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John Fletcher - Gardens of Earthly Delight: The History of Deer Parks

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Gardens of Earthly Delight: The History of Deer Parks: summary, description and annotation

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This is a highly original, profusely illustrated, and well researched account of deer parks. With humility and respect Fletcher touches on errors commonly made by archaeologists and historians, taking issue with long held theories while drawing on his lifetime working with deer to formulate plausible explanations as to, for example, why they were not domesticated until the 20th century, how parks evolved from haga and elricks , why deer parks were created throughout Eurasia, why fallow so rapidly ousted red deer from medieval British parks, and much more.
He ranges from meat sharing amongst chimpanzees to the symbolism of venison as the elite product of hunting, ensconced within seven centuries of the English Royal Warrant, through the 300 year long prohibition on its sale within England and the continuing illegality of selling hunted venison within the USA, the aristocratic pursuit of park breaking, and the imposition of the Black Act. He stresses the cross-cultural importance of rulers being seen to hunt, compares ancient Chinese parks, the colossal Asian ring hunts, and the water hunts of Germany as expressions of mans urge to contain deer.
Within Britain, which has for a thousand years held more deer parks than any other part of the world, he describes how deer were fed, transported, enclosed, captured, castrated and housed, and how they were hunted in the confines of parks. The recent theory as to the use of trenches for handling deer in medieval Scotland is explored. The international symbolism of white deer, collared deer and enclosed deer is discussed. Recently, parks provided deer for English carted hunts and Scottish sporting estates; now we recognise their ecological and recreational value. We learn how parklands may be our spiritual home - the environment in which we are most content - and that parks have always been, in a fashion, designed landscapes.
Table of Contents
1. Carving out the meat: beyond deep history the manipulative cunning of apes
2. Deep history and why hunting matters
3. Our natural habitat: glades, groves and parkland
4. Elricks and kites, hayes and ha-has
5. Paradeisos and classical hunting parks
6. East of Eden: Chinese parks and the Sons of Heaven
7. Xanadu and the nomads
8. Flowers of the high medieval: how fallow deer came to Britain from the paradise gardens, the Arabic origins of ornamental landscape, and flirtation
9. Beautiful and tame: why we chose fallow
10. How the deer were hunted in the parks: coursing, and venery
11. Noli me tangere le cerf priv in paradise
12. Parks in contention: Forest Law, park breaking and poaching
13. The parkers duties: pales, salters and trenches, browse, grease and fence months
14. Ornament: antithesis of utility, bedfellow of status Tudor parks and beyond
15. The Restoration and landscape: from ashes to avenues; purgatory to paradise
16. The Black Act: expulsion from Paradise beyond the pale
17. Giving it away: venison as conspicuous consumption, a gift beyond price
18. Against the odds carted stags and show hunts: British and German attitudes to containing deer for sport
19. Castles for deer: from hunting to husbandry
20. Mounting heads: trophies, monarchs and dictators
21. Ecological oases, urban lungs, and venison farms
Terminology of deer and trees

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Windgather Press is an imprint of Oxbow Books Oxford John Fletcher 2011 All - photo 1
Windgather Press
is an imprint of
Oxbow Books, Oxford
John Fletcher 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (whether electronic, mechanical, photocopying or recording) or otherwise without the written permission of both the publisher and the copyright holder.
ISBN 978-1-905119-36-3
ISBN 9781905119523 (epub)
ISBN 9781905119516 (prc)
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
This book is available direct from
Oxbow Books, Oxford, UK
(Phone: 01865-241249; Fax: 01865-794449)
and
The David Brown Book Company
PO Box 511, Oakville, CT 06779, USA
(Phone: 860-945-9329; Fax: 860-945-9468)
or from our website
www.oxbowbooks.com
Printed by
Information Press, Eynsham, Oxfordshire
To Niall Manning
For his enthusiasm and for the garden of earthly delight he has created with Alastair Morton at Fintry
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
In Scotland Niall Manning introduced me early on to Christopher Dingwall who literally opened books by taking me to the invaluable library of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and the maps department of the National Library of Scotland. Christopher also led me on several stout tramps around forgotten Scottish upland medieval parks whose pales, largely undisturbed by the urban sprawl and intensive farming of many parts of Britain, can still be traced despite five hundred years and more of disuse. Christopher's enthusiasm and his deep knowledge of designed landscapes spurred me on yet curbed my silliest imaginings. It was Christopher who noted the trenches near Tarbolton in Ayrshire which give strength to the notion that the Falkland trenches in Fife may have been created to handle deer.
Christopher Smout, the Scottish Historiographer Royal, at St Andrews University has been greatly encouraging. In England Nick Walmsley of the National Trust has given very freely of his time and provided many contacts and suggestions. Laura Mason by a chain of coincidences was able to direct me to the unpublished manuscript of the late Jack Chard, a stalwart of the Forestry Commission whose enthusiastic reveries certainly fired my imagination; and Robin Gill of the Forestry Commission let me see it. Thomas Nivison Haining in Brechin generously translated Professor Reinken's paper on the naming of fallow deer.
Over the years many other specialists and professional historians have also contributed: Michael Ansell in Dumfries and Galloway; Jette Baage at the Hrsholm museum near Copenhagen; Caroline Cheeseman at St John's College, Oxford; the flint knapper Allan Course; Tony Fothergill of Spelman Books in York; Katie Fretwell and Jeannie Willan at the National Trust; Stephen Hall at the University of Lincoln; Jerry Haigh at the University of Saskatoon; Ursula Heinzelmann at the Oxford Symposium; Jeremy Johns, Director of The Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East, University of Oxford; Marco Massetti at the University of Firenze; Rachel Misson; Jacqui Mulville at Cardiff University; Nigel Smith at Hebden Bridge for sharing his studies of Erringden Park; Craig Stanford at the University of Southern California; Naomi Sykes at the University of Nottingham; Simon Taylor at the University of Glasgow who noted the suggestive field names near the Falkland trenches; Iain Thornber; and Richard Wrangham at Harvard. At the Museum of London Hazel Forsyth was generous with her time and experience in confirming regretfully that the stag's head retrieved from the trenches at Falkland was late eighteenth or more probably nineteenth century.
Amongst the many friends who have provided support have been Paul Broda, Norma Chapman, Edward Dyson, James Ellis at Gunton Park; Susie Lendrum, Gillian Riley, Liz Rogers; Julian Stoyel at Houghton Hall; Callum Thompson at Woburn and Frank Vigh-Larsen. In Paris Jean-Olivier le Gal provided me with several French papers including those of Jean-Denis Vigne.
I am grateful to Alex Fraser, a great hunter of hinds, for pointing me towards Sir Thomas Wyatt's poem Whoso list to hunt.
On the farm Dave Stewart's unquenchable zeal, interest and enthusiasm for the deer has inspired me while Pauline, Gemma, Vikki and Graeme are due thanks for their work which has allowed me to take time off.
I wish to thank most sincerely the staff at Oxbow for their patience and professional support, particularly Val Lamb and Tara Evans, but most especially Clare Litt and Julie Gardiner who have encouraged me in this cross-disciplinary endeavour.
I make no claims to be a historian and I have used no primary sources but instead have drawn extensively on published material. I wish therefore to acknowledge my profound debt to those whose writings I have used. And to those whose work I have misunderstood or misquoted, or accidentally left unacknowledged, I sincerely apologise.
If it had not been for the publisher, Peter Crawley, whose encouragement set me off on this project the book would never have been written and I am immensely grateful for his patience and generosity.
I offer especial thanks to The Authors' Foundation of the Society of Authors in London whose generous award made it possible for me to complete my book. I would like to draw the attention of struggling writers, as well as generous benefactors, to the possibilities offered by the this wonderful Foundation.
Above all I thank Nickie, Stella and Martha for their apparently unwavering encouragement over the many years during which I have worked on this book and for Nickie's valuable and imaginative suggestions.
Introduction
From the tree Cosimo looked at the world; everything seen from up there was different, which was fun in itself Cosimo saw it all the roofs were feathery with the tops of trees: plane trees, and oaks too, haughty and detached, branching out an orderly riot where the nobles had built their villas and walled in their parks.
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
I have spent all my working life with deer and much of that in deer parks. In this I am sharing an experience common to a long line of others who have lived with, and from, deer in parks. Often, in a procedure eerily like medieval bow and stable hunting,tranquilliser gun; they used bows and crossbows. I aim to prolong lives by transporting them to fresh pastures; they shot to kill for the table.
This 15th century painting depicts a medieval hunter watching and waiting for a - photo 2
This 15th century painting depicts a medieval hunter watching and waiting for a red deer stag. Humans may have ceased sleeping in trees 1.5 million years ago, perhaps as they learned to control fire to deter predators, but until very recently they used trees as lookouts when hunting.
BIBLIOTHEQUE MAZARINE, PARIS, FRANCE / ARCHIVES CHARMET / THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
For the purposes of this book, therefore, imagine me in my eyrie aloft with the lichens, insects and birds, unnoticed by the deer beneath. Here I escape the pedestrian and see with an elevated perspective. Such a perch always fascinates: Italo Calvino's fictional Baron Cosimo took to the trees at twelve and never came down, and the eccentric Yorkshire naturalist, Charles Waterton, rushed up high trees quickly and with agility in his Yorkshire park, Walton Hall, until he died, nimble into his eighties, in 1865.
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