Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 160

Medieval Clarendon was an illustrious place. Outside the new town of Salisbury, it had the grandest palace away from London, the biggest park in England, and a small royal Forest. It is a famous site; the author builds on many previous scholars’ work, notably the excavation of the palace in the 1930s which lay unpublished for fifty years.

Some sort of palace goes back at least to the twelfth century; the park is first documented in 1223. The Forest is first heard of in 1214 – one of the latest royal Forests, though it was probably split off from the New Forest. They were raised to magnificence by Henry III in the mid-thirteenth century. The palace attracted royalty for 150 years, passing thereafter through phases of decline and revival; occasional royal visits continued until James I.

Dr Richardson’s work is based mainly on written records. She has extracted a gigantic body of data from the official files in the Public Record Office. She has, properly, left archaeological excavation to others, and herself regrets that not more has been done with fieldwork.

A park was where a landowner kept deer confined within a deer-proof fence called a pale, which was difficult to maintain as the pales rotted or trees fell on it. A Forest was a tract of land, arbitrarily defined, whereon the king (or other magnate) asserted the right to keep deer; it was not fenced, and the deer stayed by force of habit. This particular Forest may have contained little more than deer that escaped from the park; were the many ‘deer-leaps’ devices to let them get back in? As usual, there is no record of where the deer came from: most of them were fallow deer, an exotic species which someone must have put there.

Forest historians, including Dr Richardson, claim that Forests were ‘reserved for the king’s hunting’ to the restriction, if not exclusion, of other people’s interests. However, Forests (in the legal sense) covered nearly all Hampshire and half Wiltshire, and were hardly a restraint on the towns, villages, agriculture, sheep-farming, and commerce of those counties. Clarendon itself included ten ordinary settlements, whose inhabitants seem to have done well out of jobs created by the palace and Salisbury city and cathedral.

Even in this very well-documented place, there is far more evidence for deer on the table than in the hunt. Medieval kings commonly feasted on salt venison, much of it brought from other Forests and processed at Clarendon. The only actual record of a royal hunt is by Edward II, the playboy king, in the 1320s. (There is at least as much evidence for dancing!) As elsewhere, deer were ordinarily ‘farmed’ or else caught by professional hunters.

Not even Dr Richardson answers the perennial question about medieval deer: why were there so few? Henry III is known to have eaten 400 fallow deer out of Clarendon in 49 years, which would have been in equilibrium with a population of about 40 animals, by modern standards an absurdly small number for the area. How could people with mere bows and hounds have held down the numbers, whereas today the utmost efforts with guns (and cars to run them over) cannot stop deer from proliferating?

By 1500 numbers of deer had increased into thousands, and hunting becomes more evident and more formal. The ‘Pady Course’ was like a modern greyhound track, with a live deer instead of an electric hare. As a climax, Elizabeth I – that mightiest hunter among sovereigns – slew 340 deer in one day in 1574. By 1661, it was said, all the deer had been exterminated: the mind boggles at how this could have been done.

Both park and Forest contained woodland, mostly belonging to the king. The woods were compartmentalized into coppices, fenced periodically after each felling to keep the deer from eating the regrowth. Clarendon was also a modest if curiously intermittent supplier of timber. The woods suffered badly from the twentieth-century replanting craze, and little is known of woodbanks or surviving coppice stools.

What did the deer eat? They might have lived in woodland, but (like their present successors) would need grassland or savanna to feed. The Forest seems to have been largely either woodland or farmland, without the common pasture on which deer fed in other Forests; they seem, nevertheless, to have been too few to cause trouble by eating farmers’ crops. In the sixteenth century the huge numbers of deer in the park would have conflicted with trees. They went through hungry times in late winter.

I commend this illuminating study, full of curious detail. However, a book costing £38 deserves legible illustrations and an index. Dr Richardson’s fascinating particulars of fish, rabbits, ferrets, and hermits ought not to be irretrievably buried in the text.