Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 218

How the history of parks has changed. Now, as this attractively produced and illustrated volume of essays shows, historians discuss the sociology and cultural context of park-making (Mileson), parks as spaces where cloistered ladies could indulge in sporting activities while shielded from prying eyes (Sykes) and parks as part of planned landscapes (Richardson). Anyone who ever found parks boring should think again. This collection is intended to demonstrate the new diversity of approaches to the subject, and it admirably succeeds in its aim.

The essays are all of high quality, and generally clearly written. The first five chapters are rather grandly described as examining some ‘conceptual issues concerning the place of parkland’. Stephen Mileson shows just how varied were the precise circumstances and motives of those who established parks, refining the notion of parks as status symbols and setting the subject firmly in a context of gentry formation and status display. Amanda Richardson’s fascinating chapter examines the way certain parks were integrated into the landscapes surrounding royal residences. Naomi Sykes shows how fruitful the zooarchaeological approach can be; bone assemblages, this reviewer was delighted to find, suggest that the best venison joints went to the lord’s residence, the less good to those lower down the social scale. Pluskowski argues for an environmental archaeology of parks, emphasising changing medieval conceptions of them, and usefully locating them between forests on the one hand and gardens on the other, and in a broader context of aristocratic hunting culture. Ian Rotheram, writing on the historical ecology of parks, follows them through to the twentieth century and discusses the challenge of conserving this heritage.

These introductory chapters are followed by a series of case histories (Stephen Moorhouse, on Yorkshire, Anne Rowe on Hertfordshire, Rosemary Hoppit on Suffolk and Angus Winchester on Cumbria) that bring us firmly back to earth. Every one of these is useful and together they provide a remarkable illustration of how different approaches applied at the level of a county can illumine aspects of park histories. They bring out the wide range of purposes and uses to which parks were put in different places, periods and circumstances. ‘No two parks are the same’, observes Moorhouse, with justice. They might mostly contain deer, but they were rarely simply ‘deer parks’. Some were stock farms or studs; many (perhaps most) were exploited for their grazing and timber; others contained quarries, fishponds or rabbit warrens, and a host of lesser resources were also drawn on, such as nut trees. Rotheram talks of the ‘working medieval park’, Hoppit of ‘working resource-units’. And just as parks might change in size and shape over time, so might their primary purposes. Yet Moorhouse himself and his fellow contributors are alert to general features too. The extent to which the gentry created parks may vary from one county (or region) to another (Rowe finds many in Hertfordshire; they seem to be fewer elsewhere), but their parks are generally smaller than those of their social superiors. The siting and distribution of parks relates to territorial organisation, lordship and tenure as much as to the distribution of woodland or topography. They may often have been a response to erosion of woodland.

A recurring theme in these essays is the extent to which parks were integrated into a planned landscape based on the seigneurial residence – designed as settings, perhaps even with the visual pleasure they might provide in mind. Amanda Richardson’s examination of royal parks is immensely stimulating. Those puzzling ‘little’ (‘inner’ or ‘home’) parks fit well into such a perspective. But she herself is aware that the general applicability of these ideas remains to be tested; in any case she is writing about exceptionally large royal parks and her focus is largely on what she calls the ‘great age of the medieval park’, the fourteenth century. Parks were often close to or adjoined the residence but many were well away, on the edges of manors or parishes, partly because that was the only possible place for them at the time of their creation. In fact the circumstances and manner of their creation are largely absent from these stories, as is the relationship of parks to the rest of the manorial economy. Clearly this, too, varied, but the subject needs to be explored. There are occasional references to ridge and furrow in parks or running beneath park enclosures. What had happened here? There is, I think, one reference to what is rather euphemistically called ‘settlement disruption’ (Pluskowski), another to the dispossession of tenants, but in the sixteenth century. The point is several times made that it can be difficult if not impossible to pin down the date of a park’s creation (licenses to impark are shown not always to be reliable) and the need to consider the attitudes of the local population is sporadically noted, but such subjects are never really tackled. The park at Cockermouth (Winchester) was a ‘valuable tract of woodland and pasture for the local community’, yes, but the local community had to pay to use it. So this is very much parks from the park-owners’ point of view. But it is a collection that should send us all back to our sources, which is high praise indeed.