The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (11 page)

The centrality of hunting as the principal purpose of most parks is reinforced by the fact that many of them were located in or very close to forests or chases, so that they could be managed together. As Henry II’s treasurer put it, ‘it is in the forests that the king’s chambers are, and their chief delights. For they come there, laying aside their cares now and then, to hunt, as a rest and recreation’. His king had work done on his residences in the parks of both Woodstock and Clarendon almost as soon as he came to the throne.
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The royal park at Havering was located within the forest of Essex, the Earl (later Duke) of Lancaster’s park at Quernmore was within the forest of Quernmore (Lancashire), the Courtenay family’s Okehampton Park lay within the chase of Okehampton, and so on. In August 1357, because the Black Prince’s park at Peckforton (Cheshire) was ‘so stocked with game that the pasture thereof is insufficient for their sustenance’, orders were given to release some animals through the boundary ‘for the replenishment of the prince’s forest there’. 400 deer are known to have been driven in the other direction – from the New Forest into the New Park – prior to a hunt by Richard III in the 1480s.
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Since gates were liable to be left open either by accident or design, access into the park for the deer was commonly achieved by the construction in the surrounding barrier of a deer-leap over which they could jump. Analysis of deer-leaps at Quernmore, in what appears to be a surviving remnant of the medieval park wall, shows them to have been 14 yards (12.8 metres or two customary rods) long and suggests that deer were driven from the forest into the park using temporary fencing to funnel them towards the leaps, which were located on a downslope making it easier for the deer to jump over. The design of the leaps, and the fact that – as we have already seen at Capplebank Park, West Witton – the slope from within was uphill, meant that it was impossible for the deer to jump out again
(
Figure 7
).
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Figure 7: Deer Leap, Quernmore Park (Lancashire)
. Although somewhat dilapidated, the ‘Low Stile’ deer leap, at a zigzag in the park’s drystone wall boundary, gives an impression of the required height: intended to allow deer to leap into the park if driven downhill from outside, but sufficient to prevent escape if approached uphill from within. (Photograph by kind permission of Mike Derbyshire.)

A significant feature of many parks – though not confined to them, since they were also constructed on common pasture or on demesne land close to a lord’s hall – were rabbit warrens. When first reintroduced to England following the Norman Conquest, and from thereon until the early fourteenth century, rabbits (or ‘coneys’ as they were properly called, ‘rabbit’ being the term used for the young) were regarded as luxury items, to be kept – like
deer – primarily for the lord’s table by special permission of the king. Though reared in all parts of England, these early rabbits were ill-suited to the climate and in need of nurture and protection, their custodians, the warreners, being relatively well-paid specialist officials. Enclosed within the boundaries or compartments of a park, or by banks, streams and ditches elsewhere, they raised few concerns about risks to the surrounding countryside, being seen as fragile creatures, unlikely to stray.
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However, all this changed during the course of the fourteenth century. In the Breckland, where dry sandy soils were better suited to rabbit-keeping than to other forms of farming, Ely Cathedral Priory’s warren at Lakenheath (Suffolk) traditionally produced no more than 50 rabbits per annum, exclusively for the monks; by the last two decades of the century, it had an annual average output of over 3,000, with 80% being sold for profit. At nearby Brandon, where the warren belonged not to the prior but to the Bishop of Ely, the decade immediately before the Black Death generated an annual average of 158 rabbits, of which 89% went to the lord; by contrast, the 1380s and 1390s yielded well over 2,000 rabbits per annum with some 85% produced for the market. Although the evidence suggests that production and profits generally fell back in the fifteenth century, the Duchy of Lancaster’s warren
at Methwold (Norfolk) appears to have been a wholly commercial enterprise from the 1390s right through to the 1460s. These East Anglian businesses were particularly favoured by proximity to the London market, meeting a buoyant demand for both meat and fur, but there is no reason to suppose that the rising living standards of the mass of the population, in town and countryside, did not encourage a similar response to rabbit-production on tracts of less fertile soils elsewhere. Alongside all this there are clear signs that increasing rabbit populations, as the animal became acclimatized, led to greater incidence of crop damage from escapees and a welcome, if occasional, supplement to some peasant and labouring families’ diet through poaching; by 1521, the Scots writer John Major could describe Britain as an island where ‘rabbits swarm’ as nowhere else.
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The most obvious legacies of medieval rabbit farming in the landscape are the fifteenth-century warreners’ lodges at Thetford (Norfolk) and Mildenhall (Suffolk), both remnants of defensible tower-houses which could be used as look-outs, storehouses and accommodation, both for the warrener’s household and, on occasion, for a hunting party. Associated earthworks are more subtle. Although natural features, or those inherited from the past (such as the early-Saxon linear earthwork known as the Fossditch, which forms the western boundary of Methwold warren) were frequently used to confine the rabbits, man-made enclosure banks can sometimes be detected, as at High Lodge Warren near Thetford. Better-known are the so-called ‘pillow mounds’ – low, flat-topped mounds, usually rectangular with a surrounding ditch to aid drainage and hardly ever more than ten metres across. Over 2,000 have been identified in England and Wales, in more than 500 groups, although the majority are post-medieval in origin: examples on Dartmoor at Merrivale in Walkhampton and Yalland in South Brent (Devon), the Cotswold sites of Crickley Hill (Gloucestershire) and Castle Combe (Wiltshire) and two apparently linked to religious houses at Isleham (Cambridgeshire) and Sawtry (Huntingdonshire) are among those which through documentary references or association with other features are likely to be of medieval date. Their regional distribution is uneven, surviving examples tending to be in the moorlands of the south west, the Cotswolds and the chalk downlands, as well as in Wales: far more in the west of the country than in the east, a circumstance attributable in part to subsequent ploughing-out in arable areas but also to the fact that they were built to help the rabbits to find burrows in areas of damper soil, an effort less necessary in the drier east of England. They are very scarce in the Breckland, for instance, despite the known popularity of rabbit farming here. It remains the case, however, that the principal means of catching farmed rabbits in the medieval period, by sending in ferrets and netting them as they fled from their burrows, was easier if the burrows were constructed beneath a pillow mound to a predetermined pattern rather than if left to the
rabbits to develop themselves, and this was almost certainly another factor in their construction.
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Before we leave the subject of farming, we should discuss the activity essential to processing the grain from the fields. Mills are commonly associated with peasants’ obligations to their lords,
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but many of them were at least in part commercial enterprises which relied on paying customers: apart from industrial mills – to which we shall return in the next chapter – some corn mills were held not by a lord but by tenants, while others operated in boroughs away from any manorial regime. That said, Domesday Book, which records just over 6,000 mills, does treat them as profitable assets for their lords, and they continued to be so for much of the middle ages; at least 5% of manorial lords’ income is reckoned to have been derived from their mills by the end of the thirteenth century. The erection of three mills in Cambridge by the sheriff Picot, yielding £9 per annum, led to complaints recorded in Domesday Book over encroachment on common pasture, destruction of houses and the loss of mills belonging to the Abbot of Ely and Count Alan of Richmond. To judge by the provision made for legal redress for nuisance caused by watermills, entered in the late-twelfth century lawbook ‘Glanvill’, this was a far from isolated case.
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The millers themselves, who normally paid fixed sums to the lord which they recouped by charging a ‘multure’ on each customer – typically one-sixteenth – were notorious for dishonesty with their weights and measures: Chaucer was repeating a commonplace when he wrote that his burly, boorish miller, ‘well versed in stealing corn and trebling dues … had a golden thumb’.
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Horse mills can rarely be discerned in the landscape but such documentary references as there are suggest that they were often utilised when for some reason other forms of power were inappropriate. A horse mill was installed at Carlisle Castle in 1194 in case the garrison was cut off from the mills on the river below, and in the mid-thirteenth century one was built for St Albans Abbey because the stream feeding the watermill had found another course. It has also been suggested that several new horse mills were introduced towards the end of the middle ages, in places where population had declined to the point where manorial water- or windmills were no longer economic to run. There is some evidence that they were favoured for the grinding of malt for brewing, as was the case with the horse mill belonging to Margery Kempe, who was a leading brewer in King’s Lynn (Norfolk) in the 1390s before devoting her life to pilgrimage and mysticism; the surviving
early-sixteenth-century brewhouse at Middleham Castle (Yorkshire) preserves a circular horse track for just such a mill.
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Most watermills depended for their power on fresh flowing water, but along the coast tide mills were sometimes built, reliant on the ebb and flow of the sea to turn the wheel which drove the machinery. Tide mills are elusive in the archaeological record, but 37 examples (none of which survive) have been identified from documentary references before 1300, among them one at Fareham (Hampshire) which was unambiguously described as a ‘sea-mill’ in 1210–11. One of the main drawbacks of these mills was their vulnerability to storms and excessively high tides; towards the close of the thirteenth century, at both Walton (Suffolk) and Milton Hall (Essex), new windmills had to be built to replace tide mills wrecked by the sea.
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Inland watermills, by contrast, tended to be long-lasting and even if no structures survive they can often be recognized by the diversion and damming of streams, to create ‘leats’ and millponds so that a head of water could be released to drive the wheel: although it is fair to add that there is a risk of confusion with the creation of water features for aesthetic purposes, as may be the case at the site of the deserted medieval village of Ingarsby (Leicestershire).
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The
Luttrell Psalter
of about 1340 shows a small timber-framed building with thatched roof and overshot wheel (plus eel traps in the millpond) and if this modest structure is representative of most medieval watermills it is no surprise that their survival is so rare. There are standing remains at Fountains Abbey, where some twelfth-century masonry survives and the original plan of the mill, straddling the watercourse with symmetrical chambers on either side, is still to be seen, but this was unusually substantial. More typical is the late-medieval stone and cob building beside a leat, little more than 6 metres by 3.5 metres in size, which was later incorporated into the industrial site at Sticklepath (Devon).
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Watermills were fairly evenly distributed across England, reaching an estimated total of at least 9,000 by the end of the thirteenth century. By contrast, the 4,000 or so windmills built from the late twelfth century onwards tended to feature in the eastern half of the country, where supplies of running water were less readily available.
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One of the earliest references to them, in the 1190s, relates to a dispute between Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds and a dean, Herbert, who ‘set up a windmill at Haberdun [within the abbey’s area of jurisdiction] and when the abbot heard this, he grew so hot with anger that he would scarcely eat or speak a single word’. This was precisely the type of dispute over competing mills sparked by Picot the sheriff in Domesday Cambridge, and despite Herbert’s protestations that ‘free benefit of the wind ought not to be denied to any man’ – presumably a novel argument at the time – and that ‘he wished to grind [only] his own corn there and not the corn of others, lest perchance he might be thought to do this to the detriment of
neighbouring mills’ he was obliged to have it pulled down. It is a sign of the proliferation of a novel form of milling just at this time that Pope Celestine III (1191–98) was obliged to weigh in with a decretal stating that windmills were liable to the payment of tithe.
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