Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 122

This book provides a comprehensive guide to the deer parks of Hertfordshire between 1485 and 1642. Released nearly a decade after the author’s Medieval deer parks of Hertfordshire, it is as thorough and beautiful as its predecessor. Rowe has produced another well-researched regional landscape history, interrogating a range of archive and secondary texts to present new insights and raise new questions. The objective of the book is to provide an evidence base rather than answer the resulting questions, and the reader should expect to follow up on those insights that pique their interest themselves.

Part I begins by describing the source material, highlighting that the period in question provides a great many more than were available for the medieval volume. Particular attention is paid to county maps, the earliest of which is Saxton’s 1577 county survey. These county maps are thoughtfully evaluated, although there is no corresponding discussion of other cartographic sources such as at the estate or park level. We then move on to the legacy of the over 70 medieval deer parks in Hertfordshire, most of which had come and gone, with over a third surviving into the seventeenth century. These tended to be large, with almost all parks of over 300 acres surviving to the sixteenth century and sometimes beyond. The real focus of this book is on those parks existing from the late fifteenth century, with at least 60 existing at some point between then and 1642. There is only evidence for 46 of the parks containing deer, and it is these that form the core for analysis as ‘Probable’ parks. It is possible that surviving documents are too sparse to record deer at the 14 other parks, but Rowe also suggests that in some cases these ‘Possible’ parks refer to areas of ground used as rabbit warrens. An accompanying comparative table of all the deer parks in the study would have been a useful tool for the reader.

The ‘Probable’ parks have been assigned to five main ownership categories: royal, aristocratic, ecclesiastical, royal officials, and gentry. It is no surprise that the data show a large drop in ecclesiastical ownership in the 1530s and 1540s, corresponding to a peak in royal ownership at the same time. Although gentry and aristocrats seemed to benefit most from the resulting redistribution of land during this time, the correlation is not quite so simple, as elevations to the peerage moved parks from one category to another. Overall though, the gentry consistently held the highest number of parks if never the largest acreage. The total number of parks rose in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite the peak in acreage having been in the 1570s. Most new parks were created during the reign of Elizabeth I and clustered in the south of the county, interpreted as evidence of the increased importance of the capital during the period.

Sub-sections dealing with the inhabitants and materiality of the park follow. A segment concerning animal history covers deer, rabbits, hares, fish, horses, livestock and birds. Poachers and park personnel follow. Wage rates for employees were apparently kept low but accompanied a prestige that was difficult to match in other occupations. Finally, the less animate parts of the park receive attention. The archaeological nature of the boundary and its complementary oak pale are discussed and contrasted to medieval evidence suggesting that most pales during that period were more likely to have been constructed or at least reinforced with dead wood.

Part I ends with the buildings of the park: lodges, banqueting houses, standings and deer houses. Lodges are afforded the most discussion, being either substantial houses for gentleman keepers or simple timber-framed constructions that were occasionally moved. There is tantalizing evidence here for the afterlives of parks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A few lodges were replaced by or became country houses, but most were converted to farmhouses. In either case, what became of the surrounding parkland? Such threads are numerous in the book, hinting at the future use of this vast body of evidence. The chapter ends after a short paragraph on hay barns, and some concluding remarks would have perhaps been appropriate.

Following on from such a good overview of the whole work, Part II seems slightly out of place. It deals exclusively with the evidence for the relationship between the parks of Hertfordshire and the Tudor and Stuart monarchies. The crown estate is examined before each monarch is given their own section. Henry VIII greatly expanded the acreage of parks owned by the crown in Hertfordshire, while we have already seen that Elizabeth I’s reign saw the highest number of new parks created. James I spent ‘almost half his reign’ at Theobalds, a park that had measured just over 300 acres in 1600 but was over 2500 acres by 1650. It is an interesting section and the strength of royal connection cannot be denied, but there is little discussion of how this compared to other counties and their parks. At fifteen pages this section could have been absorbed into Part I.

The gazetteer in Part III is organized alphabetically by parish, with over 50 entries. Some of these entries pertain to more than one park, and a central table listing all the featured parks would have been convenient. Each park has a name, National Grid Reference, dates and acreage. All have a corresponding map based on the first edition Ordnance Survey maps. A biography of each park follows, built from the historical evidence. Where a boundary has been difficult to reconstruct from the archives alone, entries are supplemented with LiDAR and aerial photography to physically identify earthwork traces. Relevant earlier park and estate maps have been reproduced as a set of plates in the centre of the book, including a map of c.1610 depicting nine parks between Hatfield and London. As elsewhere in the book, there is a wealth of detail in these park biographies, which is drawn together in such a way as to encourage further research.

The book is well laid out and beautifully illustrated. An individual list of citations follows each park entry, consisting largely of primary archive sources. The bibliography attests to the amount of research in the book, listing over seven pages’ worth of primary sources drawn from private, local, and national archives. The gazetteer and main text have been indexed, simplifying the task of navigating to specific sites or topics of interest.

This volume forms a well-researched and robust evidence base for further work, although the lack of space for exploring some of the questions it raises is occasionally frustrating. For instance, why is it that larger parks were more robust than their smaller counterparts, and therefore more likely to survive beyond the fifteenth century? The correlation between size and survival is identified and the question is posed, but no answer attempted. Rowe’s use of county maps to illustrate Hertfordshire being particularly ‘parky’ is one of the few examples of comparative evidence in the book, and more of this contextualization would have been helpful. When discussing the under-studied topic of deer coursing and standings, for example, consideration could have been given to the evidence for such courses and structures at Ravensdale and Clarendon, among others. This does feel like nitpicking, because overall the book is an excellent addition to the literature on post-medieval parks. The objective of the volume is to present the evidence for deer parks that existed in Hertfordshire over the course of two centuries, and it meets that objective in an informative and engaging way. If only such a book existed for all counties.