FLORA AND SYLVA, 



ENGLISH DEER PARKS. 



In England, parks have existed from Nor- 

 man times and perhaps even from earlier days. 

 Thirty-one are mentioned in Domesday Book, 

 in which venerable record parcusmeam a park, 

 and parcusfcrarum a deerpavk. Ofthese thirty- 

 one parks, one only still exists with deer in it. 

 Reredfelle of Domesday is Eridge Park in Sus- 

 sex. A common error,which Stow and Dugdale 

 have propagated, is that Woodstock, which 

 dates from Henry I.'s reign, was the oldest 

 park in England. No fewer than eight out 

 of the thirty-one Domesday parks belonged to 

 the King. Besides parks, haice, or hays, to 

 the number of seventy or more, are mentioned 

 in Domesday Book. These were enclosures in 

 the forests for the purpose of entrapping deer 

 which were driven in with horns and hounds. 

 In size, a deer hay, if one may judge from one 

 in Warwickshire, was about half a mile square. 

 We are accustomed nowadays to think of the 

 park as surrounding the dwelling or mansion 

 house of the owner, but in the Middle Ages 

 many parks were made on the poorest and 

 most distant parts of the estate, far from the 

 castle. The keepership of one of the royal 

 parks was, in old days, a rare prize ; and the 

 younger brothers of knightly families were 

 often made lodge-keepers of the ancestral park. 

 The oldest deer parks were, apparently, all 

 fenced with strong palings of oak. There is 

 nothing prettier, and, though it is expensive, 

 a good oak paling will last a hundred years 

 with reasonable care in repairing. The oldest 

 park wall, we believe, is that at Wootton in 

 Staffordshire. It is of stone, 10 feet high and 

 4 feet thick, and was built in the reign of 

 Richard II. Many of the smaller parks of to- 

 day have been walled within the last couple of 

 hundred years. Among the larger parks with 

 fine walls are Ashton, Petworth, Woburn, and 

 Wollaton. We cannot but deplore the increased 

 use of hideous iron and wire fences for which 

 the poverty or depression of the landed class 

 may perhaps be urged as an excuse. Saxton's 

 maps (1575-80) show 700 parks in England, 

 but how many of these were stocked with deer 

 it isimpossible now to discover. Weknowfrom 

 the Northumberland household book that the 

 family of Percy were the owners of twenty-one 

 parks containing 5,500 deer. These were dis- 

 tributed over Northumberland, Cumberland, 



and Yorkshire, and there were also some in the 

 South of England. Harrison, writing in 1 577, 

 complained that the twentieth part of the realm 

 was employed upon deer and coneys already. 

 Stow, inhis" Annals" (1 592), quoting Andrew 

 Bourd, wrote that "there be more parks in 

 England than in all Europe beside." He men- 

 tions deer, goats, and coneys, and adds, " for 

 everywhere there is jolly maintenance of these 

 kinds of beasts." In Moryson's "Itinerary" 

 (16 17) it is suggested that there were more 

 fallow deer in a single English county than in 

 all Europe besides. "Every gentleman of £500 

 or jf 1,000 rent by the year hath a park for 

 them enclosed with pales of wood for two or 

 three miles compass." After Elizabeth's time 

 few new deer parks were made, and they pro- 

 bably began to decline in numbers. During 

 the troubles of the Civil War many parks be- 

 longing to Royalists were destroyed by Round- 

 heads. In some the deer were killed, in others 

 the fences were levelled and the deer driven 

 out. William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, 

 was the owner of eight parks, but they were 

 all destroyed except Welbeck. The King's 

 parks suffered with the others. Marylebone 

 Park wasdisparked under the Commonwealth, 

 and 124 deer 'of several sorts' were sold for 

 £130. When Cromwell's Government re- 

 solved to sell Hyde Park, the deer therein were 

 valued at £765 6s. 2d., and Parliament en- 

 joined that care was to be taken that no deer 

 be embezzled or stolen. After the Restoration 

 the parks were again restocked; and if the his- 

 tory of all the existing parks could be traced, 

 we should probably find that the majority did 

 not date farther back than Charles II. 's reign. 

 The King of England, who at the Conquest 

 possessed eight deer parks, is still, at the be- 

 ginning of the twentieth century, the owner 

 of four — Windsor, Richmond, Greenwich, 

 and Bushey. Windsor Great Park, the second 

 largest in England, is also one of the finest, and 

 contains about a thousand fallow deer and a 

 hundred red deer. The first mention of it is in 

 the reign of Henry III. Cranbourne Park, 

 which contains a small herd of white red deer, 

 is really a part of the Great Park. Richmond 

 Park, though now in the suburbs of London, 

 has lost little of its natural wildness, the game 

 coverts are still well stocked, and the heronry 

 j is undisturbed. — Edinburgh Review. 



