Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 2 (2014), p. 363

Sadly, Harold Fox died before completing the final stages of preparing this book for publication. His death was a significant loss to medieval economic history and the history of Devon, but the loss would have been all the greater had Matt Tompkins and Chris Dyer not stepped in to see this book through to publication. This book bears the hallmarks of Harold Fox’s research style and expertise: meticulous and thorough in his approach to the surviving documentation, deeply knowledgeable about Devon, but also imaginative and flexible. It draws evidence from archaeology, maps, place-names and the landscape as well as from manuscript documents, and uses comparative examples from other parts of England and Europe and from later time periods where this was helpful in developing the interpretation. The result is an impressive and revealing study, with a firm focus on Devon’s medieval pastoral economy and the unique role of Dartmoor within it.

The study ranges from the Anglo-Saxon period to the nineteenth century, but its core is the golden age of manorial documentation from fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Fox’s central argument is that Dartmoor, far from being an area of wild and unusable ‘waste’, was the key element in a wide-reaching system of pastoral transhumance. In the early medieval period this was genuine transhumance, with people as well as livestock moving seasonally to Dartmoor to benefit from the summer pastures. In the high-to-late medieval period it was what Fox describes as ‘impersonal transhumance’, by which ‘down country’ farmers entrusted cattle to the guardianship of either moor-side middlemen or royal officials on Dartmoor for part of each year. As a result Dartmoor’s pasture benefited not only the parishes and farmsteads that bordered the moor, but the majority of Devon, an extensive area west of the Exe and lower Taw rivers. The evidence is not always exactly watertight, but is presented clearly and in detail to the reader. The earliest evidence is the remains of huts on Dartmoor, possibly used by transhumant shepherds and dairymaids each summer. Certainly intriguing are the detached moor-side sections of distant manors such as Kenton on the Exe estuary and Cockington on the Torbay coast. Place-names and administrative boundaries provide further evidence of the movement of livestock, seasonal occupation and links between Dartmoor and a much wider area of Devon. Comparative evidence from studies of the Kentish Weald and Warwickshire Arden where transhumance was also practiced shows that such systems were not unknown in England, as is often assumed. For the late medieval period the large numbers of cattle sent to Dartmoor (although not sheep which must also have been moved) in the summer are documented, with grazing fees of 1½d. per head paid for over 10,000 cattle in the fifteenth century, in addition to cattle sent by more local farmers of ‘venville’ tenements which were exempt from the fee. As might be expected from a book not quite finished at the time of the author’s death, some parts are a little uneven in style and approach, and there are romantic interludes alongside hard-headed assessments of the available evidence. The editors provide a helpful introduction and summarizing conclusion, which draw out the wider issues addressed. The book is well illustrated with diagrams, maps and photographs (many in colour). This all adds up to a vivid and accessible account of a neglected topic despite the complexity of the evidence and issues discussed. It is an important addition to the literature on the agricultural systems of the medieval period, as well as to the history of Devon.