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The Medieval Park: New Perspectives

edited by Robert Liddiard

The park - a feature of the landscape we always associate with the hunting of deer - played an important role in the psyche of Britain's medieval aristocracy. This well-illustrated book offers a reappraisal of the park by a new generation of landscape researchers, who use a diversity of approaches to assess its economy, ecology and social role. They show how parks actually had many functions other than deer management and hunting; they were integrated into the wider rural economy, and also provided a means by which seigneurial control of the landscape might be demonstrated. They varied considerably across Britain, and are of considerable conservation significance today. c.256p, 69 illus, 35 in col (Windgather Press 2007)

Review Quotes

"There have been few successful attempts to provide a synthetic overview of English park development since Shirley's study in the 1860s. One consequence has been a general failure to grasp the significance of the park as a socioeconomic entity. The nine essays in this excellent volume do not set out to remedy that position - that would require a much larger programme of study and synthesis - but they do demonstrate successfully the range of research materials available, the potential for a genuinely interdisciplinary environmental history of medieval parks, and the importance of such an integrated approach for the informing of strategic conservation plans for surviving historic parklands."

Richard Oram
Medieval Archaeology, vol 54 (November 2010)

"The extent to which each essay in this collection offers fresh insights underlines the liveliness of current approaches."

James Bond
Landscape History 30 (2008/9)

"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."

Jean Birrell
The Agricultural History Review 56.2 (2008)

Table of Contents

Introduction (Robert Liddiard). Part One: Approaches to the Medieval Park: The Sociology of Park Creation in Medieval England (S A Mileson); 'The King's Chief Delights': A Landscape Approach to the Royal Parks of Post-Conquest England (Amanda Richardson); Animal bones and Animal Parks (Naomi Sykes); The Social Construction of Medieval Park Ecosystems: An Inter-disciplinary Perspective (Aleksander Pluskowski); The Historical Ecology of Medieval Parks and the Implications for Conservation (Ian D Rotherham). Part Two: Parks in the Landscape: The Medieval Parks of Yorkshire: Function, Contents and Chronology (Stephen Moorhouse); The Distribution of Parks in Hertfordshire: Landscape, Lordship and Woodland (Anne Rowe); Hunting Suffolk's Parks: Towards a Reliable Chronology of Imparkment (Rosemary Hoppitt); Baronial and Manorial Parks in Medieval Cumbria (Angus J L Winchester).

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