal for the care of the deer are prominent in forest were reserved for the use of the the lists of duties of the officers serving in king; only lords of high rank were able Needwood and Duffield Frith, the two to acquire chases; and the majority of chases on the estate. '2 And some decades parks, especially the larger and more long- earlier, the Black Prince's Register reveals lasting ones, were owned by the wealthier a great lord concerning himself with the lords. ~° Whether this exclusivity was the welfare of the deer scattered throughout real reason for the silence of the treatises his estate, as a result constituting a mine seems doubtful. They may have been slow of information about deer management. '3 to catch up with techniques still in their Deer farming is also peculiar in that, infancy at the time they were compiled, though venison was highly prized, it was though this seems unlikely; it is more not, as a rule, produced for the market.