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01 Medieval

Tudor and Early Stuart Parks of Hertfordshire

Publication grant The publication of this volume has been assisted by a generous grant from the Marc Fitch Fund

Tudor and Early Stuart Parks of Hertfordshire

Anne Rowe

HERTFORDSHIRE PUBLICATIONS an imprint of University of Hertfordshire Press

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Hertfordshire Publications an imprint of University of Hertfordshire Press College Lane Hatfield Hertfordshire AL10 9AB Š Anne Rowe 2019 The right of Anne Rowe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-912260-11-9 Design by Arthouse Publishing Solutions Ltd Printed in Great Britain by XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Dedicated to my sister, Sue Cooles

Contents List of figures viii List of plates x List of tables xi Abbreviations xii Dates, units of measurement and money xiii Acknowledgements xiv Preface xv

Part I Introduction: Tudor and early Stuart parks of Hertfordshire The sources 3 Hunting in Hertfordshire’s parks 6 The medieval legacy 9 Hertfordshire’s parks 1485–1642 9 Park ownership 12 Summarising the main trends 15 The new parks and new parkland 15 Disparking 18 Early park design 20 The inhabitants of the parks 22 Parks without deer? 28 Poaching 28 Park management 29 Park buildings 36

Part II Hertfordshire’s parks and the Tudor and Stuart monarchies The crown estate and its parks in the county 45 The Tudor and Stuart monarchs in Hertfordshire 50

Part III Gazetteer of Tudor and early Stuart parks in Hertfordshire Introduction 66 Gazetteer 68 Glossary 257 Bibliography 258 Index 273

vii

Figures 1. County map of the medieval parks 10 2. Chart showing active deer parks in Hertfordshire, 1485–1642 11 3. Chart showing number of deer parks by social group and variations in total acreage, 1485–1642 11 4. Line chart showing acreage of active parkland by social group, 1485–1642 12 5. County map of parks existing 1485–1642, period of origin and distance from London 17 6. Plan of fishpond earthworks in the valley of the Hunsdon Brook 19 7. Detail of a plan of Berkhamsted Park by John Norden c.1612 showing woodland and lawns 34 8. Plan for Hatfield Lodge by John Thorpe, undated 37 9. Old Park Lodge (or Keeper’s House), Ashridge, drawn by H. Edridge, 1805 38 10. Map of Hertfordshire’s active deer parks in the mid-sixteenth century indicating those held by Henry VIII 46 11. View of Hertford and its castle by John Speed, 1610 49 12. John Norden’s county map (1598), showing the travels of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1530 52 13. Key map showing Hertfordshire’s parks in the Tudor and early Stuart periods with their parishes 67 14. Weld Hall, Aldenham, on the county map by John Oliver, 1695 70 15. Plan of the garden earthworks in the former Benington Park 74 16. South side of Berkhamsted Park on John Norden’s plan of Berkhamsted, c.1612 78 17. One of the milestones from the wall around Theobalds Park 94 18. The remains of the King’s Pond in the former Theobalds Park, 2013 96 19. Digswell Park on the county map by John Norden, 1598 104 20. Bedwell Park on the county map by John Seller, 1676 109 21. Plan of land at Hatfield sold to the earl of Salisbury, 1610 116 22. Parkland around Hatfield House on the county map by John Seller, 1676 120 23. Brocket Hall, Hatfield on the county map by John Seller, 1676 136 24. Parkland around Hatfield House on John Oliver’s county map, 1695, including Hatfield Wood Hall, Popes and Tyttenhanger 144 25. Deer parks in the Gade and Colne valleys on the county map by John Norden, 1598 162 26. The parks at Ashridge on the county map by John Seller, 1676 170 27. Hadham Park on the county map by John Oliver, 1695 175 28. Nyn Hall, Northaw, by J.P. Malcolm, c.1805 180 29. Aerial photograph of the site of Redbourn’s former parks, 1947 184 30. Holywell House from the gardens, 1806, engraved by J. Storer from a drawing by G. Shepherd 196 31. Gorhambury Park on the county map by John Oliver, 1695 201 32. Remains of Gorhambury House, 1803, engraved by J. Greig from a painting by G. Arnald 202 33. Sopwell House on a plan of Aye Wood by Mark Pierce, c.1600 206 34. The park at Sopwell on the county map by John Norden, 1598 206

viii

35. Holywell House and Sopwell House on the map of St Albans by John Oliver, 1700 207 36. Shingle Hall, Sawbridgeworth, on the county map by John Oliver, 1695 212 37. Park north-east of Stanstead Bury on Saxton’s county map, 1577 220 38. Park south of Stanstead Bury on Norden’s county map, 1598 220 39. Parks at Stanstead Bury and Hunsdon on the county map by John Seller, 1676 222 40. Aerial photograph of the site of the sixteenth-century Pendley Park, Tring, 1947 227 41. Parks at Ware and surrounding area on the county map by John Seller, 1676 234 42. Parks at Cashiobury and More Hall on the county map by John Seller, 1676 238 43. Cassiobury in the mid-nineteenth century by Rock & Co. 239 44. Woodhall Park and surrounding area on the county map by John Norden, 1598 244 45. Ancient oak pollards in Woodhall Park 246 46. An ‘old sketch’ of Lamer House, Wheathampstead, ?c.1760 252 47. Wyddial Hall by Jan Drapentier, 1700 256

ix

Plates 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Map of Hertfordshire by Christopher Saxton, 1577, from Lord Burghley’s atlas Map of Hertfordshire by John Norden, 1598 Portrait of Henry VIII c.1530–35, by Joos Van Cleve Portrait of James VI and I, ‘dated 1618?’, by Paul Van Somer Detail of a portrait of the future Edward VI, 1546–before 28 January 1547, attributed to William Scrots 6. Portrait of William Cecil and Robert Cecil, after 1606, by circle of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger 7. Map of Cheshunt Park by Israel Amyce, 1600/01 8. Map of Lord Burghley’s Theobalds estate c.1574 9. Map of Theobalds Park by Israel Amyce, 1602 10. Plan of Theobalds Park in the parish of Cheshunt, by John Thorpe, 1611 11. Map of Hatfield Palace and environs c.1608 12. Map of Hatfield Palace, gardens and south to Potters Bar c.1608 13. Map of the area around Hatfield House c.1610 14. Portrait of William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, 1626, by George Geldorp 15. Detail of a map of the manor of Digswell, 1599 16. Detail of a plan of the manor and parish of Benyngton, 1628 17. Painting of Hadham Hall from the park, c.1640, unknown artist 18. Detail of a map of the manor of Gorhambury by Benjamin Hare, 1634 19. Detail of a seventeenth-century plan of the manor of Sopwell 20. Hunting scenes from Hertford Borough charter, 1605

x

Tables 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Parks shown on county maps and the list of parks suitable for horse breeding of 1583 5 Parks created in, or first appearing in the records during, the Tudor and early Stuart periods 16 Valuation of trees growing in the launds of Hunsdon Great Park in 1556 33 Huntable beasts as a proportion of the herd in Theobalds Park 97 The woods in Langley Park, 1608 163 Survey of the pale around Moor Park, 1563–4 189

xi

Abbreviations BL Bod. Lib. Cal. Chart.

CCP Commons CPR CSP dom.

CSP Ven. EHAS HALS HHA HHER HKW Inq. p.m.

JP L&P LiDAR ODNB OS TNA

British Library Bodleian Library Calendar of charter rolls Calendar of the Cecil papers in Hatfield House The history of parliament: the House of Commons Calendar of patent rolls Calendar of state papers, domestic Calendar of state papers, Venetian East Herts Archaeological Society Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies Hatfield House Archives Hertfordshire Historic Environment Record H.M. Colvin et al. (eds), History of the king’s works, 6 vols Inquisition post mortem justice of the peace Letters and papers, foreign and domestic, of the reign of Henry VIII, 1509–47 Light Detection and Ranging Oxford dictionary of national biography Ordnance Survey The National Archives, Kew

xii

Dates, units of measurement and money Until 1752 the new year began on 25 March (Lady Day), not 1 January. For dates lying between 1 January and 24 March before 1752, the convention is to record both years for clarity: for example 1 February 1525/6. The accounting year usually ran from Michaelmas (29 September) to Michaelmas.

A perch was a highly variable measure of between 9 and 26 feet which became standardised at 16.5 feet.

Different Hertfordshire manors used different measures; for example, at Benington a perch contained 18 feet as late as the sixteenth century. Some measurements quoted in this book in perches have been converted into metres using the standardised measure, but readers should bear in mind that the conversions given are very approximate. A perch could also be called a rod or pole.

Area was measured in acres, roods and perches. An acre consisted of four roods and each rood contained 40 perches.

Conversions 1 foot = 0.3 metres 1 furlong = 200 metres 1 mile = 1.6 kilometres 1 acre = 0.4 hectares A pound (ÂŁ) contained 20 shillings and one shilling (s) contained 12 pennies (d). 1 shilling = 5p

xiii

Acknowledgements Many people have helped me during the research and writing of this book and I am immensely grateful to all of them. In particular I wish to thank Graham Allatt for allowing me to photograph his county map

by Thomas Kitchin, Susanna Bott for her help with Plate 16, Lynne Burton of Hertfordshire Archives, together with Gemma Cooles and Torsten Moller for their photographic skills, my sister Sue Cooles for creating Figures 5, 10 and 13, Rob Liddiard for his helpful comments on Part I, Richard Walduck for his interest and support, Sarah Whale and Robin Harcourt Williams of Hatfield House Archives, and Tom Williamson for sharing his knowledge and his earthwork plans in Figures 6 and 15. Heather Falvey, Sue Flood, Bridget Howlett, the late John McCann, Andrew Macnair, Sue Pittman, Lee Prosser, Kathryn Shreeve, Mick Thompson and Alan Thomson have all kindly shared their knowledge, information and sources with me and the staff at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies have never failed to provide a helpful and friendly service. My husband Charlie deserves special credit for his unfailing support and willingness to give an opinion on innumerable statistical and grammatical queries over many years. I am also very grateful to Jane Housham and Sarah Elvins of the University of Hertfordshire Press for their great patience and their supportive and professional assistance throughout the development of the book.

Great credit is also due to the late Richard Thompson Gunton, librarian at Hatfield House from 1866, whose meticulous cataloguing of the estate papers proved invaluable for researching the development of the Hatfield parklands.

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Mark Pretlove of Gillmark Gallery for supplying many of the images of early maps and illustrations and without whose great generosity this book, and its author, would have been much the poorer.

I am grateful to the following for permission to reproduce images in their collections: Marquess of Salisbury Gillmark Gallery Gorhambury Estates Company Limited The Royal Collection The British Library The Bodleian Library Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies Hertford Museum Ashridge Archives Sir John Soane’s Museum The National Archives This book has been published with the generous financial support of the Hertfordshire Gardens Trust Marc Fitch Fund Gretna Trust

xiv

Preface The proposal for this book was accepted by Hertfordshire Publications at the beginning of 2011 and the necessary research and writing progressed in fits and starts as other work permitted over the succeeding seven and a half years. The initial intention was to continue the research which resulted in Medieval Parks of Hertfordshire (2009) and compile a history of the county’s deer parks up to at least the end of the seventeenth century, thus covering the period of the Civil Wars and Interregnum and including the many new parks created in post-Restoration Hertfordshire. But as research progressed, and the number of parks and the volume of documentary evidence continued to grow, it became necessary to curtail the chronological scope of the book. The end date of the history was consequently scaled back to the start of the Civil Wars in 1642, but the start date was also shifted back to the beginning of the Tudor period in 1485, overlapping slightly with the previous volume, as research revealed the important role of the Tudor monarchs – and their successors, James I and Charles I – in the history of Hertfordshire’s parks.

Much scholarly attention has been focused on medieval deer parks – their social significance and the relative importance of their various functions – but little has been published about the parks which continued into the early modern period and the new deer parks created during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This book attempts to address this gap in our knowledge of the nation’s parks.

In addition, I hope the book will contribute to a greater understanding of the development of Hertfordshire’s landscapes and demonstrate how the county’s attractive countryside was enjoyed and appreciated by the social elites of earlier centuries. The extensive parklands have, in many cases, left a deep and enduring legacy in our modern landscape that deserves to be recognised and valued as an important ecological resource and heritage asset in a county which is currently facing immense development pressure.

Anne Rowe September 2018

xv

Part One

Introduction: Tudor and early Stuart parks of Hertfordshire

T

deer parks that existed in Hertfordshire during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.1 As in medieval times, parks in the early modern period were almost always privately owned enclosures containing deer, and evidence of their importance as venues for recreational hunting becomes increasingly abundant during the sixteenth century. Their depiction on the earliest county maps, which appeared in the Elizabethan period, attests to their cultural importance and prominence as features in the landscape. Less than one-third of the parks depicted on those maps were sixteenth-century creations; the remainder were medieval parks, half of which were already over 300 years old and two (at Benington and Ware) that were recorded five centuries earlier in Domesday Book. The Elizabethan county maps were part of national mapping projects that allow us to make direct comparisons with other counties for the first time, confirming that Hertfordshire’s reputation for being a particularly ‘parky’ county was well founded: it had the highest density of parks in south-east England at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 Deer parks were previously assumed to have declined in number and significance in the Elizabethan period, partly owing to increasing commercial pressures on land caused by population growth and greater demand for agricultural products, especially in the counties closest to London.3 Recent research has shown that this assumption is incorrect. In Hertfordshire the number of parks was remarkably stable from the late thirteenth century onwards, increasing to a peak at the end of the sixteenth century that matched the medieval peak three centuries earlier. Many of the new parks were created by Queen Elizabeth’s officials and courtiers, who chose to live in Hertfordshire precisely because it was close to London. Levels of disparkment – the cessation of deer park management – remained low in Hertfordshire throughout the sixteenth century

and park losses were generally more than matched by the creation of new parks. Although park numbers started to fall from the late sixteenth century, the total acreage of parkland in the county did not peak until the end of the Jacobean period, reaching c.13,400 acres (5,423 hectares) – an increase almost entirely due to the expansion of the royal parks.

A detailed analysis of the evidence for those parks – who created, owned and perhaps disparked them, and how they were used and managed – is presented in the pages that follow in Part 1 of this volume. By the time Henry VII claimed the throne in 1485 – and in contrast to earlier centuries – deer parks were more likely to be located close to the owner’s residence and during the sixteenth century their function as an ornamental setting for a country house became firmly established. Evidence for the dawning of design in Hertfordshire’s park landscapes is also explored below.

Several monarchs and members of their immediate families spent significant periods of time in Hertfordshire and played a notable part in the history of its parkland; indeed, many of the county’s parks were acquired by Henry VIII. A brief account of the presence of the Tudor and early Stuart monarchy in Hertfordshire is presented in Part 2.

Part 3 is a gazetteer of parks for which records dating to the period 1485–1642 have been found. Each entry brings together the documentary, cartographic and occasional field evidence for that park and is accompanied by a map showing its probable extent in the Tudor and early Stuart periods.

HIS BOOK IS ABOUT THE

The sources A greater range of sources is available to researchers of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century deer parks compared with those of the medieval period, and those that allow direct comparisons with other counties are of particular value. The most important of these are outlined below.

1 The work presented here forms a continuation of the research published in Medieval parks of Hertfordshire (Hatfield, 2009).

2 Based on a comparison by Susan Pittman of maps by Saxton (1577) and Speed (1610) of 17 counties in south-east England (S. Pittman, ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean deer parks in Kent’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 132 (2012), p. 67). After correcting the number of parks shown by Speed (27), Hertfordshire had the highest density of parks – one for every 20 square miles – on both maps.

3

Introduction

County maps During the sixteenth century cartography began to flourish in Britain, as a few enlightened men – most notably William Cecil Lord Burghley (Plate 6), minister to Queen Elizabeth I – realised its potential value as a tool for both governing the nation and, at a much more local scale, managing one’s own estate. The earliest map of Hertfordshire was produced in 1577 by Christopher Saxton, a cartographer selected by Cecil to complete a detailed and consistent survey of all the counties of England and Wales. The atlas – including the Hertfordshire map – was published in 1579. Perhaps the most interesting version of this map is the proof copy sent to Lord Burghley, which was subsequently bound into the ‘Burghley–Saxton Atlas’ (Plate 1).4 Burghley added numerous annotations and amendments to his copy of the map, almost entirely confined to the east of the county, which he knew best. He added five places: ‘Newgate’, at the eastern end of the park called Hatfield Wood, and ‘Hodesdo[n]bury p[ar]k (which he owned) north-west of Hoddesdon were given square symbols; while ‘Woodhall – butlar’ at Watton, ‘Danyells – Morisyn’ at Sandon and ‘Hoo’ to the south-east of ‘Poules Walden’ were located with small circles. To two unnamed parks in the far east of the county he added the names ‘Pisho p[ar]k’ and ‘Shy[n]gle hall’, but his most frequent additions were the names of landowners, presumably men he knew personally. These include the earl of Essex at Benington, Lytton at Knebworth, Horsey at Digswell, Mr Capell at Little Hadham, ‘Barley now Leve[n]thorp’ at Albury, ‘Sadlar’ at Aspenden and Gill at Wyddial.

Apart from towns and villages and the topography (rivers, hills and wooded areas), the most obvious features recorded on the map by Saxton were the deer parks, ringed ‘with miniature palings to suggest their importance and flatter his noble customers’.5 Twenty-six parks were portrayed (see Table 1) and, while their scale is often exaggerated, their locations, relative sizes and varying shapes do reflect an approximation of their sixteenth-century geography. Saxton omitted the far south-west corner of the county from the map and consequently the park at The More was not depicted, but it is shown on his map of Middlesex (on the Hertfordshire side of the county boundary), bringing the Hertfordshire total to 27.6 We can assume that the parks recorded on these maps contained deer at the time they were surveyed. In a study of parks in Kent, Susan Pittman was able to compare those depicted on the earliest county maps, including one by Saxton, with a 1576 list recording whether the parks were with or without deer, and she concluded that ‘the cartographers were attempting to record only existing deer parks’.7 The second map of Hertfordshire was produced by John Norden in 1598 and was also the result of an original survey

(Plate 2). It was the first map of the county to show roads, but in other respects the features he chose to portray were very similar to those depicted by Saxton. Norden’s map shows 32 deer parks (Table 1), including one that appears to have arisen from a mistaken interpretation of Saxton’s map. Saxton placed (and named) Walkern park east of the village of Ardeley and consequently within his boundary of the hundred of Odsey; a short distance to the south-east – and separated by the hundred boundary – he showed Benington park. In reality, Walkern and Benington parks shared a common boundary, which was accurately depicted by Norden, but he also illustrated the park shown by Saxton east of Ardeley, where there is in fact no evidence for a park in the sixteenth century.8 As a source of evidence for active deer parks, Norden’s map is open to question. He depicted several parks for which there is no known evidence of deer at the end of the sixteenth century, including Digswell, Stortford, Sopwell and Cashiobury. Particular doubt exists over Benington, which had been disparked by 1580, and Pendley, which was at least partially disparked during the 1590s. At least a quarter of Bedwell Park had been ploughed by 1597 but Norden depicted its full medieval extent.

Conversely, two parks for which there is evidence of deer in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century are not included on the map: at Northaw poachers took a buck in 1597 and at Knebworth a doe was shot in 1607. Knebworth was also recorded on a county list of parks drawn up in 1583 – as were Weld (Aldenham) and Wyddial – yet none appear on Norden’s map; however, without further evidence it is not possible to judge whether there were deer in the parks when he undertook his survey.

The next map of the county, made by William Smith in 1602, was closely based on Norden’s map and adds nothing new to the record of the county’s parks. John Speed’s map, produced in 1610, is of more interest, however.9 In addition to his county maps Speed also published a map of England and, in a table bordering this map, he recorded that Hertfordshire had 23 parks but no chases or forests. In fact, his map of Hertfordshire portrayed 28 parks, one of which was probably fictitious (Table 1). Speed, who freely admitted that most of his maps were based on the work of earlier cartographers, relied in the case of Hertfordshire almost exclusively on John Norden’s map of 1598. As a result, he repeated Norden’s mistake regarding the extra park to the east of Ardeley, but, perhaps aware that Norden had shown too many parks in the area, he merged Walkern and Benington parks into one elongated park. Speed also introduced other inaccuracies: his rendering of the three Hunsdon parks placed the south-western park too far from the other two, and he erroneously applied the name

3 H. Prince, Parks in Hertfordshire since 1500 (Hatfield, 2008), p. 23.

4 BL Royal MS. 18. D.III, f.34 Hartfordiae Comitatus, Hertfordshire map by Christopher Saxton, 1577 (the map can be seen at <http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery>); A. Macnair, A. Rowe and T. Williamson, Dury & Andrews’ map of Hertfordshire. Society and landscape in the eighteenth century (Oxford, 2016), p. 5.

5 N. Nicolson, ‘Introduction’, in The counties of Britain. A Tudor atlas by John Speed (London, 1995), p. 16.

6 BL Royal MS. 18. D.III, f.24 Cantii, Southsexiae, Surriae Et Middlesexiae Comitat, map of Kent, Sussex, Surrey & Middlesex by Christopher Saxton, 1575.

7 Pittman, ‘Elizabethan and Jacobean deer parks in Kent’, p. 57.

8 Prince ascribed this park to Ardeley Bury, but that lay west of Ardeley and no evidence of an active deer park has been found in the sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries. (Prince, Parks, p. 11).

9 BL Maps C.2.cc.2.(3.) map of Hertfordshire by William Smith, c.1603; J. Speed, The counties of Britain. A Tudor atlas by John Speed (London, 1995 edn), pp. 98–9.

4

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Table 1 Comparing the parks shown on the county maps by Saxton, Norden and Speed and the list of parks suitable for the breeding of horses of 1583.

Park

Bedwell, Essendon Benington Berkhamsted Brocket, Hatfield Cashiobury, Watford Cheshunt Digswell Furneux Pelham Hadham Hall Hatfield Innings Hatfield Middle Hatfield Great Park/Wood Hatfield Woodhall Hertingfordbury Hunsdon Great Hunsdon New Hunsdon Pond King’s Langley Knebworth More, Rickmansworth Pendley, Tring Pisho, Sawbridgeworth Ponsbourne, Hatfield Popes, Hatfield Salisbury Hall, Shenley Shingle, Sawbridgeworth Sopwell, St Albans Standon Lordship Stanstead Bury, Stanstead Abbots Stortford, Bishop’s Stortford Theobalds, Cheshunt Tyttenhanger, Ridge Walkern Ware Weld, Aldenham Woodhall, Watton at stone Wyddial

Saxton 1577

List 1583

* * * *

* * *

*

*

* * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * *ii * * * * * * * * *

*i * * * * * * *

* *

* * *

* * * * * *

27

28

Norden 1598 * * * * * * *

Speed 1610 * *iii * * *

* * * *

* * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

* *

* *

* * * * * * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * * *iii *

*

*

31

27

(+1 error east of Ardeley) (+1 error east of Ardeley)

i Shown on Hertfordshire side of county boundary on Saxton’s map of Middlesex. ii Two parks were indicated at Hunsdon but it is not clear which of the three parks there was meant. iii Benington and Walkern Parks are shown as one park but counted here separately.

of the hamlet of ‘Freseden’ (Frithsden) to the nearby park at Berkhamsted. In addition to these relatively minor errors, there are some significant omissions from Speed’s map, namely the deer parks at Brocket Hall and Shingle Hall (shown by both Saxton and Norden) and at Digswell and Sopwell (shown by Norden only). Was Speed careless in his copying of Norden’s map or was he presenting an accurate record of active deer

parks a decade or so later? Owing to the fragmentary nature of the evidence for all four parks, the question is impossible to answer: there is no conclusive evidence for deer in any of the four parks c.1610, but nor is there evidence that any had been disparked. One of the most interesting features of Speed’s map is his plan of the town of Hertford, probably surveyed himself, which includes a bird’s-eye view of the castle (see Figure 11).

5

Introduction

It was to be over half a century before the county was surveyed again and on this occasion the task was undertaken

by John Oliver, for a map published by John Seller in 1676.10 Once again, parks were a prominent feature of the map, including those at Ashridge and Knebworth, created before the outbreak of the Civil Wars, and another 14 established since the Restoration – but the histories of the latter are beyond the scope of this book.

online catalogue of the Hatfield estate papers, meticulous handwritten catalogues compiled by Richard Thompson Gunton, private secretary and librarian at Hatfield House from 1866, have rendered this valuable archive accessible to researchers who are able to visit Hatfield House. The Hatfield House archive also contains a collection of early maps commissioned

by William and Robert Cecil, pioneers of estate mapping.

County histories, the earliest of which was published in 1700, provide a wealth of information about the ownership of the county’s parks up to the early twentieth century, while published calendars of Quarter Sessions records provide a useful record of prosecutions for poaching activity in Hertfordshire’s parks.

National records State papers held at The National Archives in Kew contain valuable information about parks held by the crown and occasional information about other parks. The calendars of the State Papers Domestic and Cecil Papers can be searched on the British History Online website and calendars of the Patent Rolls can also be found online, but variation in the spelling of names is a constant challenge to the researcher. Royal expenditure on crown properties, including parks, has been very usefully analysed, summarised and published in The History of the King’s Works, edited by Howard Colvin. An important record of royal manors and their parks in Hertfordshire was compiled in a 1556 survey for Philip and Mary.11 A century later, the remaining royal estates passed to the control of parliament and detailed surveys were undertaken to ascertain their monetary value, including of those in Berkhamsted and Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. These documents can be seen at The National Archives.12 In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, her Constables were required to draw up county lists of parks suitable for the breeding of horses. The earliest known list for Hertfordshire, dating from 1583, records 28 parks and the names of their owners or occupiers (Table 1). For the parks at Weld and Wyddial, the 1583 list is the earliest known evidence of their existence.13 Information about former park-owners can frequently be found on the websites of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and of The History of Parliament.

Hunting in Hertfordshire’s parks Hunting was the most popular leisure activity during the Tudor period, as it had been in previous centuries and as it was to continue to be into the seventeenth century. Wealthy landowners enjoyed a range of hunting activities essentially unchanged from the medieval period, including pursuing deer on horseback with hounds (par force de chiens), ‘bow and stable’ hunting – in which deer were driven towards stationary huntsmen, coursing of deer and hare with greyhounds, falconry, wildfowling and fishing. Elaborate etiquettes and language, promoted in popular books of the period, imbued hunting and hawking with added mystique and social exclusivity.14 But the pursuit of a stag or buck on horseback accompanied by a pack of hounds was considered the noblest and pre-eminent hunting experience and was the favourite pastime of most huntsmen and women, from the monarch down to the Tudor gentry.15 Many of these hunting activities took place in parks, a fact attested by contemporary observer Fynes Moryson, who spent much of the 1590s travelling in Britain and across Europe. He wrote, ‘The English are so naturally inclined to pleasure, as there is no Countrie, wherein the Gentlemen and Lords have so many and large Parkes onely reserved for the pleasure of hunting.’ Moryson’s journeys through Hertfordshire, which appear to have taken in Hertford, Theobalds (Waltham Cross) and St Albans, perhaps contributed to his opinion that ‘England (yea perhaps one County thereof) hath more fallow Deare, then all Europe that I have seene’, and he considered that ‘every gentleman of five hundred or a thousand pounds rent by the yeere’ had a park of fallow deer ‘inclosed with pales of wood for two or three miles compasse’.16 The deer-hunting calendar followed a regular pattern. Red deer stags17 and fallow bucks were hunted in the summer, from

Local records Useful information about a county’s parks can also be found in estate records, many of which can be located using the online catalogue of The National Archives. Only rarely do collections of estate documents survive and become accessible to researchers but, where they do, they can provide an unparalleled record of park management. Outstanding records from the early seventeenth century have survived for the estates at Hatfield (at Hatfield House) and Walkern (at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies at County Hall, Hertford). Although there is no

10 D. Hodson, The printed maps of Hertfordshire 1577–1900, Part I (London, 1969), p. 32.

11 TNA E 315/391 survey of Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions of King Philip and Queen Mary, 1556.

12 Hertfordshire properties can be found at TNA E 317/Herts. See also E 317/Cambs/4 and 5 for surveys in Royston.

13 TNA SP12/163/14; CSP dom. 1581–90, p. 125. Lord Hunsdon received a ‘Certificate of the horsemen within the county of Hertford; and of the parks and commons for the breed [sic] of horses, with the names of the owners or occupiers’.

14 Juliana Berners, The boke of St Albans (the earliest hunting manual to be printed in England, reprinted 22 times between 1486 and 1615); G. Gascoigne, The noble arte of venerie or hunting (London, 1575); T. Cockaine, A short treatise of hunting (London, 1591).

15 R.B. Manning, Hunters and poachers. A social and cultural history of unlawful hunting in England, 1485–1640 (Oxford, 1993), p. 4.

16 F. Moryson, The Itinerary of Fynes Moryson, 4 (London, 1617), <http://www.archive.org/stream/fynesmorysons04moryuoft/fynesmorysons04moryuoft_ djvu.txt>, accessed 27 August 2017.

17 Mature males with antlers of ten tines or points were more accurately called harts, but in sixteenth-century Hertfordshire records they are called stags.

6

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

about mid-June to mid-September, when they were in prime condition (‘in grease’) and their antlers were fully developed; hinds and does were hunted during the winter. Hunting generally ceased during the autumn, when the deer were rutting, and in the early summer, when the calves and fawns were born (the ‘fence month’).18 The hunting season for stags and bucks happily coincided with the annual royal progress, when succeeding monarchs and their courtiers left the palaces in and around the capital, partly to avoid the diseases and foul smells that were especially prevalent in the city during the warm summer months. Other functions of the progress included honouring favoured gentlemen with a royal visit and displaying the monarch to the people, but for the kings Henry VIII, James I and, to a lesser extent, Charles I, the progress was primarily a glorious hunting holiday.

Stags, being twice the size of a fallow buck, were the quarry of choice for most monarchs, but in Hertfordshire red deer were confined to just a few parks, including Bedwell, Theobalds, Watton Woodhall, Hatfield and Little Hadham. When Henry VIII wanted to hunt at Knebworth in 1531 he brought his own stag with him from Ampthill.19 Few of Hertfordshire’s parks were large enough to accommodate a par force stag hunt and, even in those that were, the stag and its pursuers were not necessarily restricted to the confines of the park. The large parks at Bedwell (Essendon) and Theobalds (Cheshunt) lay adjacent to the extensive wooded common land of southeast Hertfordshire, which extended eastwards from North Mymms through Northaw to Cheshunt and Broxbourne and continued south across the county boundary onto Enfield Chase in Middlesex, offering a huge area of open countryside over which hounds and huntsmen could pursue their quarry. In 1557 Princess Elizabeth was conducted on horseback from her home at Hatfield, where she was confined by Queen Mary, to enjoy a hunting spectacle on Enfield Chase (p. 55), and when King James went for his first hunt at Theobalds in 1603 the hunting party also found itself on Enfield Chase.20 While it seems likely, therefore, that the more prestigious organised stag hunts were not confined to parks, it is clear that smaller-scale, informal hunting of red deer by the owner and a small number of guests could certainly be accommodated within a park, as in 1584, when the earl of Leicester hunted in Lord Burghley’s brand new deer park at Theobalds. The earl wrote to thank the absent host for the pleasure, saying ‘I have been bold to

make some of your stags afraid but killed none … yet had I very good sport and killed a young hind.’21 Over succeeding decades Theobalds Park was greatly expanded to over 2,500 acres, first by Sir Robert Cecil and then from 1607 by James I, who imparked part of Enfield Chase and parts of Cheshunt and Northaw commons. By c.1620 the king had evidently decided that the park was large enough to accommodate his par force stag hunting. His desire for privacy and security had become more important than his freedom to pursue his quarry across open country and he surrounded the entire park with a brick wall nine miles long (pp. 94–5).

There is evidence for the hunting of fallow deer in parks by various monarchs and members of the aristocracy, but the methods used are rarely recorded. Henry VIII made payments from his privy purse to the keepers of the parks at Berkhamsted, Hertingfordbury, Bedwell, Hunsdon, Pisho and The More, which, while not conclusive, is the best evidence we have that he hunted in them. His two daughters, as well as his son Edward, were raised with the expectation that they would hunt. Mary purchased hunting equipment – bows, crossbows, arrows and quivers – in 1537 and 1543 and Elizabeth is known to have hunted on horseback in her youth.22 They are very likely to have hunted deer in the parks at Hunsdon, Hertingfordbury, Hatfield and elsewhere in the county. Elizabeth certainly hunted in the Innings Park at Hatfield, which she owned from 1551, as measures proposed in 1578 for improving the park pasture were to be undertaken without ‘impairing the Queen’s Majesty’s hunting and her walks in the park, wherein her highness taketh great pleasure’.23 Lady Anne Bourchier, daughter of the earl of Essex, hunted deer in Benington Park and was accused in 1560 of taking liberties with the game by Sir John Boteler, who, as master of the hunt, had restocked the park during the previous decade. The judgement of Lord Keeper Nicholas Bacon was that Lady Bourchier could hunt in the park just twice a year – once in summer and once in winter, or twice in summer – and that on each occasion she could kill no more than three deer.24 In September 1611 James I wanted an old buck in Theobalds Park to be saved until it could be hunted by his son Prince Henry.25 In 1615 Prince Charles hunted in Berkhamsted Park, accompanied by men from the town, and killed a buck,26 and in 1618 Lord Hunsdon’s Little Park at Hunsdon was described as ‘full stored with fallow deer in great abundance’, which he was preserving ‘for his pleasure disport and expence’.27 In the

18 M. de Belin, From the deer to the fox: the hunting transition and the landscape 1600–1850 (Hatfield, 2013), p. 15.

19 N. Harris, King Henry VIIIth’s household book, being an account of the privy purse expenses of Henry VIII from November, 1529, to December 1532 (London, 1827), p. 163.

20 J. Nichols, E. Goldring, F. Eales, E. Clarke, J.E. Archer, G. Heaton and S. Knight (eds), John Nichols’s the progresses and public processions of Queen Elizabeth I: a new edition of the early modern sources, 1, 1533–1571 (Oxford, 2014), p. 84, citing J. Strype, Ecclesiastical memorials, iii, 444–5; A. Thomson, ‘Progress, Retreat, and Pursuit: James I in Hertfordshire’, in D. Jones-Baker (ed.), Hertfordshire in History (Hertford, 1991), p. 94.

21 S. Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the court of Elizabeth I (New Haven, CT, 2011), p. 253 citing Leicester to WB, 31 July 1584, SP 12/172ff. 50r.

22 F. Madden (ed.), Privy purse expenses of the Princess Mary, daughter of King Henry the Eighth, afterwards Queen Mary: with a memoir of the princess, and notes (London, 1831), pp. 30, 122, 125; Manning, Hunters and poachers, p. 200.

23 TNA E 178/1026 Certificate as to the destruction of deer by the growth of moss in Innings Park, 1578.

24 TNA C 78/38/28 decree in Butler v Bourghchier, 1567.

25 CSP dom. 1611–18, p. 75.

26 J.W. Cobb, Two lectures on the history and antiquities of Berkhamsted (London, 1883), p. 37.

27 TNA STAC 8/27/12, February 1618.

7

Introduction

1620s the earl of Salisbury kept a record of the deer taken in his parks at Hatfield and Cheshunt, carefully noting whether they had been killed by hounds, greyhounds, a gun or by a fourth – yet to be ascertained – method which appears to be denoted by a ‘w’.28 The entertainment of foreign dignitaries invariably included hunting and Theobalds Park was frequently used for this purpose in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

This important diplomatic function will be one reason for the high proportion of ‘huntable beasts’ recorded in the park in 1620, when it contained 295 mature stags and bucks, about 30 per cent of the total.29 James I’s favourite method of hunting deer, in common with many of his predecessors, was to follow his huntsmen and a pack of 20–30 hounds on horseback. The dogs were taken to the spot where the stag or buck selected for the chase had been standing to learn its scent. In the large park at Theobalds the king and his visitors might travel to the starting point of the hunt by carriage; then, once mounted, he would follow the hounds, which pursued their prey relentlessly until it had been caught and brought down.30 As well as packs of staghounds, buckhounds and hart hounds, the king also had otter hounds and harriers (for hares). Each pack was under the care of a master and his staff, and a keeper of the waggons was responsible for conveying the buckhounds and harriers to the chosen hunting ground.31 King Charles I had a pack of 32 buckhounds for deer-hunting, a pack of harriers and beagles for hare coursing, gun dogs (or ‘slug hounds’) for wildfowling and mews filled with hawks for the sport of falconry, while Queen Henrietta Maria also had her own pack of hounds.32 With advancing years the sporting activities of the great hunting monarchs had to be tailored to accommodate their increasing corpulence or infirmity. When Henry VIII gave up following his hounds on horseback in the late 1530s he took up bow and stable hunting, also very popular in the period and

ideally suited to parks. Large numbers of deer could be killed by a group of bowmen concealed in bushes or on a standing as their quarry was driven past, and the king is said to have hunted in this way in Moor Park.33 Sometimes the deer were driven into toils or nets before being slaughtered, as recorded when Queen Elizabeth – in her late fifties – hunted in Enfield Park in 1590.34 Another alternative was deer coursing, essentially a spectator sport where deer were driven by dogs along a long, narrow enclosure overlooked by a standing. According to Blome, writing in 1686, the course, also known as a paddock or parrock, was ideally a mile (1.6 km) long and about a quarter of a mile (0.4 km) wide, with pens to hold the deer at both ends.35 Henry VIII laid out at least three ‘parockes and courses’ in Moor Park, taking up about a third (225 acres) of the 830-acre Great Park, and he had standings built beside two of them in 1538 and 1542 to enable him to watch the sport.36 In 1576 the keepers of Moor Park proposed alterations to the course to make it ‘far more fairer and save the lives of many deer being coursed’ (p. 189).37 Henry VIII also had a course – ‘le Parock’ – at Hunsdon, the pales of which were in need of repair in 1536.38 There was a course in Sir Robert Cecil’s park at Theobalds by the end of the sixteenth century that was overlooked by a lodge (Plate 9) and there may have been another at Furneux Pelham, where a ten-acre piece of ground in the new park was ‘commonly called the Parrocke’ in 1600.39 James I thought coursing with greyhounds a poor substitute for par force hunting, and considered shooting with guns or bows a ‘thievish form of hunting’.40 Nevertheless, by 1650 there were four standings in Theobalds Park, three of which, at the west end of the park and described as ‘standings seates or Banquetinge houses’, were presumably quite substantial.41 Another form of hunting that frequently took place in parks and was popular with both men and women was falconry.

Henry VIII had always enjoyed the sport, but its importance

28 HHA General 1/13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28.

29 P.D. Glennie, ‘The development of Theobalds Park and the course of agrarian and social change in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, c.1560–c.1670’, Gonville and Caius College, April 1979, pp. 30, 32. In neighbouring parks at Cheshunt and Enfield, and on Enfield Chase, stags and bucks comprised between 8 and 19 per cent of the total.

30 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of Hertford, 1 (London, 1902), p. 347. Description of a hunt at Theobalds in 1613 by the Duke of Saxe Weimar, first published in 1620.

31 CSP dom. 1603–1610, pp. 164, 166, 173.

32 K. Whitaker, A royal passion: the turbulent marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria (first pub. 2010; paperback edn London, 2011), p. 125 citing CSP dom.

1635, 122, 401; E. Cruickshanks, The Stuart courts (Stroud, 2000), p. 103. See also TNA LR5/63, establishment list for 1629: ‘master of the bowes and hounds’ paid ‘for keeping of hounds’.

33 S. Thurley, The royal palaces of Tudor England: architecture and court life, 1460–1547 (New Haven, CT, 1993), p. 192. Manning referred to this form of hunting as a ‘drive’ (p. 24).

34 Manning, Hunters and poachers, p. 25; J. Nichols, The progresses and public processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 (London, 1823), p. 246.

35 R. Blome, The gentleman’s recreations, part 3, 2nd edn (London, 1710), pp. 146–7. Blome stated that the rules governing deer coursing had been agreed by ‘the chief Gentry’ in the time of Queen Elizabeth.

36 Thurley, Royal palaces, p. 192; HKW, 4, 1485–1660 (part 2) (London, 1982), p. 168.

37 TNA DL 44/249, 1575–6. The proposal was not implemented.

38 TNA SC7/HenVIII/6012 minister’s account, manor of Hunsdon and Eastwick, 1536–7.

39 HHA CPM Supp. 25 & CP 141/69 Theobalds Park map by Israel Amyce, 1602; HALS DE/Fp/21349 bargain and sale of manor house and lands of Furneux Pelham, 1600.

40 James VI and I, Basilikon Doron or His Majesties Instrvctions To His Dearest Sonne, Henry the Prince (Edinburgh, 1595), pp. 48–9, found at <http://www. stoics.com/basilikon_doron.html>, accessed 29 July 2018.

41 TNA E 317/Herts/27 Parliamentary survey of Theobalds Park, pp. 7–8.

8

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

as a pastime perhaps increased as he became less mobile, and he had mews built for his hawks at Hunsdon in 1537 and The More in 1542.42 In his later years James I enjoyed ‘river hawking’ and hawking the partridges and pheasants in Theobalds Park.43 Nevertheless, falconry and most other forms of hunting were also widely practised in the open countryside and were by no means restricted to parks. Some park-owners later in the seventeenth century believed that a proper hunt could only be conducted outside the confines of the park, as at Standon in the 1660s and 1670s, when Lord Aston ‘never appeared on horseback a-buckhunting, unless when one was taken on purpose in a toil and turned out of the park’, presumably to the great annoyance of neighbouring farmers.44 Evidence suggests that the earl of Salisbury – who had an extensive park around his home at Hatfield House – also liked to hunt deer in the ‘wilder’, unenclosed and wooded countryside west of Hoddesdon and Broxbourne: deer were taken from Hatfield to Hoddesdon Woods in 1677 and there are records of red deer in the earl’s woods in Broxbourne, where they were poached in 1666, 1674 and 1677.45

disparked.46 The reasons for the failure of individual parks are generally not recorded, but smaller parks appear to have been less resilient than those of 200 acres or more. In fact, the size of the park appears to have been critically important for its longterm survival. All but three of the 26 medieval deer parks that remained active into the Tudor period were probably over 200 acres in size, and half of them contained more than 300 acres.

Almost all the parks of 300 acres or more continued in use as deer parks into and indeed beyond the sixteenth century.47 About half of the surviving parks contained or lay immediately adjacent to a significant residence, an important attribute in the late medieval period when parkland started to become more firmly established as a desirable setting for a grand house.

Several of the larger parks, such as Berkhamsted, Cheshunt and Walkern, appear to have been maintained for hundreds of years, and some – most notably Benington and Ware – were to survive for about five and six centuries respectively.

Hertfordshire’s parks 1485–1642 At least 60 parks existed in Hertfordshire at various times between 1485 and 1642, but for only 46 of those parks is there evidence that they contained deer at some point during the period. It is the latter group of confirmed or probable deer parks that forms the focus of this study. Some park names appear to relate to a field or paddock, often near the house, as at Gubbins (now Gobions) in North Mymms parish, where in 1553 there was a four-acre ‘close of pasture called “the Parke” enclosed’, adjacent to the messuage.48 These have not been included in the analysis.

Hertfordshire’s parkland history during the Tudor and early Stuart monarchies is summarised in Figures 2, 3 and 4.

Figure 2 shows the rise and fall in the number of ‘probable’ and ‘possible’ active deer parks in the county between 1485 and 1642. Evidence confirming the presence of deer is, at best, patchy and is generally available for less than a quarter of parks in any one decade (but for a significantly higher proportion in the 1570s and 1590s, when the county maps by Saxton and Norden are assumed to provide firm evidence). The park numbers should be regarded as approximations, reached by extrapolating across the gaps in the evidence and by estimating when individual parks fell out of active use, something that is often difficult to determine. Erring on the side of caution, the figures presented here are likely to be under-estimates

The medieval legacy By the time the first Tudor monarch claimed the throne in 1485 there had already been more than 70 deer parks in Hertfordshire. Most had come and gone, but at least a third of the known medieval parks continued into the sixteenth century (Figure 1). These medieval parks were typically located some distance away from the home of their owner, often on the periphery of the parish on relatively high, well-wooded land. Most were stocked with fallow deer, a non-native species imported by the new Norman aristocracy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Parks were important status symbols for medieval lords, requiring a royal licence (in theory, at least), and were expensive to maintain. As well as providing valuable stores of venison and opportunities for hunting, the parks were important reserves of wood and timber and provided pasture for the lord’s horses and cattle as well as his deer, and many medieval lords chose to subsidise the costs of running their park – employing a keeper and maintaining a secure boundary – by renting out grazing and pannage rights within it.

The number of parks in the county had remained fairly stable, at about 30, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with new parks compensating for those which were

42 Thurley, Royal palaces, p. 193.

43 A. Bellany and T. Cogswell, The murder of King James I (New Haven, CT, and London, 2015), p. 22.

44 J. Morris, Troubles of our Catholic forefathers (London, 1872), pp. 403–4 quoting Sir Edward Southcote, grandson of Lord Aston.

45 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 210; W.J. Hardy, Sessions Rolls 1581–1698, 1 (Hertford, 1905), pp. 177–8, 244, 287. In 1666 a hind was killed in a wood in Broxbourne managed by a ‘keeper of the game’; in 1674 a Hertford labourer was charged with killing a red deer worth £10 in the earl’s Brambles Wood, Broxbourne; in 1678 a Hertingfordbury man was accused of chasing a red deer out of a wood belonging to James, earl of Salisbury, and shooting at it with a hand gun.

46 Rowe, Medieval parks, p. 9.

47 The parks containing 300 acres or more were: Hatfield great, Berkhamsted, King’s Langley, Bedwell, The More, Standon, Shingle Hall, Benington, Walkern, Hunsdon old, Weston great, Hatfield Middle, Knebworth great, Ware and Tyttenhanger. Possible additions include Hatfield Woodhall, for which no evidence has been found between the 1470s and 1570s, and Eywood park, which may have been disparked before 1485 but was still recorded in documents in the midsixteenth century. The smaller parks that survived were Pisho (178 acres), Knebworth little (37 acres) and Hatfield Innings (c.100 acres). Other possible survivors include Redbourn 1 (30 acres) and Maydencroft at Ippollitts (less than 100 acres).

48 CPR 1553–1554, p. 49 Patent of 1553 rehearsing an earlier patent issued June 1546 regarding ‘Gybbynnes alias Gybbeannes’.

9

Introduction

Figure 1. County map of the medieval parks and their parishes indicating those that had probably been disparked by 1485 (grey) and those which continued as active deer parks into the Tudor era (green). Parks shaded lighter green are recorded after 1485, but no evidence for the presence of deer has been found.

of the true park numbers, but the underlying trends will be genuine. The number of parks likely to have been active in each decade is indicated by the lower line in Figure 2. The upper line represents possible totals, attained by including recorded parks for which no evidence of deer has been found. The reasons for the apparent lack of deer in these parks are explored below (p. 28). Figure 3 shows both how the number of deer parks held by different social groups changed between 1485 and 1642 and variations in the total acreage of active parkland over the period, while Figure 4 shows how the acreage of active parkland held by the various social groups changed over time. The latter is based on approximate figures derived from a combination of contemporary recorded acreages,49 modern measurements of parks whose extents can be mapped and ‘guesstimations’ of

increases or decreases in the extent of individual parks. Figures 3 and 4 exclude parks with no records of deer, as well as those few deer parks – Cashiobury and Furneux Pelham – whose extents are not known or cannot reasonably be estimated, and are therefore likely to slightly under-represent the true acreage of active parkland in the county.

Active deer parks covered approaching 11,000 acres of Hertfordshire during the early Tudor period and park numbers were stable at about 25: a small number of disparkments was matched by the creation of new parks. Towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign over 1,000 acres of new parkland was created and the acreage rose again to a peak of about 13,000 acres in the 1570s, before falling back to under 12,000 acres for the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign. In contrast to the

49 The size of the acre could vary before the length of the pole became standardised at 16½ feet; e.g. Benington park was measured at 18 feet to the pole in 1556.

But any variation in the scale employed would make a negligible difference to the results presented here.

10

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Figure 2.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Line chart showing the number of active deer parks in Hertfordshire between 1485 and 1642. The upper line includes parks that were recorded but which may not have contained deer.

Figure 3.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Bar chart showing how the number of deer parks held by different social groups in Hertfordshire changed between 1485 and 1642. The green line indicates variations in the total acreage of parkland in the county over the period.

11

Introduction

Figure 4. Line chart showing the changing acreage of active parkland held by the different social groups in Hertfordshire between 1485 and 1642.

acreage, however, the number of parks rose steadily during the Elizabethan period, to a peak of at least 35 active parks in the 1590s.50 The parkland acreage rose again during the reign of James I, reaching a short-lived maximum of about 13,400 in the 1620s, and then fell to about 12,000 acres. However, despite the initial increase in parkland, the number of parks fell steadily during the early seventeenth century and about ten had been disparked by 1642. The reasons underlying the expansion and subsequent contraction of parkland in the county during the Tudor and early Stuart periods will be explored below, but it is clear that the Hertfordshire evidence does not support previous assertions of a general decline in parks and increasing rates of disparkment during the sixteenth century.51 Nor is it true that the parkland history of Hertfordshire during the period was dominated by ‘contraction and replacement’ leading to ‘a net

loss in the number of parks’.52 An increase in park numbers similar to that seen in Hertfordshire has also been identified in Suffolk, and in Kent and Sussex park numbers remained relatively stable during the Tudor period, with new parks compensating for the loss of older parks.53 More research is needed in other regions to determine whether the buoyancy in Tudor parks noted in counties close to London was replicated in other parts of the country.

Park ownership As Figures 3 and 4 demonstrate, the ownership of the parks was divided between five main social groups: royalty, aristocrats, ecclesiastical bodies (bishoprics and abbeys), royal officials and gentry.54 Before explaining the sometimes contrasting trends in the overall extent and number of the county’s parks

50 The new Elizabethan parks were at Theobalds (Cheshunt), Digswell, Brocket Hall (Hatfield), Northaw, Redbourn, Hallywell House (St Albans), Sopwell (St Peter & St Stephen’s), Stanstead Bury, Cashiobury (Watford), Lamer (Wheathampstead), Wyddial and Furneux Pelham. Earlier parks which appear to have been reinstated or were probably established earlier in the century include Hatfield Woodhall, Ponsbourne and Popes (both Hatfield). Benington, Furneux Pelham (new and old), Pisho (Sawbridgeworth) and possibly Salisbury (Shenley) and Sopwell parks were disparked.

51 S. Lasdun, The English Park. Royal, private and public (London, 1991), p. 32; R. Liddiard, ‘The disparkment of medieval parks’, in I.D. Rotherham (ed.), The history, ecology and archaeology of medieval parks and parklands, Landscape Archaeology and Ecology, 6 (Sheffield, 2007), p. 82; J. Fletcher, Gardens of earthly delight. The history of deer parks (Oxford, 2011), p. 169.

52 Prince, Parks, p. 23.

53 R. Hoppitt, ‘A Study of the development of deer parks in Suffolk from the eleventh to the seventeenth century’, PhD thesis (University of East Anglia, 1992), p. 85; S. Pittman, ‘Disparkment – a case study for Elizabethan and Jacobean parks in Kent’, Southern History, 35 (2013), p. 49; Manning, Hunters and poachers, pp. 126–7.

54 Royal officials who were elevated to the peerage remain royal officials for the purposes of this study.

12

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

over the period, it will be useful to examine how the park holdings of these different social groups changed over time.

The most striking changes occurred in the royal holdings and clearly reveal the influence of the monarchy on Hertfordshire’s parkland history.

hands: Theobalds, Cheshunt and Berkhamsted. Two-thirds of Berkhamsted Park (756 acres) was disparked in 1627, leaving 376 acres, but this loss of royal parkland is masked by the massive expansion of Theobalds Park by James I to over 2,500 acres; thus, despite having only three parks, Charles I still held 30 per cent of the county’s parkland.

Royal owners Between the late fifteenth and the mid-seventeenth centuries the reigning monarch generally held between three and seven parks in Hertfordshire. In addition to his royal parks at Berkhamsted, Hertingfordbury and King’s Langley, Henry VII acquired the parks of two aristocrats who died during his reign (Weston from Lord Berkeley in 1492 and Standon from Cicely, duchess of York in 1495), increasing his tally from three to five parks, representing about a quarter of the county’s parkland acreage. In 1509 Henry VIII inherited the parks at Cheshunt, Ware and Hunsdon from his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond.55 From the 1520s Henry VIII began to actively increase his parkland in Hertfordshire, reclaiming a park at Hunsdon from the duke of Norfolk, acquiring Pisho Park at Sawbridgeworth from Baron Scrope and those at The More and Tyttenhanger from the abbot of St Albans. He also imparked about 225 acres of farmland to make a new park at Hunsdon and about 480 acres to expand the parks at The More (293a) and Tyttenhanger (189a). In 1538 the king acquired the extensive parklands of the bishop of Ely at Hatfield, the last remaining ecclesiastical holdings in the county, and the following year the large parks at Bedwell and Ware came to the crown following the attainders of the marchioness of Exeter and the countess of Salisbury.56 By 1540 Henry VIII was holding 16 active deer parks covering 8,750 acres, about 70 per cent of the parkland in the county.

Over the course of the next ten decades to 1642 this remarkable concentration of parks in the hands of the monarch was dispersed, starting in 1540, when the king granted Standon to his secretary Sir Ralph Sadleir. In 1547 Tyttenhanger was granted to royal official Sir Thomas Pope and, immediately after Henry’s death, another three parks – Cheshunt, Bedwell and Pisho – were granted to gentlemen of his privy chamber (p. 47). The number fell still further at the beginning of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, when she granted the three parks at Hunsdon to her cousin Henry Carey, whom she created Baron Hunsdon. So, by the 1560s, the monarch’s holding had returned to a more normal total of seven parks; however, as it included some of the county’s largest parks, at Hatfield, The More and Berkhamsted, it still covered about 40 per cent of the county’s parkland by area. The number of royal parks continued to decrease gradually: in 1576 The More was granted to the earl of Bedford; in 1607 the three royal parks at Hatfield were granted to the earl of Salisbury in exchange for Theobalds Park and Cheshunt Park; and in the 1620s Charles I disposed of the oldest royal parks, those at King’s Langley and Hertingfordbury. This left just three parks in royal

Aristocratic owners From a starting point of seven parks in 1485, the aristocracy lost four to the monarchy before 1510 (see above), and a fifth was lost when St Albans abbey acquired the park at The More following the death of the earl of Oxford in 1513, leaving just two: Pisho Park at Sawbridgeworth, belonging to Baron Scrope of Bolton, and the countess of Salisbury’s park at Ware. In 1514 Henry VIII granted the manor of Hunsdon to the duke of Norfolk, whose son, the earl of Surrey, appears to have established at least one new park there before the manor was returned to the king c.1526. Henry also acquired the parks at Pisho (by exchange with Lord Scrope) and at Bedwell and Ware (by attainder), so that by 1540 just one park – Benington – remained in aristocratic hands.57 During the reign of Queen Mary Benington also passed to the crown, but this was counterbalanced by the granting by the queen of her manor and park at Ware to the earl and countess of Huntingdon.58 The aristocracy re-established its share of the county’s parks during Elizabeth’s reign, holding about 10–12 per cent of the total acreage. In the 1560s Benington was held by Lady Anne Bourchier (and by the earl of Essex from 1572), Furneux Pelham was held by Baron Morley and the three parks at Hunsdon by Baron Hunsdon, while Ware continued to be held by the Huntingdons until the countess sold it in 1575. Lord Morley’s park at Furneux Pelham was probably new and another new park was created by the earl of Warwick at Northaw in 1579. In 1576 Queen Elizabeth granted the large royal park at The More to the earl of Bedford, who proceeded to dispark most of it, leaving a park of just 200 acres. Aristocratic fortunes improved further under the Stuart kings, and between c.1610 and 1629 they held about 25 per cent of the county’s parkland in eight parks, rising to a maximum of 40 per cent in 11 parks in 1642, largely at the expense of the gentry and royal officials. The sharp increase in aristocratic park ownership just before the start of the Civil Wars rested largely on the fortunes of one man, Arthur Capel of Hadham Hall. The former royal park at King’s Langley passed to Capel through his wife’s Morrison inheritance in 1628, together with her family seat and park at Cashiobury. Capel already owned the parks at Hadham Hall and Walkern, so, when he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Capel in 1641, he took four parks covering over 1,800 acres into the aristocratic category – in total, about 15 per cent of the county’s parkland.

The earl of Salisbury, the aristocrat with the next highest total in 1642, held 1,400 acres of parkland at Hatfield, the earl of Dover held two parks of unknown size at Hunsdon and the earl of Bridgewater had a park of at least 336 acres at Ashridge.

55 Ware was restored to Lady Margaret Pole in February 1512.

56 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of Hertford, 3 (London, 1912), pp. 92, 460, 387.

57 Benington was part of the estate of the deceased earl of Essex.

58 Page, Hertford, 3, p. 387.

13

Introduction

Ecclesiastical owners In the late fifteenth century the bishops of Ely held three deer parks at Hatfield, the bishop of London had a park at Stortford, the abbot of St Albans held Tyttenhanger Park at Ridge and the abbot of Waltham Holy Cross held Easneye Park at Stanstead Abbots. St Albans abbey also had a park at Redbourn, but there is no evidence that it contained deer in the Tudor period, and Easneye Park may also have been disparked before 1500; Stortford Park was disparked by 1515. Against this general declining trend, the abbot of St Albans acquired the large park at The More in Rickmansworth after the death of the earl of Oxford in 1513, increasing the ecclesiastical parkland holding at the expense of the aristocracy. During the 1530s Henry VIII acquired the abbot’s parks at The More and Tyttenhanger and the bishop of Ely’s three parks at Hatfield, thereby eliminating ecclesiastical owners from the charts (Figures 3 and 4). The bishop of London continued to own the disparked park at Stortford and it may have contained deer again before 1598, when it appeared on Norden’s county map.

in contrast, Sir Edward Baesh had created a second park at Stanstead Bury by 1648.

Gentry owners Park ownership by members of the Hertfordshire gentry displayed the most stability in terms of overall numbers and acreage compared with other social groups through the Tudor and early Stuart periods. Apart from the three decades of the 1530s–50s and immediately before the start of the Civil Wars, the gentry consistently held the largest number – ranging between 8 and 16 parks – and their proportion of the total number of parks increased from about 35 per cent to over 40 per cent from the mid-sixteenth century. In terms of acreage, however, gentry parks were almost always outstripped, by ecclesiastical parkland up to the 1520s and by royal parks thereafter. Their total acreage generally ranged between 2,700 and 4,000 acres, peaking in the 1570s at 4,800 acres, about 36 per cent of the county’s parkland. Individual gentry parks contained an average of 320 acres in the 1580s.

Gentry parks appearing in the records for the first time early in the sixteenth century were held by Henry VIII’s courtiers Sir Giles Capell at Hadham Hall and Sir Philip Boteler at Watton Woodhall. A large new park appears to have been enclosed by a member of the Rowlett family at Gorhambury near St Albans by 1545. The property was one of several parts of the dissolved estate of St Albans abbey purchased around 1540

by Ralph Rowlett, goldsmith, merchant of the Staple of Calais and master of the mint.59 Twenty years later Gorhambury passed to Sir Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper to Queen Elizabeth, who appears to have reduced the area of the park by more than a half. From the middle of the century the number of parks held by the gentry started to climb, peaking at about 16 at the turn of the seventeenth century. New parks included Sir John Brocket’s at Brocket Hall near Hatfield, Charles Morison’s at Cashiobury near Watford, Sir Philip Boteler’s at Lamer near Wheathampstead and George or Ralph Horsey’s at Digswell. Unlike these country house estates, the park created at Hallywell (Holywell) House by Sir Ralph Rowlett was on the outskirts of St Albans and appears to have been very small, less than ten acres of meadow between the house and the river Ver, and there is no evidence that it contained deer.

The marked increase in the acreage of parkland held by members of the gentry between the 1560s and the 1570s (Figure 4) is likely to be a distortion caused by the availability of evidence and should be treated with caution. The parks at Hatfield Woodhall (500 acres), Brocket (288a) and Ponsbourne (78a) are depicted on Saxton’s map of 1577, but a lack of documentary evidence renders invisible their possible existence in preceding decades. Although the precise timing of some imparking is uncertain, the increase in the acreage of gentry parkland during the sixteenth century is real and their holdings fell significantly only from the 1630s, as the parks at Hertingfordbury, Ponsbourne and Shingle Hall were disparked and three more became aristocratic parks on the elevation to the peerage of Arthur Capel in 1641. The Great Park at

Royal officials Two royal officials held parks in the county in the early Tudor period: Sir John Cuttes, under-treasurer to both Henry VII and Henry VIII, built a house in Salisbury Park, Shenley, and Sir William Fitzwilliam, treasurer of the household from 1525, was given Weston for life by Henry VIII but had given it back by 1532. More royal officials became park-owners in the middle of the sixteenth century, as the king granted Standon to his secretary Sir Ralph Sadleir and Tyttenhanger to civil servant Sir Thomas Pope. Surveyor of the king’s works Sir Richard Lee acquired Eywood Park at St Albans from the estate of the dissolved monastery (acreage unknown) and John Boteler, servant to Princess Mary, inherited the park at Watton Woodhall. During the Elizabethan period the queen’s ministers and government officials added to the county’s parkland: William Cecil Lord Burghley (lord treasurer) created a new park at Theobalds and Edward Baesh (general surveyor of victuals for the royal navy) created another at Stanstead Bury.

In addition, Lord Burghley had another two parks at Cheshunt, Sir Nicholas Bacon (lord keeper) had a park at Gorhambury near St Albans, Sir Henry Cock (cofferer of the royal household) had a park at Ponsbourne in Hatfield parish, William Tooke (auditor-general of the court of wards and liveries) had a park at Popes, also in Hatfield, Sir Ralph Sadleir (chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster) still had his park at Standon, Thomas Fanshawe (remembrancer in the exchequer) had Ware Park and Sir Richard Lee (military engineer) established a new park at Sopwell, St Albans.

The parks held by royal or government officials decreased markedly during the reign of James I. After the death of the earl of Salisbury (secretary of state) in 1612, the only government officials to continue holding parks in the 1620s were Sir Francis Bacon (attorney general then lord chancellor) at Gorhambury and Sir Edward Baesh (chamberlain of the exchequer) at Stanstead Bury. Gorhambury was disparked in the 1630s but,

59 D.F. Coros, ‘ROWLETT, Sir Ralph (by 1513–71), of Holywell House, St. Albans, Herts.’, in S.T. Bindoff (ed.), The history of parliament: the House of Commons 1509–1558, 3 (London, 1982), pp. 223–4. Rowlett was one of the two deputy masters of the mint from 1533.

14

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Knebworth was probably also disparked at this time but was replaced by a new park – which still exists today – from 1641.

parish) as ‘active’ in the 1570s perhaps relies too heavily on their depiction on this map: they may have contained deer in preceding decades, or perhaps not until a decade or two later. The parkland acreage fell to about 11,500 acres in the following decade as Benington was disparked and the parks at The More and at Tyttenhanger were greatly reduced in size. The number of parks nevertheless continued to rise, to a peak of at least 35 parks in the 1590s, but those at Stortford, Benington, Digswell and Sopwell all rely on Norden’s map for their designations as active deer parks, with no evidence for their survival beyond 1600. Conversely, Norden did not record the Old Park at Cheshunt or a park at Northaw, both of which probably held deer in the 1590s although, again, there is no evidence they continued to do so after 1600. A more sustained and convincing increase in the parkland acreage occurred from the 1590s, reaching a peak of about 13,400 acres by the end of the Jacobean era. The majority of this increase was the result of the expansion of Theobalds Park, started by Sir Robert Cecil c.1600 but continued obsessively from 1607

by James I, augmented by the expansion of the royal parks at Berkhamsted and Cheshunt and by the reimparkment of land at Ashridge and Gorhambury by royal officials Thomas Egerton (lord chancellor) and Francis Bacon (attorney general then lord chancellor), respectively. These increases mask some significant losses, notably a net loss of 775 acres of parkland at Hatfield when Lord Salisbury (secretary of state and lord treasurer) enclosed the great wood in 1612 (allocating half to the commoners) and the disparkment of substantial gentry parks at Essendon (Bedwell), Shenley (Salisbury) and Tring (Pendley).

Professional men Members of the legal profession start to make their appearance among the county’s park owners from the beginning of the seventeenth century, three of them purchasing estates with pre-existing parks: James Altham, serjeant-at-law, bought the Oxhey estate near Watford with some old parkland (probably disparked) in 1604; in 1613/14 Sir Julius Caesar and his lawyer son Charles bought Benington Park (possibly disparked); and in 1628 Wyddial Park was purchased by John Gulston, prothonotary of the Court of Common Pleas. There is no evidence that any of these were active deer parks at the time of their purchase, nor that their new lawyer owners maintained them as such. The only lawyer to inherit his estate was Francis Bacon, who acquired Gorhambury in 1602 following the death of his brother. The (probably) disparked park was restored and expanded as Bacon’s career took off and he rose to become attorney general and then lord chancellor.

Summarising the main trends At the end of the fifteenth century Henry VII held about 20 per cent of the county’s parkland and the remainder was divided fairly evenly between the gentry, ecclesiastical owners and the aristocracy.60 The royal holdings steadily increased, largely at the expense of the aristocracy, so that for most of the period between 1530 and the end of the Jacobean era the crown held the greatest share (by acreage) of Hertfordshire’s parkland.

The expansion of the parkland at Hunsdon in the 1520s was counter-balanced by the disparking of Weston and it was not until the 1540s that Henry VIII’s imparkments made an impact on the county total. The increase in this decade was, however, also the result of the imparking of about 600 acres of the former monastic estate at Gorhambury by wealthy merchant Ralph Rowlett or his descendants, although clear evidence of an active deer park at this time is lacking.

Most new parks were established during Elizabeth I’s reign, several created (or in some cases perhaps re-established) by her ministers and government officials, such as William Cecil Lord Burghley (Theobalds), Sir Henry Cock (Ponsbourne), Sir Richard Lee (Sopwell), Edward Baesh (Stanstead Bury) and perhaps William Tooke (Popes). Cock had inherited his wealth and estate from his lawyer father but Lee, Baesh and Tooke were self-made men, risen to positions of wealth and power through a combination of practical talent, administrative ability, business acumen and luck. The acreage of parkland held by royal officials rose steadily from the 1540s to a peak of about 15–20 per cent of the total at the end of the sixteenth century, only to decrease to about 3 per cent by the 1630s.

The acreage of parkland in Hertfordshire peaked in the 1570s at over 13,000 acres, but the uncomfortable coincidence of this rather sudden and short-lived increase with the publication of Saxton’s county map highlights the potential shortcomings in the evidence. The designation of the parks at Brocket, Ponsbourne and Woodhall (all in Hatfield

The new parks and new parkland At least 17 new deer parks were established in Hertfordshire between 1485 and 1648 (Table 2). Also created in this period were the new parks at Digswell, Redbourn, Hallywell in St Albans, Sopwell (St Peter’s and St Stephen’s), Lamer (Wheathampstead) and Wyddial, for which no evidence of deer has been found. The parks at The Weld (Aldenham) and at Broadfield appear in the records during this period, but may have originated before 1485 and there is no evidence they contained deer. The average size of those new parks that contained deer based on 16 probable deer parks for which the acreages can be established, was about 200 acres.

Figure 5 shows that, although the new parks were spread across the county, most of those created in the sixteenth century lay within 25 miles of Whitehall; the three exceptions (Hadham Hall, Furneux Pelham and Wyddial) were all located in the east of the county. The four early seventeenth-century parks lay between 16 and 28 miles from Whitehall, but only one (Stanstead Bury) was on a virgin site with no medieval antecedent. In contrast to the situation in the medieval period, there is a clear trend for the new sixteenth-century parks to be concentrated in the south of the county, reflecting the increased importance of the capital as the base for the royal court during the Tudor period. A cluster of new parks along the Ver valley near St Albans (Redbourn, Gorhambury, Hallywell, Sopwell)

60 Henry VII’s parks were Berkhamsted, Hertingfordbury and King’s Langley, plus Weston and Standon.

15

Introduction

Table 2 Parks created in, or first appearing in the records during, the Tudor and early Stuart periods.

Park

Aldenham, Weld

Broadfield

Created

Extant by

Evidence for deer at any time?

?15th century

?1593

N

1583

1584

Cheshunt, Theobalds

1590s

Digswell

Furneux Pelham New Hatfield New Park

1570

1612

c.1560

Hatfield, Brocket

N Y

N Y Y Y

Hatfield, Holwell

1504

N

Hatfield, Popes

?1542

Y

Hunsdon, New

1529

1536

Hatfield, Ponsbourne

1525

Hunsdon, Goodmanshyde/Pond Knebworth

1641

?c.1603

Little Gaddesden, Ashridge

Little Hadham, Hadham Park Northaw

Redbourn 2

?1525

1579

c.1560

1566

St Albans, Hallywell

St Michaels, Gorhambury St Stephens, Sopwell

1545

c.1562

1577

Stanstead Bury

Stanstead Bury 2

1648

Watton Woodhall

1530

Watford, Cashiobury

1598

Wheathampstead, Lamer

1589

Wyddial

?mid-16th century

1583

– but not around the county town of Hertford – reflects the availability of land following the dismantling of the St Albans abbey estate at the Dissolution. The concentration of new parkland between Hatfield and Waltham Cross to the southeast was perhaps influenced not only by proximity to London but also by access to thousands of acres of open common land in the parishes of Northaw and Cheshunt and the neighbouring Enfield Chase.

Most of the new parks were laid out around the residence of the owner, but there are some interesting exceptions. The Elizabethan park at Stanstead Bury appears to have been laid out on rising ground to the north of the house, but was separated from it by the road from Stanstead Abbots to Sawbridgeworth. A second park, presumably laid out before 1642 (but not recorded until 1648), lay adjacent to the east side of the house, south of the road. At Northaw in 1579 the earl of Warwick chose to enclose part of Northaw common to make a park about half a mile from his house, but it probably did not survive many decades and later sources record a park adjacent to the house. Another Elizabethan park was created at Cashiobury near Watford, but its early history is obscure and the first record is provided by Norden’s county map of 1598. Norden depicted the park to the west of the river Gade

Y Y Y Y Y Y Y

N N Y

N Y Y Y Y

N N

– perhaps in the area occupied today by Whippendell Woods – but the house was located about a mile to the east on the other side of the river. By 1676, according to Seller’s map, most of the park lay east of the river, and it surrounded the house. At Hatfield a pale was erected around the earl of Salisbury’s New Park in 1612. Despite the name, it was actually a surviving part of the former Great Park – or Great Wood – a large area over which many of the earl’s tenants had rights of common. These rights were extinguished at the request of the commoners, and the Great Wood was enclosed and divided between them and the earl. Given that the earl had been creating new parkland to surround his new house at Hatfield since 1607, it is not clear what he intended for the New Park, which lay three miles away, but in 1614, two years after his death, his son leased it to a tenant.

These exceptions aside, the location of most new parks – and other new parkland – was determined by the site of the owner’s house and consequently land with a variety of uses came to be imparked. This often included arable land: sometimes part of the demesne farm or – in several cases – common arable fields, still farmed in strips by numerous tenants in the medieval fashion, were imparked. Cheshunt Park – much of which survives as a public park today – was enlarged with relative ease by James

16

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Figure 5. County map of all parks recorded between 1485 and 1642. Different symbols indicate when the parks were created. Concentric rings indicate distance from the palace of Whitehall in London.

I in the early seventeenth century by imparking about 270 acres of the adjacent manor of Perriers, including 129 acres of demesne arable in ten fields, over 80 acres of ‘mowing land’ and 60 acres of pasture and wood.61 Enclosing common arable land farmed by numerous tenant farmers was generally a much more complex, protracted and expensive process. Surviving records hint at how the Botelers expanded their park at Watton Woodhall in the sixteenth century, gradually acquiring closes and strips of arable land from their manorial tenants. Their purchase of the adjacent manor of Sacombe in 1593 enabled the park to expand south-eastwards with the acquisition – by a combination of surrender and purchase – of land in more closes and strips together with meadows and a grove of woodland.

William Cecil Lord Burghley (Plate 6) enclosed a common

arable field on the manor of Cullings to lay out his new park at Theobalds in the 1570s. As the owner of the manor and sole farmer of the field this was easily accomplished, but manorial tenants still required compensation for their lost grazing rights on the stubbles after harvest.62 In the early seventeenth century Francis Bacon was able to expand Gorhambury Park northwestwards by purchasing land in a common arable field from a neighbouring farmer. At Brocket Hall the park contained 150 acres of customary land held of the manor of Hatfield, some of which had presumably been purchased from other tenants of the manor.63 In laying out his new estate at Hatfield from 1607, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury (Plate 6), imparked at least 700 acres of farmland and was scrupulous in ensuring that the owners and tenants of the closes and strips of common

61 HALS D/P29/27A/1/11 abstracts of title to Cheshunt Park and Theobalds.

62 TNA E 178/3900 petition re lands taken into Theobalds Park, 1608–26; Glennie, ‘Theobalds Park’, p. 19.

63 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 3, p. 1125.

17

Introduction

arable land were fairly compensated, either financially or by exchange, creating new common arable land on at least one former demesne field for that purpose.64 Not all landowners shared Cecil’s scruples. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey seized copyhold and customary fields and meadows from tenants in the 1520s to expand his park at The More and descendants of those tenants were still seeking restitution 40 years later.65 No records have been found to explain how the farmland enclosed into the two early sixteenth-century parks at Hunsdon was acquired, but the parson was still owed tithes worth 30s from the land in 1532.

Common pasture was another source of land for aspiring park-makers or park-enlargers, but its enclosure often met with stiff opposition from the dispossessed commoners.

Although the 92 acres enclosed by the earl of Warwick at Northaw in 1579 was a relatively small part of a common covering over 2,000 acres, the tenants of several manors in neighbouring parishes staged riots in protest at their lost grazing rights, leading to the arrest and execution of the ringleaders.66 The remodelling of Tyttenhanger Park in the early sixteenth century seems to have involved imparking part of Colney Heath, and common land was also imparked at Berkhamsted in 1619, when Prince Charles enclosed 300 acres of Berkhamsted Frith into Berkhamsted Park, causing riots and subsequent prosecutions.67 Popular protests and general lawlessness also erupted in response to James I’s enclosure into Theobalds Park of over 800 acres of wood-pasture on Enfield Chase and on Cheshunt and Northaw commons.

Growing on the imparked land were about 6,000 pollarded trees, an important source of fuel for the commoners of Cheshunt, Northaw and Enfield.68 The loss of common wood-pasture was just one of the consequences of James I’s relentless expansion of Theobalds Park, which also swallowed up whole farms, hamlets, common arable fields, meadows and woods. The land was acquired at enormous cost by a combination of purchase and exchange, payments of compensation for loss of commoning rights and compensation to the church for the loss of tithe income from the imparked farmland. The king’s imparking activities nevertheless caused real hardship for the residents of Cheshunt parish in particular, as the levels of tax (‘fifteenths’) owed by the parish had been set before hundreds of acres of farmland were removed from the parish economy and replaced by parkland.69 The parish was also subject to regular demands from the royal purveyors for set quantities of wheat, hay, straw and oats. Until 1607, a significant proportion of these demands had been supplied by Sir Robert Cecil from his Cheshunt estate, but once his lands were granted to the

crown the burden of royal purveyance fell entirely on other landowners, many of whose holdings had diminished as Theobalds Park expanded.

Disparking Several Hertfordshire parks are described in contemporary sources as having been ‘disparked’, a term which is generally taken to mean that the park ceased to contain deer. Over 40 had already been disparked by 1485 and a number of ecclesiastical parks lost their deer herds in the decades around 1500. Both the bishop of Ely’s park at Little Hadham and the abbot of St Albans’ park at Redbourn are likely to have been disparked by 1485, while the bishop of London’s park at Stortford was disparked by 1515 and Easneye Park, belonging to the abbot of Waltham Holy Cross, had been disparked by 1526. None of these parks contained a residence worthy of accommodating a bishop or abbot, limiting their value as status landscapes, and the prospect of earning income from leasing the disparked land seems to have become increasingly attractive from the late fifteenth century. Apart from these ecclesiastical losses, levels of disparkment during the mid-sixteenth century were very low in Hertfordshire, the royal park at Weston, which was divided and rented to numerous farmers in the 1530s, being the only known instance. A number of parks, however, were disparked towards the end of the century, starting with the ancient park at Benington, which was disparked in, or just before, 1580. Pisho Park was probably disparked around 1585, when the owner built a new mansion close to the town of Sawbridgeworth, and two parks at Furneux Pelham (‘old’ and ‘new’) were described as disparked in 1600. The parks at Pendley (Tring) and Bedwell (Essendon) were disparked in stages from the late sixteenth century as parts were leased to tenants or sold and converted to farmland; a farmer at Tring stated in 1731 that he did not know when Pendley Park had ceased being a deer park but he believed it had been ‘disparked at severall times by Degrees’.70 The largest single disparking event in Hertfordshire during the period of this study was at Hatfield in 1612, when the Great Park or Great Wood was enclosed and divided between the earl of Salisbury and the commoners. Five hundred acres of his share of the park was retained by the earl and called the New Park. Salisbury Park at Shenley may have been disparked around 1600 or within the next two decades. In 1627 Charles I disparked most of Berkhamsted Park, reducing it to 376 acres and heralding a significant phase of disparkments in the 1630s. Four parks probably lost their deer herds in that decade: Gorhambury (St Albans), Shingle Hall (Sawbridgeworth), Hertingfordbury and Ponsbourne (Hatfield) – Shingle Hall after the early death of

64 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 3, pp. 1351–2.

65 TNA DL 44/173 Report upon the rights to certain customary land within Moor Park, Hertfordshire, 1567–8.

66 A. Jones, ‘Commotion time: the English risings of 1549’, PhD thesis (University of Warwick, 2003), p. 334, citing J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Hertfordshire indictments, Elizabeth I (London, 1975), nos 175–6.

67 H. Falvey, ‘Crown policy and local economic context in the Berkhamsted Common enclosure dispute, 1618–42’, Rural History, 12 (2001), pp. 131–42; TNA STAC 8/32/16 Attorney General v Barnes, Destruction of enclosures of the park of Berkhampstead manor, 1620.

68 A. Rowe, ‘Pollards: living archaeology’, in K. Lockyear (ed.), Archaeology in Hertfordshire. Recent research (Hatfield, 2015), p. 310.

69 CCP, 19, 1607, pp. 143–4; TNA E 178/3900 Theobalds Park, Cheshunt Park, Perriers, in Cheshunt Petition of the inhabitants of Cheshunt as to the assessment of subsidies, and inquisition as to lands taken into Theobalds Park.

70 TNA E 134/4GEO2/Hil2.

18

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Figure 6. Plan of the well-preserved remains of a fishpond complex in the valley of the Hunsdon Brook east and south of Lords Wood, Hunsdon, by Tom Williamson (2017). The complex comprised four ponds retained by four substantial dams, with traces of a terrace along the east side. The scale and cost of these ponds, created for Henry VIII c.1530 (pp. 152–4), suggests a recreational and/or ornamental purpose in addition to fish production.

Dams ‘a’ and ‘b’ have level tops around ten metres wide that rise nearly two metres above the valley floor. Dam ‘c’ has a narrower top (around six metres) and is slightly higher, reaching around three metres at the centre. Dam ‘d’ is the least substantial, with a height of less than two metres. Dams ‘a’ and ‘c’ have steeper slopes to the south and dam ‘d’ is slightly steeper on the northern side.

Of particular interest are the quarry pits, evidently excavated to provide material for construction, which exist at each end of dams ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’; those to the east are much filled and levelled by cultivation, while those to the west (within the wood) are well preserved. It is unclear why dam ‘d’ does not appear to have them.

19

Introduction

Early park design Clear evidence of park features created for aesthetic reasons first appears in Hertfordshire in the sixteenth century at Theobalds, the prestigious estate established by William Cecil in the parish of Cheshunt from the 1560s. Four decades earlier, however, it is possible that Henry VIII created an elaborate ‘water garden’ in the Pond Park close to his palace at Hunsdon. The impressive earthwork remains of a series of four large fishponds in the valley of the Hunsdon Brook (Figure 6) include a terrace along the valley side just above the ponds. They were not the only fishponds in the king’s parks at Hunsdon but they were very extensive – covering 12 acres in 155676 – and this impressive scale, together with the high cost of their construction, suggests that their purpose was more than simply functional and raises the possibility that the king was attempting to emulate Italian Renaissance gardens of the period.

It is in Theobalds Park, however, that we find firm evidence for the design of features that were primarily ornamental in purpose. Lord Burghley and his son Robert Cecil moved in the highest social circles and were aware of the latest ideas in architecture and garden design, but were perhaps ahead of their time in viewing the park as an extension of the pleasure gardens around the house. Indeed, although the park was laid out a decade after work started on the house and gardens, Sir William Cecil appears to have planned the house, gardens and park as a single coherent scheme: a three-storey loggia or banqueting house projecting from the west side of the garden was constructed before the park was laid out but must have been intended to provide views of the surrounding landscape as well as of the magnificent gardens. From 1598 Sir Robert Cecil created a suite of innovative water features in the park.77 The evolution of the remarkable landscape at Theobalds can be traced in unusual detail thanks to the record-keeping of the Cecil family and, in particular, to the shared enthusiasm of both William and Robert Cecil for the new science of cartography.

The map of his Theobalds estate commissioned by Lord Burghley c.1574 provides the first evidence of a scheme to connect his new garden to the landscape beyond, which at the time was entirely farmland but included a coneygarth (rabbit warren) outside the south wall of the garden (Plate 8).78 Burghley annotated the map to indicate that the coneygarth was to be extended around the west side of the garden and added several rows of dots to the map. Of particular interest are two parallel lines of dots linking the south wall of his garden to a hedged lane leading to the homestead moat of the manor of Cullings, apparently already a moated garden divided by paths into four square plats. The lines of dots signalled the creation of a treelined walk leading south from an arched gateway in the garden

the owner and the other three following a change of ownership.

The outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 probably caused the disparkment of Walkern Park and the royal parks at Theobalds and Cheshunt followed c.1650 after the execution of Charles I, together with those of royalist supporters at Hunsdon and King’s Langley.

Once disparked, a park could continue to function as an enclosed area of pasture containing livestock – cattle, sheep, horses – thereby retaining the potential to be restocked with deer, and its park name could continue indefinitely.

Hertingfordbury Park and Ponsbourne Park were disparked in 1632 and 1635, respectively, when their deer were captured and removed to Hatfield Park, but parts of their parkland pasture survive to this day, as have their park names. During the twentieth century deer herds were reinstated in two Hertfordshire parks (Knebworth and Hatfield) after an absence of many decades, and the same process is likely to have occurred in the early modern period but generally went unrecorded. At Benington, however, there is firm evidence that the park was disparked by 1580 and a decade later was leased to a tenant who converted some of the pasture to arable land, but in 1613/14, when the estate was sold, it was said to include ‘a hunting seat and large park of deer’.71 This might be evidence that the park – or part of it – had been reinstated, or perhaps that it could be reinstated if the purchaser so wished.

Pisho Park near Sawbridgeworth, also probably disparked in the late sixteenth century, appears to have survived as enclosed pasture that was subsequently incorporated into a new park laid out around New Place in the late seventeenth century, later known as Gilston Park.72 When a disparked park was divided up and leased to more than one tenant, or where parts were sold, the process was much more difficult to reverse and generally resulted in the permanent loss of the park. Floodgacy Park near Dane End was probably disparked around 1490 but it was only after a change of ownership 40 years later that 130 acres of the park were divided between eight copyhold tenants and the remaining 71 acres around the lodge were also leased to a tenant. Documentary references to the former ‘Fludgate park’ persisted until at least 1800.73 At Weston disparking may have occurred during the 1520s as a result of neglect by the tenant, but, once returned to royal control in 1531, it was divided between five copyhold tenants and converted into farmland.74 The 30-acre park (or warren) laid out by lawyer Sir Richard Rede at Redbourn in the third quarter of the sixteenth century was broken up in 1630 by a subsequent owner, who divided 21 acres between three tenants and sold the 10 acres remaining at the east end of the park near the High Street.75

71 E. Lodge, Life of Sir Julius Caesar Knt. … with memoirs of his family & descendants (London, 1810), p. 32.

72 HALS DE/Bo/T14/1 indenture, 1694.

73 Rowe, Medieval parks, pp. 102–4.

74 TNA SC6/HenVIII/6443 bailiff’s account, 1534–6.

75 HALS DE/X138/T13/16 and /2 lease of land in Redbourn park, 1630 and ’31; HALS III.A.1 sale of 10a of Redbourn Park, 1631.

76 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556.

77 A. Rowe, ‘Hertfordshire’s lost water gardens 1500–1750’, in D. Spring (ed.), Hertfordshire garden history v. II. Gardens pleasant, groves delicious (Hatfield, 2012), pp. 38–45.

78 Bodleian Library MSS. Gough Drawings a. 3. fol. 27 undated plan of Theobalds estate.

20

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

wall into what was to become Burghley’s new park, and notes written in 1575 record the distance to ‘the walks’ and ‘alleys’ ‘in Collyns’.79 On a map of 1611 (Plate 10), surveyor John Thorpe depicted the Cullings moat with a bridge and pavilionlike structures at the corners, but precisely who – Burghley, Sir Robert Cecil or James I – was responsible for them is not recorded.80 The map also shows other water features, some of which may have been created for Lord Burghley: a list of works completed towards the end of 1578 records the making of a ‘new pond head and casting the mount for the swans nest’.81 But there is clear evidence that some water features in the park were created for Sir Robert Cecil.

On inheriting Theobalds in 1598 Sir Robert Cecil set out to enlarge his father’s park and to improve the rather flat and featureless park landscape south and west of the house. In June 1601 there was a scheme to plant 300 trees in the park, presumably for ornamental purposes and perhaps as avenues along the walks.82 Much more ambitious was a series of large-scale ornamental water features, including a ‘new river’ constructed in 1602 by Adrian Gilbert, the younger brother of the seaman and explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert and halfbrother to Sir Walter Ralegh. Adrian Gilbert appears to have been connected with the creation of several important gardens, one of which was at ‘Sherborne Lodge’, Ralegh’s new house in Dorset, where during the 1590s Gilbert’s contribution included ‘drawing the River through rocks into his garden’.83 Letters from Gilbert to Sir Robert Cecil reveal that the channel in Theobalds Park had been dug by July 1602 and sedge (‘sagge’), rushes and bushes were to be planted on the banks the following spring.

The artificial river was to incorporate ‘four or five fords for the deer to go through’ and these shallows would also permit herons to feed on the fish.84 It was Gilbert’s immodest opinion that he had made Cecil ‘a river in his park better than if it were natural and has less impediments, more pleasure, more profit and [is] more beautiful’, and that his work was worth half Cecil’s house and park.85 Thorpe’s 1611 plan shows that the ‘river’ extended south-westwards through the park from the large ‘Greate pond’ lying on the west side of Theobalds House (Plate 10).86 As well as the river, Thorpe’s plan also shows several obviously man-made ponds: two rectangular pools – possibly

deliberately designed to align with the lodge – and a pair of parallel ‘mini-canals’ on the east bank of the artificial river.

The plan also features a much larger square pool containing five islands which Sir Fulk Grevill in May 1605 considered ‘pleasantly one in proportion to another’.87 This pond was accessible from the royal palace (as it became in 1607) via the interconnecting walks or allées, and was probably where James I kept a barge. In 1623 a payment of £9 2s 6d was made to William Johnson, ‘keeper of the great pond, and of the barge and barge-house, together with the island and arbour, &c, at Theobalds Park’.88 Twenty-seven years later ‘the Kings Pond’, with a ‘Decayed Barge and Barge house’ and ‘an arbour in the midst of the Pond’, together with stairs, rails, water gates and grates, was recorded by the parliamentary surveyors prior to the dismantling of the Theobalds estate.89 One side of this pond survives – a substantial earth bank 100m long and topped with trees. The remainder of the pond is gradually disappearing under repeated ploughing, but it refills with water after wet weather (Figure 18, p. 96).90 When Robert Cecil, now earl of Salisbury, accepted the royal estate at Hatfield in exchange for his Theobalds estate in 1607 he took the opportunity to plan a new house and its landscape setting, creating a coherent design with long straight ‘walks’ aligned on the central axis of the house and leading to the horizon from both the north and south fronts – one of the first men in England to do so. The north walk descended into a valley before rising towards the north-west side of the park, as it still does today, and great effort went into reducing the gradients, earth from the higher parts being used to raise ‘the bottom’.91 The resulting cutting through the hill and the causeway across the valley to the south are clearly visible on LiDAR images. To the south of the new house the land rose up a gentle slope along which ran the highway carrying traffic from Hatfield towards the south, which was bounded by common arable fields and a number of small closes. The earl had the road closed and shifted the traffic about 200m westwards onto a back lane, where it would not intrude into the formal vista he planned before the south front. His vision comprised a straight, tree-lined carriage drive – the ‘south walk’ – extending half a mile to the horizon from the entrance courtyard and walled gardens around the house. All traces of the old road

79 HHA CP 143/51–3; CPM Supp. 25 map of Theobalds park by Israel Amyce, 1602.

80 BL Cotton MS Aug.I.i.75 plan of Theobalds park by J. Thorpe, 1611.

81 HHA CP 143/55 list of works for which money was owed, December 1578. The cost of the pond head and mount was £4 2s 6d.

82 CCP, 11, 1601, p. 248. The records suggest that the tree-planting was proposed by Israel Amyce, rather than by Cecil himself.

83 J.C. de V. Roberts, Devon’s Falstaff … the life and times of Adrian Gilbert <https://jrmundialist.wordpress.com/devon-history/devons-falstaff/chapter-12/> accessed 22 December 2017.

84 CCP, 12, 1602–1603, pp. 221, 292, 317.

85 Ibid., p. 221.

86 BL Cotton MS Aug.I.i.75.

87 CCP, 17, 1605, p. 215.

88 The king’s barge-master was commissioned to build two barges in 1609 – one for ‘the Prince’ and one for his daughter ‘the Lady Elizabeth’; a new barge was ordered for the queen in 1618, and a ‘new privy barge’ for himself in 1620, with ‘two barges thereto belonging’. (F. Devon (ed.), Issues of the exchequer: being payments made out of his majesty’s revenue during the reign of King James I (London, 1836), pp. 91, 249, 273–4, 276, 289.)

89 TNA E 317/Herts 27 Parliamentary survey of Theobalds Park, 1650, p. 7.

90 An application made to English Heritage in 2011 for this feature to be listed was refused.

91 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 203.

21

Introduction

Deer The fallow deer was the species most commonly found in Hertfordshire’s parks from medieval times onwards.

Introduced by the new Norman lords and their descendants, who took control of Hertfordshire’s manors after 1066, fallow deer flourished and today roam wild in the countryside in good numbers. The male deer were categorised according to their age and suitability for hunting: a pricket was a second-year male whose horns were beginning to ‘grow up sharp and spit-wise’; a sorel was in its third year; a sore in its fourth year; and a buck was five or more years old.98 The bucks were hunted during the summer months, when they were well-fed and carried the most venison and fat – described as ‘in grease’. Does were usually taken between late November and mid-February.99 No hunting was permitted during the ‘fence month’ – the two weeks each side of midsummer when the fawns were born.100 Red deer are native to Britain but the earliest record of them from a Hertfordshire park was in 1427/8, when the abbot of St Albans stocked his new park at Tyttenhanger with both red and fallow deer.101 How long the red deer remained at Tyttenhanger is not known and it was more than a century later that red deer next appear in the Hertfordshire records, when in 1543 Henry VIII stocked his new park at Waltham in Essex with 12 stags taken from Bedwell Park.102 Red deer are twice the size of fallow deer and were generally found in the parks of the wealthiest members of society. In the 1570s Lord Burghley obtained red deer for his new park at Theobalds. When his son Robert inherited Theobalds in 1598 he began to expand the park and, during 1600, was sent dozens of red deer, mostly hinds, from friends in Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Essex and elsewhere to stock the park. In 1612, after Theobalds had passed into royal ownership, James I was sent red deer by his brother-in-law the king of Denmark and in 1620 there was a herd of 800 red deer at Theobalds and only 152 fallow. A decade later there were said to be 700 of each.103 In 1611 the king was sent a rare white red deer calf that was accommodated at Theobalds together with the woman who was nursing it,104 and 21 stags were sent to Theobalds for Charles I in 1636 by the earl of Salisbury’s brother-in-law Henry Lord Clifford.105

and the hedged field boundaries were erased and thousands of trees were imported from the continent and planted under the direction of John Tradescant to border formal walks in the park and gardens.

An unusual and interesting contrast to the ornamental park landscapes planned by the Cecils is provided by the park at Gorhambury, near St Albans, which in the early seventeenth century was divided by hedges into a number of fields. Crucial evidence for the existence of the deer park was provided by the park’s surveyor, who noted that some of the hedgerows contained ‘gappes for the deare’.92 Many of the field names and acreages correlate precisely with an earlier survey for Sir Nicholas Bacon of 1569, indicating that his park had the same pastoral appearance.93 Sir Nicholas laid out some notable gardens at Gorhambury, possibly including the ‘watering pond inclosed & terraced about with brick’ in Brickkiln Close in the park.94 Alternatively, this may have been the work of his son, Francis Bacon, who also created a magnificent terraced walk along the northern boundary of the park leading to Verulam House at the north-east corner of the estate. According to John Aubrey, writing in the mid-seventeenth century, the main avenue on the walk was wide enough to take three coaches and the side walks could take two more. The avenue was planted with a sequence of different species in a repeating pattern: ‘severall stately trees of the like groweth and heighth, viz. elme, chestnut, beach, hornebeame, Spanish ash, cervice-tree’, creating ‘a most pleasant variegated verdure’ when viewed from the roof of Verulam House.95 The inhabitants of the parks Parks were often stocked with a range of animals, domesticated and semi-domesticated,96 providing not only prey for recreational hunting but also a ‘living larder’ for the owner to draw upon whenever he needed meat or fish for his table.

As well as the deer and livestock we would expect to find in Hertfordshire’s parks there are occasional records of more unusual animals, but there is no evidence that the earl of Salisbury accepted Captain Avery Philips’ offer of wolves for one of his Hatfield parks in 1609.97

92 HALS 1.A.83/7 early seventeenth-century survey of the Gorhambury estate, perhaps c.1626.

93 HALS Gorhambury Deeds XI.2.

94 HALS 1.A.83/7 early seventeenth-century survey of the Gorhambury estate.

95 J. Aubrey, ‘Brief Lives,’ chiefly of contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between 1669 & 1696 edited from the author’s MSS by A. Clark, 1 (Oxford, 1898), pp. 79–80.

96 Also termed ‘intermediate exploitation’ – see T. Williamson, ‘Fish, fur and feather: man and nature in the post-medieval period’, in K. Barker and T. Darvill (eds), Making English landscapes (Oxford, 1997).

97 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 201.

98 C.E. Hare, The language of sport (London, 1939), pp. 10–11.

99 J. Birrell, ‘Deer and deer farming in medieval England’, Agricultural History Review, 40/2 (1992), pp. 122–3.

100 Fletcher, Gardens of earthly delight, p. 151.

101 W. Page (ed.), The Victoria history of the county of Hertford, 2 (London, 1908), p. 237; H.T. Riley (ed.), Annales Monasterii S. Albani a Johanne Amundesham, vol. 1, AD 793–1290 (London, 1870), p. 261.

102 L&P, 18 (2), pp. 264–5.

103 Thomson, ‘Progress, retreat, and pursuit’, p. 100.

104 CSP dom. 1611–18, p. 84 letter, 6 November, 1611; J. Nichols, The progresses, processions and magnificent festivities, of King James the First, 2 (London, 1828), pp. 431–2.

105 CSP dom. 1636–7, p. 49. Letter from the earl of Salisbury at Hatfield House, 3 July 1636. Some of these stags may have been destined for other parks.

22

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Stags from Theobalds were sometimes transported around the country for the king’s sporting entertainment when on progress. Late in 1638, for example, ‘two brace of stags’ from Theobalds were ‘put into the park of Sir Francis Leight (Leigh), at Addington, Kent, to be kept there for his Majesty’s disport in the next summer’.106 There were still 337 red deer in Theobalds Park in 1650, just before it was disparked by parliament.107 In addition to Theobalds, red deer were also present early in the seventeenth century in the parks at Watton Woodhall, a prestigious house belonging to Sir Philip Boteler, and at Hatfield. The royal estate at Hatfield was granted to Robert Cecil, now Lord Salisbury, in 1607 in exchange for Theobalds, and he obtained red deer to add to the herds of fallow already present in the parks. The second earl of Salisbury added more red deer in 1620 and in 1629 red deer calves were brought to Hatfield from Theobalds.108 The red deer at Hatfield appear to have been kept close to the house, separate from the fallow herd and with their own keepers.109 There are no records of numbers but there may have been relatively few of them; they were perhaps bred for prestige and for release one at a time on the occasion of a stag hunt.110 Some became too tame to be hunted and were shot at (with shot and powder) ‘to make them wild’.111 Red deer were also introduced to the park at Hadham Hall, perhaps in the 1630s, by Arthur Capel, one of the wealthiest men in England, and by the 1660s there were ‘thirty or forty’ red deer in the herd of ‘five or six hundred’ in Lord Aston’s park at Standon Lordship.112 The second earl of Bridgewater established a red deer park at Ashridge in 1664 alongside the existing park of fallow deer, and in 1679 and 1680 red deer were taken from Ashridge to Hatfield, where, by the end of the century, there was also said to be one park for red deer and one for fallow.113 Both red and fallow are ideal park deer, being gregarious and well adapted to grazing and consuming a diet consisting mostly of grass.114 At times when grass was in short supply – during the winter or periods of drought – a variety of supplementary foods was provided. The provision of hay features regularly in records of park management and particular meadows – either

in the park or elsewhere on the demesne – were often allocated to produce hay as winter fodder for the deer. Parks containing a meadow for this purpose included Standon, where, in the mid-sixteenth century, 10s was allocated annually for haymaking, and Ware, where eight acres of a 21-acre meadow called Closelaunde were reserved to grow hay for the deer.115 At Hunsdon in the 1530s the king’s three parks were supplied with hay from three specific meadows: four acres of meadow in the common field called Brodemede were allocated to the deer in the old park and two acres went to the parks of ‘Goodmanshyde and Le Newparke’; the first crop of hay from a five-acre meadow called Little Tidney also went to ‘Le New parke and Goodmanshyde’, as did all the hay from another acre and three roods in Westmede. The cost of making the hay and its carriage to the parks came to 22s 11d in 1532.116 At Hertingfordbury between 1485 and 1555 hay for the deer was made in Smalemede each year at a cost of 3s 4d and in the 1560s a ‘good store’ of hay was mown on part of the park each year, as well as from a small meadow called the Deer Mead lying between the park pale and the river.117 This meadow was mentioned again at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when commissioners for James I stated that the three-acre Deer meadow was essential ‘for maintenance of the Deer’.118 At Hadham Hall in 1540 three loads of hay for the deer came from Plantens mede (Plantains), and in 1551 and 1552 five loads were taken to the park from Nashe Mead on the east bank of the river Ash.119 At Moor Park in the 1580s – when the park had been reduced to just 200 acres and contained 200 fallow deer – two free tenants were each obliged to provide three cartloads of hay each year.120 When insufficient hay was available from the demesne meadows it was purchased – sometimes at great expense – but the documents rarely provide sufficient information to draw any conclusions about the quantity of hay allowed for herds of different sizes. The records for two of Hertfordshire’s royal parks are, however, more illuminating. At Moor Park in the mid-sixteenth century 505 deer were supplied with 30 loads a year, for which the keeper was allowed £7 10s.121 In James I’s

106 CSP dom. 1638–9, p. 294. The stags subsequently escaped from Addington Park and one of the king’s yeomen huntsmen was given responsibility for preserving them, with instructions to ‘intimate his Majesty’s commandment to the inhabitants of the [neighbouring] towns that they forbear to hunt them’.

107 TNA E 317/Herts/26.

108 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, pp. 198, 206.

109 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 206.

110 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 208.

111 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 248.

112 Morris, Troubles of our Catholic forefathers, pp. 403–4 quoting Sir Edward Southcote, grandson of Lord Aston.

113 CSP dom. 1664–5, pp. 47–8; HALS AH1181 marriage settlement, 21 October 1664; HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 210; H. Chauncy, Historical antiquities of Hertfordshire (London, 1700), p. 308.

114 Fletcher, Gardens of earthly delight, p. 98.

115 TNA SC6/HenVIII/6629, /6632, /6677 bailiff’s accounts for Standon, 1533–4, 1537–39, 1543–45; SC6/HenVIII/6869 minister’s account for Ware, 1539–40.

116 TNA E 315/273/2 account, January 1532.

117 HHA Court Rolls (bailiff’s accounts) 21/18 1485–6, 22/5 1493–4, 21/10 1495–6, 21/17 1513–14, 22/6 1518–19, 22/12 1554–5; TNA DL 4/83/37 depositions, 1632.

118 TNA DL 44/674 A Survey of Hertingfordbury Park, 1604–05.

119 HALS DE/X531/M16, /M22, /M23 accounts, 1540, 1551, 1552.

120 HALS DE/B1841/M1 ‘court book’ containing a seventeeth-century copy of the survey.

121 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556.

23

Introduction

park at Theobalds in 1618 the keeper was authorised to spend up to £200 a year on hay and oats and the herd two years later contained 952 deer; in 1637 there were 1,657 deer and in 1640 £277 16s was spent on hay alone.122 The size of the herd is not recorded at Hatfield Woodhall, where, in 1643, hay for the deer was said to cost about £15 a year, or at Cashiobury, where, at the end of the seventeenth century, 11 loads and 12 trusses of hay were purchased for the deer at a cost of £21 7s 10d.123 Records of buildings for storing the hay are discussed below (p. 41).

In addition to hay, other foodstuffs for the deer were occasionally recorded. At Hatfield these include oats, peas, lentils, tares (vetch), holly, ivy and peas.124 Peas were also bought for the deer in Theobalds Park in 1640.125 Branches of trees in leaf were regularly lopped to provide browse for the deer and – once the foliage had been eaten – firewood for the keeper. In the 1540s the king’s woodward was responsible for checking ‘the good order of the browse wood’ in Bedwell Park and in 1562 there are records of 55 oaks being ‘unlawfully topped, hedded and lopped’ by the keeper in Innings Park at Hatfield for browse for the deer.126 Thirty years later the underkeeper of Hatfield Wood rebutted accusations that he had similarly damaged trees by stating that ‘such woodes so felled lopt and tressled is Browsewoode for the deare there’.127 Underwoods of hornbeam, maple, hazel and hawthorn in Hertingfordbury Park in 1553, lopped by the keeper for fuel and for browse for the deer, were valued at £30 and the 1556 survey of Hunsdon recorded browsewood for the deer in all three parks.128 In 1614 the earl of Salisbury’s tenant of the New Park at Hatfield was allowed wood for browse for the deer and conies and in 1631 his tenant of the lodge in the Middle Park was permitted to take 20 loads of firewood yearly ‘of such wood as shall be lopped or cut for browse for the deer’.129 In 1619 the earl himself, as

keeper of Cheshunt and Theobalds Parks, was authorised to cut wood ‘for browse for deer’.130 There are many records of live deer being moved from one park to another, sometimes over considerable distances.131 The process was evidently not without risk: in 1600 a contingent of hinds sent to Sir Robert Cecil at Theobalds by his friend Peregrine Bertie, probably from Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire, all arrived dead, having suffered fatal ‘bruising’ as a result of being transported two to a cart.132 Another friend, Henry, earl of Lincoln, planned to transport deer to Theobalds by ship from Boston in Lincolnshire via the Thames and river Lea, to be landed ‘hard by your park’.133 A decade later, when Cecil, now earl of Salisbury, was stocking his Little Park at Hatfield, the earl of Lincoln again sent red deer by ship, but this time landed them in London.134 How they travelled between the ship and the park is not recorded in either case but carts were sometimes used, even for short distances, as when 20 fallow deer were ‘carted’ less than a mile from Hatfield Woodhall to the earl of Salisbury’s Little Park at Hatfield in 1608 and when red deer were carted out of the Middle Park at Hatfield in 1612.135 Fallow deer were easier to capture and transport in a box or crate on a cart.136 At Walkern in 1634 12s was paid ‘to 4 men for helping cart the deare’ for three days and other payments in the same account may relate to the same event, including 6d to ‘a taylor for soeing the canvus’, 2s for ‘six boyes … helping tye paper’ (the paper cost 1s) and the oats (8s) and ‘pease straw’ (5s) for the deer.137 Another interesting account from Walkern, this time from 1603, includes a payment of 46s 8d for ‘The Kreyght’ made from the ‘offal’ of two felled oaks – perhaps a crate for transporting the deer.138 Other equipment for managing deer included nets, toils, feeding troughs and buckstalls.139 An unusual record of ten fawns being ‘speyed’ at Hatfield in 1604 contrasts with the episodes of deer mortality that were

122 TNA PRO 30/26/161; CSP dom. 1611–18, p. 554; Glennie, ‘Theobalds Park’, p. 32 citing HHA General 1/6, 9, 16, 22, 24, 30, 33.

123 ‘House of Lords Journal Volume 6: 16 October 1643’, in Journal of the House of Lords: Volume 6, 1643 (London, 1767–1830), pp. 255–60. British History Online <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol6/pp255–260>, accessed 3 April 2017; HALS 10457.

124 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, pp. 206, 198, 207 (the tares were also fed to the pigeons), 210.

125 TNA PRO 30/26/161.

126 TNA E 315/457 and E 315/458 accounts of the woodwards of various manors, 1543–5; TNA E 178/7370 inquisition, c.1568.

127 TNA E 178/1026 inquisition into ‘waste and spoiles’ at Hatfield in previous 12 years, 1594.

128 TNA DL 43/3/38; E 317/391 survey of manors in the county of Hertford, lands & possessions of King Philip & Queen Mary, 1556, fol. 84.

129 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, pp. 175, 255.

130 ‘House of Commons Journal Volume 6: 30 April 1650’, in Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 6, 1648–1651 (London, 1802), pp. 404–6 <http:// www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol6/pp404–406>, accessed 9 January 2016.

131 Examples include stags from Bedwell to Waltham park in 1543, 20 deer from Hatfield Woodhall to Hatfield Little Park c.1608, 50 deer from Cheshunt Park to the earl of Suffolk in 1613.

132 CCP, 10, 1600, p. 307.

133 CCP, 24, Addenda 1605–1668, p. 132.

134 HHA Building of Hatfield House, p. 224.

135 HHA Building of Hatfield House, p. 196. There is a bill for 10s dated April 1608; Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 248.

136 Fletcher, Gardens of earthly delight, p. 93.

137 HALS 9607 Walkern estate accounts, 1591–1640.

138 HALS 9607 Walkern estate accounts, 1591–1640. This forms part of ‘A note of charges for felling and for squaring for boards for the deerhouse’, 8 July 1603.

Offal was the term for the smaller wood of no use as timber.

139 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 196.

140 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 196 ‘Speying 10 fawns in the Park at 2/’. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes records of spaying bitches from 1425 and mares from 1607 but early records relating to deer are difficult to find.

24

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

more often reported.140 At least 200 deer were said to have died in Moor Park during the year 1558–9 and a ‘great number’ had been lost to ‘morayn’ in the previous three or four years.141 Excessive moss in Innings Park at Hatfield was thought to be the cause of unusually high mortality in the deer herd in the 1570s.142 Commissioners for James I reported in 1604 that in Hertingfordbury Park 160 deer out of a 200-strong herd had died in one year – although which year is not recorded.143 Many of the deer in two parks belonging to Sir Arthur Capel – presumably at Hadham Hall and Walkern – had died in 1604 and 1605, perhaps an indication of more widespread malaise within the deer population, or perhaps cross-infection between the two herds.144 Possession of a deer park provided the owner with a ready means of expressing gratitude and promoting goodwill with gifts of deer or venison. Elizabeth Howard, duchess of Norfolk, sent ‘a couple of does’ to Cardinal Wolsey when she wrote to him from Hunsdon in 1524 to enquire about the return of her husband from military service on the Scottish border.145 Sir Robert Cecil was frequently in receipt of venison – both bucks and does – from Sir Arthur Capel at Hadham Hall, who sent at least a dozen deer to Theobalds between 1597 and 1611. Capel had a large family and many of the deer were sent in gratitude for Cecil’s help in advancing the career of one or other of his sons.146 Between 1627 and 1637 the second earl of Salisbury gave away each year an average of 105 bucks, killed in his two parks at Hatfield, as gifts to family, friends and neighbours.147 Letters written by the second earl of Bridgewater in 1659 reveal that gifts of venison continued to hold currency and oil the wheels of elite society during the Interregnum: the intended recipients of two half bucks from his park at Ashridge were ‘Chief Justice Glynne’ and ‘Colonel Commissioner Tyrrell’.148

mansion built by William Cecil in the 1560s was a precursor to the deer park he laid out in the following decade. William Cavendish enclosed part of Northaw common to establish a rabbit warren beside his house; although attacked by angry commoners in 1544, it was later also incorporated into a park.149 Rabbits were proudly portrayed on estate maps of the period, as at Digswell, where grey rabbits, together with the warrener and his dogs, were depicted in 1599, and at Sopwell, on the outskirts of St Albans, in the mid-seventeenth century (Plate 19).150 It is possible that some parks contained only rabbits and never did hold deer, as is perhaps hinted at in the description of Thomas Perient’s early sixteenth-century ‘Park or Warren called Holwelbury Park’ and the 30-acre ‘Park or Rabbit Warren’ established at Redbourn in the later sixteenth century.151 As well as signifying social status, a rabbit warren could be a valuable economic asset, producing income from land which was frequently of little value for agriculture. Some were very extensive and required significant investments of effort and money to set up. In 1566 Lady Bourchier ‘made and stored with conies thirty new burrows within the park’ at Benington.152 A 72-acre rabbit warren was established in the early seventeenth century by Francis Bacon in his park at Gorhambury on the ‘worste parte of the grounde’. Some years later it was described as ‘well stored’ and its burrows were ‘in good repaire’.153 The second earl of Salisbury intended to make 100 burrows, each stocked with conies to the value of 10s, when he leased the New Park at Hatfield to Sir Anthony Forest in 1614. Forest agreed that, at the end of his lease, he would leave ‘1000 breeding conies, bucks and does, whereof half to be black and half grey’.154 In 1689 the fourth earl established a warren in the Middle or Miller’s Park at Hatfield and the cost of making the burrows was £43 18s.155 Many warrens were leased, producing substantial rental income for the owner, but it is not always clear whether the warren lay within or outside the park, as, for example, at Bedwell, where Sir William Say leased his warren for £6 13s 4d per annum in the 1490s.156 At Hertingfordbury in the same decade Edward Benstead, keeper of the park and warren for

Rabbits Rabbit warrens, in which the rabbits lived in specially constructed artificial burrows, were very common in Tudor and early Stuart deer parks. A warren adjacent to one’s residence was regarded as a mark of status and at Theobalds the ‘coneygarth’ established outside the garden walls of the

141 TNA DL 44/3 Inquisition as to the state of Moor Park, 1558–59.

142 TNA E 178/1026 Certificate as to the destruction of deer by the growth of moss in Innings Park, 1578.

143 TNA DL 44/674 A Survey of Hertingfordbury Park, Hertfordshire, 1604–1605.

144 CCP, 18, 1606, p. 19; HALS 8503 copy of Capel’s letter.

145 M.A. Everett Wood (ed.), Letters of Royal and illustrious ladies of Great Britain from the commencement of the twelfth century to the close of the reign of Queen Mary, 1 (London, 1846), p. 338.

146 CCP, 7, 1597, p. 465; CCP, 9, 1599, p. 393; CCP, 11, 1601, pp. 239, 457; CCP, 17, 1605, p. 275; CCP, 18, 1606, pp. 224 and 334; CSP dom. 1611–18, p.

49; CSP dom. 1611–18, p. 88.

147 HHA General 1/13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28.

148 HALS AH1045, AH1046, AH1048, AH1053.

149 Jones, ‘Commotion time’, p. 33.

150 HALS DE/P/P1 map of the manor of Digswell, 1599; XIII.30 plan of the ‘Mannor of Sopwell, part of the possessions of Robert Sadleir Esquire’, n.d.

151 HALS DE/P/T719 Statement regarding wood ground near Holwelbury Park, c.1639; X.C.7.A survey of the manor of Redbourn, 1609.

152 TNA C 78/38/28 decree in Butler v Bourghchier, 1567.

153 HALS 1.A.83/7 undated survey, ?c.1626.

154 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 175.

155 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, pp. 256, 261.

156 Rowe, Medieval parks, p. 90.

25

Introduction

Henry VII, paid 60s a year to lease the warren, which was probably outside the park.157 Benington warren was valued at 66s 8d per annum and was leased with the manor until at least 1508.158 The warrens in the royal parks at Standon and The More do not appear to have been leased, but were given annual rental values of 30s between 1495 and 1545 at Standon and 100s at The More in the 1530s.159 The manorial warren at Tyttenhanger, which lay partly within and partly outside the park, was leased for 41 years in 1532 by the abbot of St Albans to John Bowman for £20 a year. Bowman was permitted ‘to make the borrowes where he thought best within the warren and Parke for save garde and sustentacon of the Connyes and gayme there’.160 The rental value of the warren of black rabbits in Innings Park when Henry VIII acquired Hatfield in 1538 was 73s 4d and in 1551 it was leased to a tenant at that rate.161 Rabbit warrens created additional hazards for sportsmen hunting in parks, however, and for his own protection James I ordered the destruction of the warren in Innings Park in 1607.162

Fishing rights were carefully protected on rivers passing through the parks at Hatfield, Hertingfordbury, King’s Langley, Ware and Watton Woodhall, and probably also in the parks at Brocket Hall and Cashiobury. Ponds provided an essential source of water for deer in those parks which lacked a river or stream, but ponds managed for fish production are also recorded in numerous parks and the term ‘pond’ can probably be stretched to include the extraordinary artificial river created for Sir Robert Cecil in Theobalds Park in 1602.167 Henry VIII enjoyed fishing and created a remarkable series of fishponds by damming a brook in one of his parks at Hunsdon (pp. 152–4 and Figure 6). It is possible that these ponds, which covered 12 acres, also had an ornamental function (p. 20), perhaps imitating the water gardens of Renaissance Italy. Comparable fishponds existed in Popes Park at Hatfield by 1722 and in Knebworth Park by 1731, but, unlike those at Hunsdon, their construction dates are not known.168 Henry also fished in the ponds in Moor Park, but these fell into disrepair after his death. A survey ordered by Queen Elizabeth in 1565 found the sluices and ponds ‘in great decay and the fish destroyed for lack of water because the sluice be broken’; repairs, predicted to cost £40, do not appear to have been carried out.169

Hares Hares were recorded in Berkhamsted Park in 1559, when the ‘free warren of conies, hares and the small game’ was leased to the queen’s new keeper, and again in 1580.163 The only other clear evidence for hares being kept in a warren or park in the county before the Civil Wars relates to Lamer Park in Wheathampstead, where a survey in 1617 recorded the park extending eastwards onto the neighbouring manor of Bridehall to incorporate a seven-acre Hare Park.164 Later records of hare parks or warrens include two hare warrens in Knebworth Park, possibly established in the mid-seventeenth century and shown on a map of 1731,165 and the observation of Thomas Baskerville, who, on a trip to Baldock in 1681, noticed ‘a hare-warren lately made and railed in by the present Earle of Salisbury’, who had a hunting lodge nearby at Quickswood.166

Horses Many deer parks were home to the owner’s horses. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Ware Park and its meadows were reserved for the livery of the countess of Richmond’s horses; the abbot of St Albans kept horses in the park at Redbourn; and Sir William Capell kept a ‘black colt in the park at Hadham’.170 At Hatfield in 1611 the first earl of Salisbury provided an enclosure and house within the newly extended Innings Park for the mares and colts of his son William.171 The keepers of some parks, including Henry VII’s keeper at Hertingfordbury and the abbot of St Albans’ keeper at Tyttenhanger in 1532, were also permitted to keep one or more horses in the park.172 Two horses were kept by the custodian of Benington Park in 1556, three horses and three geldings by the keeper and an old retainer at Moor Park in 1586 and four horses by the keeper of the Middle Park at Hatfield at the beginning of the seventeenth century. When William Cecil, now

Fish Rivers and fishponds provided both freshwater fish for the dining tables of the social elite – an important dietary element on those days when religion forbade the consumption of meat – and another opportunity for sporting recreation in parks.

157 HHA court rolls 22/5 account, 1493–4, 21/10 account, 1495–6.

158 HHA court rolls 10/19, 10/21, 10/23, and 11/5 bailiff’s accounts, 1490–1, 1495–6, 1498–9 and 1508.

159 TNA SC6/HenVII/258, /265; SC6/HenVIII/1567, /1572, /1577, /6632, /6677 minister’s accounts for Standon; SC6/HenVIII/5995, 6012 minister’s accounts for The More, 1532–3, 1536–7.

160 HALS DE/B2067B/T86, fol. 175.

161 TNA LR2/vol216 fols 1, 5; HHA Hatfield manor papers 2, p. 807.

162 CCP, 19, 1607, p. 115.

163 CPR 1558–1560, pp. 296–7; CCP, 2, 1572–1582, p. 313.

164 HALS 27235 & 27237 Abstract surveys: manors of Lamer, Butlers, Brydell and Waterend by Aaron Rathborne, 1617.

165 Private collection, Knebworth estate map, 1731.

166 M. Tomkins, So that was Hertfordshire: travellers’ jottings 1322–1887 (Hertford, 1998), p. 24.

167 Parks with records of fishponds include Weld, Theobalds, Hatfield middle, Hunsdon, Maydencroft, Knebworth, Nyn Hall, Moor and Gorhambury.

168 HHA CPM Supp. 67 survey of the manor of Popes, 1722; private collection, Knebworth estate map, 1731.

169 TNA DL 44/120 Commission to enquire as to the state of the orchards and sluices at the Manor of the Moor and fragment of the return, 1565.

170 L&P, 1, p. 365; HALS X/C/6/B court rolls of the manor of Redbourn, 1515–1537; TNA PROB 11/18/292 will of Sir William Capell, 1515.

171 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 233.

172 C. Given-Wilson et al. (eds), ‘Henry VII: November 1485, Part 2’, in The parliament rolls of medieval England, 15 (London, 2005), p. 312; HALS DE/

26

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

second earl of Salisbury, was appointed keeper of the king’s parks at Cheshunt and Theobalds in 1619, he was granted pasture for two horses in each park.173 A scarcity of potential warhorses led Henry VIII to pass an Act in 1536 decreeing that all owners (or tenants) of parks with a circumference of more than one mile were to keep two breeding mares and those with parks more than four miles in circumference were to keep four such mares, the only exemptions being parks where the tenants or inhabitants of neighbouring townships had right of common.174 According to Brayley, ‘this statute probably soon fell into disuse’ but ‘an attempt was made to revive it’ during Elizabeth’s reign, which resulted in the surviving list of 28 Hertfordshire parks considered suitable for the breeding of horses, compiled in 1583 (pp. 5, 6).175 Early seventeenth-century horse-breeding records that have survived for Walkern Park show that in 1611 there were seven breeding mares, two ‘sucking colts’, two two-year-old mares and three geldings.176 Five mares foaled in 1626 and another five foals were recorded in 1629.177

documents.178 Accounts from 1495, 1507 and 1509 for the royal park of Standon all record an annual rental value of 66s 8d for summer and winter agistment in the park, which remained fixed throughout the reign of Henry VIII, together with an additional sum of 48s for the agistment of 23 cows and one bull pasturing in part of the park. No pannage was recorded between 1495 and 1545 and it seems likely that there was no agistment either, although a notional value continued to appear in the accounts.179 At the royal park of Hertingfordbury no income was recorded from pannage or agistment in accounts compiled between 1485 and 1555,180 and there is, similarly, no evidence of agistment or pannage occurring in Henry VIII’s parks at King’s Langley, Cheshunt or The More, although at the latter the farm of the herbage and pannage was valued at £4 a year and the herbage and pannage of Cheshunt Park was worth 20s a year.181 At Ware Park, however, agistment continued until at least 1513–14, when the combined revenue from the farm of the fishery and agistment of the park was £8 13s 4d.182 At Knebworth agistment and pannage in the Great Park continued into the 1540s at least, with recorded revenues of £3 13s 4d from agistment and £7 10s 4d from pannage.183 When Princess Elizabeth became the owner of Hatfield Great Park in 1551, her surveyors reported that, while the herbage of the park was common, the pannage belonged to her Grace.184 In good mast years the park keepers at Hatfield took in ‘other folk’s hogs’ on payment of 4d per hog and 2d for every ‘porkling’.185 The keepers or custodians of parks were frequently permitted to keep livestock as well as horses within the park, but the numbers were carefully limited to prevent ‘the Venison or le Game’ of the owner being ‘impeded or impaired’.186 At Tyttenhanger, for example, the new keeper in 1532 was permitted to pasture eight cows and one horse in the park,187 and at Benington in 1556 and in Goodmanshide Park at Hunsdon in 1558 the keepers were permitted eight cows as

Livestock Until it was enclosed in 1611–12, Hatfield Great Park encompassed an extensive area of well-wooded common land and the deer within it had to share the grazing with the cattle, sheep, pigs and horses of the local inhabitants. Most parks did not contain common land, but the deer nevertheless often had to share the pasture with livestock as well as horses.

The medieval practices of agistment and pannage – where, on payment of a fee, livestock could graze in the park and pigs could feed on acorns and beechnuts in autumn – continued into the sixteenth century, but appear to have been in decline.

At Benington agistment earned the owner Sir William Say an income of 159s 7d in 1495–6, 54s 2d in 1498–9 and 51s in 1508, while pannage was worth 11s 3d in 1498–9; however, there is no evidence of agistment or pannage in later

B2067B/E34 release by Richard Ives of parkership of Tyttenhanger, 1547.

173 TNA E315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556; HALS DE/B1841/M1, p. 28; HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 3, p. 1201; ‘House of Commons Journal Volume 6: 30 April 1650’, in Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 6, 1648–1651 (London, 1802), pp. 404–6 <http://www. british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol6/pp404–406>, accessed 9 January 2016.

174 E.W. Brayley, The history of Surrey, vol. 1, part 1 (London, 1841), p. 52. To increase the size of the nation’s horses the Act specified that the mares and the stallions that covered them were to be at least 13 and 14 hands high respectively. I am indebted to Kathryn Shreeve for this information.

175 TNA SP12/163/14.

176 HALS 9607 Walkern estate accounts, 1591–1640. A ‘view’ of the deer, mares and colts in the park, October 1611.

177 HALS 9607 Walkern estate accounts, 1591–1640. ‘Giles Humberstons account of the foles at Walkerne in Summer 1626’.

178 HHA court rolls 10/21, 10/23, 11/5 bailiff’s accounts, 1495–6, 1498–9 and 1508.

179 TNA SC6/HenVII/258, /265; SC6/HenVIII/1567, /1572, /1577, /6632, /6677.

180 HHA Court Rolls (bailiff’s accounts) 21/18 1485–6, 22/5 1493–4, 21/10 1495–6, 21/17 1513–14, 22/6 1518–19, 22/12 1554–5.

181 TNA SC6/HenVIII/6012 minister’s accounts, 1536/7; TNA SC12/6/65 Crown lands: Particulars of castles, manors, houses and parks in Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Yorkshire, Surrey, Devonshire and Somerset, no date; SC6/HenVIII/6781 Hertford and Hants: Cheshunt, &c. Richmond lands, 1546–7.

182 TNA SC6/HenVIII/1593 bailiff’s account, 1513–14.

183 HALS DE/K/133 bailiff’s account, 1541–2.

184 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 163.

185 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 167.

186 HALS AH2785 copy of lease to Mrs Jane Murray of Berkhamsted Park and demesnes, 14 March 1627.

187 HALS DE/B2067B/E34 release by Richard Ives of parkership of Tyttenhanger, 1547.

188 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556; CPR 1557–1558, p. 304.

27

Introduction

well as two horses.188 At Berkhamsted the keeper John Verney sub-let the park to tenants in the 1530s, one of whom was accused of overstocking the park with 140 cattle ‘in pannage time’ and with ‘hogs and swine’ throughout the year – including the fence months – which ‘rooted and turned up the ground’ in the park.189 During Elizabeth’s reign the underkeeper of Hertingfordbury Park was permitted to keep nine or ten milk cows in the park190 and Sir Charles Morison, keeper and lessee of the park at King’s Langley, was permitted ‘twelve kine, two horse or mares and four hogs’.191 At Moor Park in 1586 – after it had passed to the earl of Bedford – Mistress Cornwall (probably the widow of a former keeper) was permitted to keep 20 cows and one bull in the park, together with the three geldings mentioned above and two coney burrows ‘lying hard by the lodge’ where she lived ‘for her provision’. The current park keeper was permitted to graze six cows.192 At Essendon in 1638 elderly residents recalled that the queen’s falconer had kept cattle in Bedwell Park and other men had also kept cattle and a flock of 50–60 sheep.193 The keeper of Hatfield Middle Park was allowed to keep twelve cows and one bull in the park c.1608 and the second earl of Salisbury could, as keeper, keep 12 cows in both Cheshunt and Theobalds Parks in 1619.194

the smaller parks, such as Digswell (40a) or Hallywell in St Albans (<9a), and especially where the documents refer to a ‘park or warren’, as at Holwelbury (Hatfield) and Redbourn (30a), the suspicion arises that the status animals within the park were rabbits rather than deer. At Broadfield it appears that a paddock adjacent to the sixteenth-century farmhouse was called the park (29a) and, when the estate rose in status in the early seventeenth century, this was expanded slightly and divided into the ‘Great Park’ and ‘Little or Dyal Park’ (44a including woodyard), but there is no evidence that it contained either deer or rabbits. All the above have been defined as ‘possible deer parks’ for the purposes of this study (indicated by the upper line in Figure 2) with the exception of Digswell and Bishop’s Stortford, both of which fall into the ‘probable’ category because they were depicted on Norden’s county map of 1598.

Poaching Records of poaching are rare and unlikely to present an accurate picture of poaching activity. Most documented events relate to just a few parks, almost all of which were in the hands of royal or aristocratic owners whose estate papers are much more likely to have been preserved and made available to modern researchers. An example of just such a record is the letter written by Lord Burghley’s park keeper to Sir Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son, warning him that a ‘crew of ill-disposed fellows, who carry guns and crossbows’ was threatening to take all the deer in both Theobalds and Cheshunt Parks.199 Legal records similarly reflect not the level of poaching but the willingness of some park-owners to seek retribution, no doubt expecting it to act as a deterrent. Lord Hunsdon, for example, prosecuted poachers caught at various times in his parks at Hunsdon in the early seventeenth century – which suggests in fact that any deterrent effect was short-lived!

Deer were poached from Henry VIII’s park at Hunsdon in the 1530s, from Queen Elizabeth’s park at Hertingfordbury in the 1560s, from Lord Hunsdon’s park at Hunsdon in 1618 and from James I’s park at Theobalds in the 1620s.200 Records of deer poaching increase during the Civil War years of the 1640s and in the 1650s, with several incidents in the royal parks at Cheshunt and Theobalds and in the park at Little Hadham, owned by the royalist Baron Capel. Some may have been politically motivated or simply opportunistic,

Birds The only records of birds being introduced to Hertfordshire’s parks relate to Theobalds Park in the early seventeenth century – but we have to guess at the species involved. Sir Robert Cecil was sent ‘50 flying tame fowl’ by the earl of Northumberland and 100 more by Ralph Sheldon of Beoley, Worcestershire, for his newly enlarged park in 1602.195 Four years later his cousin Sir Robert Wingfield sent a ‘brood of ducks’ for the ‘river at Theobalds’.196 Twenty years later, when James I was the owner of Theobalds, there were ‘French fowls’ and an abundance of partridges and pheasants,197 and a heronry was recorded in 1650.198 Parks without deer?

For a small number of parks no evidence has been found to show that they contained deer during the Tudor and early Stuart periods. In some cases, as at The Weld (Aldenham), Lamer (Wheathampstead) or Wyddial, this is probably due to the sparsity of the documentary record, but for some of

189 TNA SC6/HenVIII/181 ministers’ accounts, 1534–6; REQ 2/3/78 Court of Requests: Pleadings. Robert Grubbe v John Verney: lease of Berkhamsted park with the small game there, 1539/40.

190 TNA DL 4/83/37 depositions, 1632.

191 TNA PROB 11/94/168 will of Sir Charles Morison, 20 February 1598/9.

192 HALS DE/B1841/M1, p. 28.

193 TNA E 134/13&14Chas1/Hil29 depositions re Bedwell Park, January 1638.

194 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 3, p. 1201; ‘House of Commons Journal Volume 6: 30 April 1650’, in Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 6, 1648–1651 (London, 1802), pp. 404–6 <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol6/pp404–406>, accessed 9 January 2016.

195 CCP, 12, 1602–1603, p. 221 Adrian Gylbarte to Sir Robert Cecil, 1602, July 11.

196 CCP, 18, 1606, pp. 195, 220 Sir Robert Wingfield to the earl of Salisbury, 1606, July 8 and later the same month.

197 Bellany and Cogswell, The Murder of King James I, p. 22.

198 TNA E 317/Herts/27 Parliamentary survey of Theobalds Park, p. 7.

199 CCP, 8, 1598, p. 281. The letter was written on 29 July; Burghley died on 4 August.

200 L&P, 11, p. 202 ‘A remembrance for hunting in the King’s Park at Hunsdon’; CPR 1563–1566, p. 320; W. Le Hardy, Calendar to the sessions books, 1619

28

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

taking advantage of the absence of the park-owner. Cases of rabbit poaching were also prosecuted in the early seventeenth century, with incidents at Bedwell Park in Essendon and in the parks at Hatfield and Hunsdon. For example, in c.1640 three men – a shepherd and two tailors – all ‘late of Hatfield’, were accused of entering the earl of Salisbury’s Innings Park with ‘dogs, ferrets, purse-nets and hay-nets’ and taking four conies worth 3s, while in December 1626 a local carpenter broke into Viscount Rochford’s park at Hunsdon after dark with ferrets and haynets and killed a rabbit worth sixpence.201 Horses were also targeted: in 1516 a local man was accused of taking horses from the abbot of St Albans’ park at Redbourn, and a mare and a colt belonging to the king’s favourite Lord Buckingham were stolen from Theobalds Park in the spring of 1623.202 Sometimes the poaching was the work of those employed to protect the deer. Henry Field was one of the under-keepers in James I’s park at Theobalds and was described as ‘a lewd fellow that made an occupation of stealing and selling the King’s deer out of Theobalds Park’. He was captured twice but managed to escape on both occasions, hoping to evade justice by fleeing to Spain.203 Other poaching incidents were undertaken by gentlemen apparently for social or political motives rather than for economic gain. At Hunsdon in 1536 a gentleman called Rafe Shelton was accused by one of the king’s keepers of unauthorised hunting and coursing in the royal parks at Hunsdon and in the parks at Hatfield and at Eltham near Greenwich.204 Shelton is likely to have been a relative – perhaps the son – of Sir John Shelton, controller of the joint household of the king’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, at Hunsdon. When the carcass of a dead deer was discovered in the lodging of Rafe Shelton’s servants, he attempted to divert the blame from himself by putting his servants in the stocks. The best-documented Hertfordshire example of gentry poaching was in Sir Arthur Capel’s park at Walkern, which suffered a series of attacks from a local band of park-breakers in 1613. Capel decided to seek redress in the court of Star Chamber and drafted a petition describing the events in some detail.205 Despite swapping clothes and covering their faces, some of the poachers were identified by Capel’s keepers as local gentlemen – Christopher Boteler of Aston and Ralph Baker – who had armed themselves with ‘swords, daggers, pistols, dags [a heavy pistol or hand-gun], forest bills [and] hunting pikes’ and, with ‘greyhounds, dogs, nets, deer hays and other unlawful engines’, had broken down the

‘gates, pales and fences’ of the park. They chased and killed ‘a great number’ of deer, some of which were carried out of the park ‘and converted to their own uses’, while others were disposed of by ‘other persons’. Those they were unable to carry away were left ‘lying dead, mangled, spoiled, corrupted and destroyed, not fit for any use or purpose’.206 Such attacks on parks were perhaps manifestations of aristocratic feuding, a ‘symbolic substitute for war’ and ‘a method by which socially rebellious gentry … could vent aggression and pursue their own vendettas’.207 Other examples perhaps occurred in Lord Hunsdon’s Little Park at Hunsdon in 1618, led by gentleman Richard Collyns of Great Parndon, and at nearby Stanstead Park during the Interregnum, apparently caused by a family feud.208 Park management The park keepers The deer and the parks they occupied were managed by keepers, who were generally provided with living accommodation – a lodge – within the park (see pp. 37–9), as at Benington, Weston and in each of the three parks at Hunsdon. Keepers’ wages during the Tudor period were generally very modest – little more than those earned by an unskilled labourer – but, in addition to their accommodation, they were usually granted fuel in the form of windfall, deer-fallen wood or browse-wood from the park and, as noted above, were often permitted to keep a specified number of horses and cattle in the park (see pp.

26–8). Royal and aristocratic park-owners tended to employ a number of keepers of different ranks. The keeper in overall charge, sometimes referred to as the master of the game, could be of high social rank, such as the earl of Salisbury at Theobalds.

He was provided with good-quality accommodation and a wage and generally seems to have played an active role in managing the park, rather than taking the post as a sinecure.

Under-keepers did most of the day-to-day park maintenance, but sometimes there is no clear distinction between the wage of the ‘gentleman keeper’ and an under-keeper.

The typical rate of pay for a park keeper in Hertfordshire had remained unchanged since the fourteenth century, at 2d a day or 60s 10d per annum.209 This was the wage of the keeper at Sayes Park in 1485, at Hertingfordbury in the 1490s, at Benington in 1499, at Benington and Bedwell in 1508 and at Ware in 1514.210 A wage of 2d per day was less than the daily rate of many labourers but the prestige of the keeper’s

to 1657, 5 (Hertford, 1928), p. 20; CSP dom. 1619–23, pp. 560, 581; Thomson, ‘Progress, retreat, and pursuit’, p. 103.

201 Hardy, Sessions rolls 1581–1698, 1, p. 66; Le Hardy, Calendar to the sessions books, 1619 to 1657, 5, p. 83.

202 HALS X.C.6.B court rolls of the manor of Redbourn, 1515–37; CSP dom. 1619–23, pp. 571, 572.

203 CSP dom. 1619–23, p. 581; Thomson, ‘Progress, retreat, and pursuit’, p. 103.

204 L&P, 11, p. 202 ‘A remembrance for hunting in the King’s Park at Hunsdon’.

205 HALS 9533 draft petition to the King, 1613/14.

206 Ibid.

207 Manning, Hunters and poachers, p. 209; E. Berry, Shakespeare and the hunt: a cultural and social study (Cambridge, 2001), p. 19; de Belin, From the deer to the fox, p. 13.

208 TNA STAC 8/27/12, February 1618; Le Hardy, Calendar to the sessions books, 1619 to 1657, 5, pp. 503–5.

209 Rowe, Medieval parks, p. 36.

210 HHA Court Rolls 10/16 bailiff’s accounts, 1484–5; 22/5 & 21/10 bailiff’s accounts for Hertingfordbury 1493–4 & 1495–6; HHA Court Rolls 10/23 & 11/5 bailiff’s accounts, 1498–9 & 1508; TNA SC6/HenVIII/1593 bailiff’s account, 1513–14.

29

Introduction

role, together with the accommodation and perks, made it a desirable occupation. Park keeperships were an important means of bestowing royal patronage and were often reserved for old soldiers, loyal courtiers or retainers.211 When Cheshunt manor passed to the young Henry VIII in 1509 on the death of his grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, he rewarded her loyal retainer, Sir William Bedell, by appointing him bailiff and parker there with an annual fee of 120s 20d.212 The king appointed his close friend William Compton keeper of Ware Park in 1510, paying him 60s 8d in 1513–14.213 The keeper of Queen Katherine’s park at Standon was George Fraunces, gentleman usher of the queen’s chamber. He was bailiff of Standon by 1514, receiving 60s 8d a year for custody of the park and manor, and the post appears to have been inherited in 1531 by his son, also a gentleman usher in the chamber of Queen Katherine.214 The keepers of the bishop of Ely’s Great and Middle Parks at Hatfield received a more generous wage, each being paid 91s 3d when Henry VIII acquired the manor in 1538.215 The fee of the keeper of the Innings Park was not recorded at that time, but three years later he was paid 30s 5d a year.216 Also in 1538, Henry VIII appointed two gentlemen of his privy chamber, Anthony Denny and Thomas Hennage, as the ‘knights Bailiff and keepers’ of the park at Cheshunt for their lifetimes with an annual fee of 120s 20d – which was shared – together with herbage and pannage worth 20s a year.217 At Ware Park in 1539 the keeper was better paid, at 4d a day or 120s 20d a year, a rate perhaps set by the countess of Salisbury before the manor returned to the crown on her attainder in that year.218 The keeper of Ware Park was still being paid 120s 20d a year in 1553, as were the keeper of the royal park at King’s Langley and Denny and Hennage, jointly, at Cheshunt.219 The custodian of Benington Park was still paid half that amount – 60s 10d a year – in 1556, but could earn an extra 10s for mowing ‘les brakes’ in the park and was entitled to ‘le browse and wyndfalles’ and to pasture eight cows and two horses in the park.220 Queen Elizabeth’s new keepers of Berkhamsted Park in 1559 and of the Innings and

Middle Parks at Hatfield in 1561 were also paid just 2d a day, but as they were also appointed stewards of the respective manors they were in receipt of substantial additional fees.221 In contrast, the new keeper of Hatfield Great Wood, also appointed by the queen in 1561, received a wage of 6d a day – perhaps in response to the rapid inflation of the mid-Tudor period or in recognition of the exceptionally large park he had to manage.222 Inflation did lead to a general increase in wages in the later sixteenth century. The keeper of Bedwell Park in 1574 was paid 133s 4d and new keepers appointed by Queen Elizabeth at Hatfield in 1593 (Sir John Fortescue and his son) were to receive a daily fee of 6d for the Great Wood (182s 6d a year), 3d for the Middle Park (91s 3d a year) and 2d for the Innings Park (60s 10d a year). Their grant included all the deer, the ‘verman’ (vermin) trees, all trees not bearing leaves, all windfall trees, ‘le browse’ and ‘derefall’ wood, and the herbage and pannage of the parks.223 The queen’s park at King’s Langley was leased at the end of the sixteenth century to Sir Charles Morison of Cashiobury and he became keeper.

In his will of 1599 he left the residue of his lease to his 11year old son with the ‘custody and keepership of the park, game of conies, herbage and pannage’. Oversight of the park was to be left in the care of his widow until their son reached the age of 19, but day-to-day management of the ‘great game’ and the conies was left to his keeper John Eresby, who was to be paid ‘her Majesty’s fee’ of 120s a year plus the right to depasture in the park ‘twelve kine, two horse or mares and four hogs’.224 In about 1608, when Hatfield had passed from royal ownership to Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, the keepership of the Middle Park and its deer were granted to London merchant Nicholas Salter for life. Salter was to receive 6d per day (182s 6d a year), was allowed to keep four horses, twelve cows and one bull in the park and was to live in a fine new lodge built for him by the earl.225 He was probably expected to pay the wages of an underkeeper out of his fee. Following Cecil’s death in 1612, Salter’s patent was confirmed by the second earl and included

211 Manning, Hunters and poachers, p. 28.

212 TNA SC6/HenVIII/1590 bailiff’s account for Cheshunt, 1516–17.

213 L&P, 1, p. 276; TNA SC6/HenVIII/1593 bailiff’s account, 1513–14.

214 TNA SC6/HenVIII/1572 bailiff’s account, 1514–16; L&P, 5, p. 156.

215 TNA LR2/vol216 f. 2 survey of Hatfield lordship, 1537/8.

216 TNA SC6/HenVIII/1618 bailiff’s account, 1538–41.

217 HHA CP 329.2 survey of parks, 1553.

218 TNA SC6/HenVIII/6869 minister’s account, 1539–40.

219 HHA CP 329.2 survey of parks, 1553.

220 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556.

221 CPR 1558–1560, pp. 296–7; CPR 1560–1563, p. 176.

222 CPR 1560–1563, p. 101. Thomas Heneage, steward of the manor, was granted the keepership of the great park in 1569, also for 6d per day (CPR 1566– 1569, p. 336).

223 HHA General 38/2 particular of Bedwell, 1574; Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 167. ‘Vermin trees’ harboured foxes and badgers.

224 TNA PROB 11/94/168 will of Sir Charles Morison, 20 February 1598/9.

225 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 3, p. 1201. Salter, who made his fortune in the Levant Company, was a farmer of customs and the king’s woodward for Enfield Chase, and was knighted in 1617 (S. Healy, ‘SALTER, Edward (?1562–1647), of Richings Park, Iver, Bucks. and Blackfriars, London’, in A. Thrush and J.P. Ferris (eds), The history of parliament: the House of Commons 1604–1629, 6 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 154; J.C. Cox, ‘Forestry’, in W. Page, The Victoria history of the county of Middlesex, 2 (London, 1911), p. 228; W.A. Shaw (ed.), The Knights of England, 2 (London, 1906), p. 161).

30

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

his daughter, Dame Anne Bowyer, but he resigned custody of the park to the earl in 1627.226 Subsequent occupants of Salter’s lodge also appear to have been gentlemen but, although they were permitted to keep animals in the park and take wood for fuel, they had no responsibility for park management and had to pay rent for the lodge.

Rates of keepers’ pay increased significantly during the early Stuart period. In Charles I’s park at Theobalds there were at least four under-keepers, one of whom was appointed in 1631 with wages of £40 a year (800s) and an additional yearly payment of £50 in lieu of keeping 20 cows and a bull in the park, a lucrative privilege granted to previous keepers there.227 The same wage of £40 was also claimed for the keeper of Hatfield Woodhall Park in 1643.228 This figure may have been inflated for the purposes of the claim but is nevertheless a good indication of the wage of a well-paid keeper of the time.

bushes’ (11s or 14s).231 The remainder of the list records costs relating to moving deer, so perhaps the dead hedge was erected specifically to aid the capture of the deer.

Another unusual record documents the fencing and ‘dobbing’ (sepacoe’ & dobbyng) of 805 perches (over 4,000m) of the pale of the ancient Benington Park in the late fifteenth century. The fencing cost 2½d for each ‘newly-made’ perch and the ‘dobbing’ cost 1½d per perch. The most obvious interpretation of ‘dobbing’ is daubing and suggests the use of mud or clay, perhaps to augment the earth bank or to plaster and reinforce the wooden paling – although the latter would require protection from the weather.232 The most detailed record of a Hertfordshire park pale comes from Walkern in 1619, when an estimate was prepared for reconstructing the 250-pole (1,260m) length of pale separating Walkern Park from the disparked Benington Park.233 The ‘old pales, posts and shores’ were to be ‘pulled up’, inspected and reused where possible, but an estimated 2,400 new pales were needed.

New posts and shores would be made from oaks felled in the park plus, if necessary, some small trees felled for charcoal in Sanchettes Wood. The wood for the new rails was to come from about 30 ‘young oaks’ but was supplemented by any reusable old rails. A carpenter and his labourers were to be paid 16d per pole of pale erected and 8d was allocated for clasps and nails for the Benington gate. The age of the oak timber available was an important consideration. Some of the oldest and ‘doted’ parkland trees were to be felled for repairing the Hertingfordbury pale in 1588 but, concerned that the timber would be very brittle and unsuitable for ‘pin wood’, the surveyors recommended that 12 or 16 young oaks ‘not much above the age of 40 years’ should also be felled from woodlands outside the park to make pin wood and new rails.234 Maintaining the wooden fence of a park pale involved several different tasks, each of which contributed to the overall cost. Some of those tasks can be illustrated by accounts for the park at King’s Langley, where the cost amounted to £14 5s 6d in 1544. Of this total, 50s was paid to four men called ‘palers’ for making 75 perches of new pale at 8d per perch; £10 14s 6d was paid to the same four palers for making 468 perches of old pale at 5½d per perch; 15s was paid for 45 cartloads of pales carried to the pale from diverse locations in the park at 4d per load; and 6s was paid for a new gate and for the carriage of the pales, posts and spars it required.235 But before any park

The park pale The typical park pale consisted of an embankment, often with a ditch on the inside, with a fence along the top constructed from oak posts, cleft oak pales, horizontal rails and angled support struts known as shores. Cleft oak was split along the grain and was consequently more resistant to water penetration and rot than sawn wood. This kind of fencing, with its open structure, was less expensive to erect in terms of wood, timber and manpower than a close-boarded fence and was less prone to wind damage. Its height varied according to the local topography and the height and depth of any associated bank and ditch, but a barrier about five feet (1.5m) high is needed to retain fallow deer, and one about six feet (1.8m) high for red deer.229 The wooden pale was frequently augmented with a hedge rich in hawthorn, but dead hedges – where cut brushwood was heaped between rows of upright stakes – have been notably absent from sources examined for this volume. Hedges, both live and dead, feature more prominently in Hertfordshire’s medieval records than wooden fences,230 but by the sixteenth century the construction and repair of the park pale almost invariably related to a wooden fence, usually of oak, erected by men called ‘palers’. One exception comes from Walkern Park in 1634, where a list of expenses suggests the construction of a dead hedge: ‘lopping of the wood for the hedge’ (£1 5s), ‘making the hedge’ (£3 16s 6d), ‘a cart to draw the wood to the hedge’ (7s) and ‘bushing of the pales and cutting of

226 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 3, p. 1357; HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 253.

227 CSP dom. 1629–31, p. 553; ‘House of Commons Journal Volume 7: 25 December 1651’, in Journal of the House of Commons: Volume 7, 1651–1660 (London, 1802), pp. 56–8 <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol7/pp56–58>, accessed 9 January 2016.

228 ‘House of Lords Journal Volume 6: 16 October 1643’, in Journal of the House of Lords: Volume 6, 1643 (London, 1767–1830), pp. 255–60. British History Online <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol6/pp255–260>, accessed 3 April 2017.

229 B. Mayle, Managing deer in the countryside – practice note (Forestry Commission, 1999).

230 Rowe, Medieval parks, p. 29.

231 HALS 9607 estate accounts Hadham and Walkern, 1591–1640, ‘A note of money Laid out for lopping of wood to make the hedge, and for hedging and other works’, November 1634.

232 HHA Court rolls 10/23 bailiff’s account, 1498–9.

233 HALS 9690 ‘estimate of the timber and charge of workmanship about the making of the pale between Benington and Walkern parks’, January 1618/19; 9689 bill of charges for making the pale, May 1619.

234 TNA DL 44/413 enquiry as to the repair of the palings of the Park at Hertingfordbury, 1587–8.

235 TNA E 315/457 accounts of sales of wood and underwood in all the king’s honours etc., 1543–4.

31

Introduction

pale could be renewed or repaired, the wood required had to be sourced and prepared. In 1625 5s 2d was paid for ‘peeling’ (removing the bark from) 36 trees felled for ‘rails, posts and pales for the park’ at Walkern and further work was recorded there three years later in preparation for more repairs. Most of the 15s 8d cost was paid to William Brown, who, working for 1s a day, spent 5½ days ‘cleaving and sawing an arm of an oak blown down by the lodge to make posts, pales and shores’ and 1½ days ‘cleaving the blocks that were left’. A second man was paid 1s 8d for felling ‘ten trees in Sanchettes Wood for pales &c for the park at 2d a tree’ and Brown then spent seven days ‘cleaving out of the said ten trees to make rails, pales, posts and shores’.236 As noted above, palers were paid at a higher rate for erecting new pale than for repairing old pale and the rates of pay appear to have risen steeply, in the royal parks at least, in the mid-sixteenth century, probably in response to inflation. In the 1530s the king paid 4d and 4½d per rod of new pale made at Hunsdon and at Standon, respectively, but by 1540 this had jumped to 6d per perch at Ware (c.4½d for repairing old pale) and three years after that the rate was 8d per perch at King’s Langley (5½d for repairing old) and the same at Berkhamsted in 1545.237 At Cheshunt in 1544 the old pale cost 4d per perch to repair.238 At Moor Park in 1558 the palers were paid 10d per perch and 20 years later this had risen to 16d per perch at Queen Elizabeth’s Innings Park at Hatfield. At Walkern in 1619 the rate was still 16d per perch.239 The cost of transporting the prepared wood to the pale must have varied with the distance involved, but at Standon in 1534 it cost 2s for the carriage of six wagon-loads of pales, and the same rate of 4d a load was recorded at King’s Langley a decade later.240 In the same year, 1543–4, at Cheshunt, however, 87 cartloads of pales were carried ‘from diverse locations’ in the park at just 2d per load.241

1532.242 A major project was undertaken in the summer of 1624 to restore the ‘Old (or great) Ponde’ in the same park to its original profile: the work to ‘clense, scoure and emptie’ the pond took nearly 500 man-days and cost £23.243 Parks as reserves of timber and wood Parks usually contained significant and valuable reserves of wood and timber – essential raw materials for fuel, fencing and the construction of buildings and bridges, but also providing the habitats favoured by deer and a source of capital upon which the owner could draw when needed. The crown undertook occasional audits of these reserves, providing records of trees in the various royal parks in Hertfordshire during the Tudor and early Stuart periods. The records are rarely directly comparable and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between timber trees, pollards (trees managed by lopping at head height) and coppice (trees lopped in a regular cycle near ground level). The records are too sparse to draw any meaningful conclusions but they do suggest, unsurprisingly, that older parkland tended to hold greater reserves of timber and wood.

The highest density of timber oaks, at 5.5 per acre, was recorded in Hertingfordbury Park in 1608, but there was a similar density of ‘oak and beech’ in Hatfield Middle Park in 1538 (c.5.7) and in Hatfield New Park (previously part of the medieval Great Park) in 1626 (5.5 per acre).244 In the three parks at Hunsdon in 1556 there were more than three times as many oaks (2.2 per acre) in the thirteenth-century Great Park as there were in the two more recent parks combined, and each of the oaks in the Great Park was, on average, worth more than twice as much as those in the other two parks.245 In 1650 the much reduced park at Berkhamsted still contained 556 ‘great Beech Trees’ (2.2 per acre), perhaps partly because the lessee – the widow of Charles I’s former tutor and secretary – was required to record every ten years the ‘large trees and trees being timber’ growing in the park and therefore took care to preserve them.246 Pollarded trees continued to be a characteristic feature of Hertfordshire’s parks in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as they had been for hundreds of years previously, but records of numbers are scarce. There were 547 oak pollards in

Ponds Reference has already been made to parkland ponds managed for the production of fish (p. 26). Ponds that appear to have been created and maintained primarily for the benefit of the deer include the new pond made for 10s in Walkern Park in

236 HALS 9607 Walkern estate accounts, 1591–1640, ‘A bill of charges for felling and cleaving rails posts pales and shores for repairing the park pales, 12 January 1627 and 16 April 1628’.

237 TNA SC7/HenVIII/6012 minister’s account, manor of Hunsdon and Eastwick, 1536/7; SC6/HenVIII/6629 bailiff’s account for Standon, 1533–4; SC6/ HenVIII/6869 minister’s account for Ware, 1539/40; E 315/457 accounts of sales of wood and underwood in all the king’s honours etc., 1543–4; E 315/458 misc. accounts.

238 TNA E 315/457 wood accounts for the manor of Cheshunt, 1543–4.

239 TNA DL 44/3 inquisition as to the state of Moor Park, 1558–9; E 178/1026 certificate as to the destruction of deer by the growth of moss in Innings Park, 1578; HALS 9689 bill of charges for making the pale, May 1619.

240 TNA SC6/HenVIII/6629 bailiff’s account, 1533–4.

241 TNA E 315/457 wood accounts for the manor of Cheshunt, 1543–4.

242 HALS 9509 bailiff’s account, 1532.

243 HALS 9607 Walkern estate accounts, 1591–1640.

244 J.E. Cussans, History of Hertfordshire, 2 (London, 1870–81), p. 104; HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 2, p. 705; HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p.

179. 520 beech and 227 oak trees were recorded on 135 acres of the 500-acre New park.

245 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556.

246 TNA E 317/Herts/7 honour and manor of Berkhamsted, 1650; HALS AH2785 copy of lease to Mrs Jane Murray of Berkhamsted Park and demesnes, 14 March 1627.

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TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Table 3 Valuation of trees growing in the launds of Hunsdon Great Park in 1556.

Oaks

Ashes Wyches* Total

No. 750

Valuation 100 at 12s the tree 100 at 10s the tree 100 at 8s the tree 100 at 7s the tree 350 at 4s the tree 3s 4d the tree 4s the tree

40 4

Total value £60 £50 £40 £35 £70 £6 13s 4d 16s £262 9s 4d

* presumably wych elms

Hertingfordbury Park in 1553, a density of perhaps 2.7 pollards per acre (although the acreage of the park is uncertain).247 There were said to be 500 pollards in Walkern Park in 1644, probably an estimate, but providing an approximate density of only 1.25 pollards per acre in the 400-acre park.248 The same source reported 888 pollards in the park at Hadham Hall, giving an apparent density of 1.3 per acre, but this figure cannot be directly compared with Walkern or Hertingfordbury because the park at Hadham Hall had expanded from 240 acres to c.690 acres in the decade preceding the pollard count and many of the pollards will consequently have been hedgerow trees from the newly imparked farmland. In Berkhamsted Park in 1650 there were 1,354 ‘other’ beech trees (5.4 per acre) worth 6s 8d each, in addition to the 556 ‘great Beech Trees’ already noted, which were worth 20s each.249 Can we assume that these ‘other’, lower value, trees were beech pollards?

Similar conundrums occur in the 1556 surveys of the parks at King’s Langley, Hunsdon and The More. No pollards were recorded at King’s Langley, but ‘growing dispersed abroad’ in the park were 180 ‘oaks very little timber amongst them’ worth 2s each.250 These seem very likely to have been pollards, but what about the 300 ash trees, of which 100 were worth 2s 4d and 200 16d, and the 1,420 beech trees, of which 300 were worth 3s, 500 2s and 620 16d, which were also in the park?

In one corner of Langley park’s 697 acres was the Little Park, which contained two acres of underwood of 20 years’ growth and 790 oaks, of which 200 were worth 2s 8d, 200 were worth 2s and 390 were worth 16d. This must have been a plantation of relatively small trees, but whether they were timber trees or pollards is impossible to say.

Hunsdon’s 345-acre Great Park was divided into two parts: the ‘Laundes & fedinges’, covering nearly 263 acres, and the 82½ acres of ‘Wood ground set with maple, hornbeam and other firewood’.251 The wood ground lay in two separate areas of the park: ‘le lodge quarter’ and ‘Le Shelleis quarters’. Each of these quarters was divided into sections with very different

values – presumably reflecting the stage of regrowth since they were last lopped – ranging between 5s and 15s an acre for most of the wood ground but rising dramatically to 66s 13d an acre for 4a 3r of the Shelleis quarters. Similarly, 10 per cent of the 222-acre Little Park at Hunsdon was ‘wood ground set with maple, thorn, hazel, hornbeam and oak’, of which 7a 1r was worth 60s per acre and 13a 3r was worth 33s per acre. As hawthorn and hazel are very unlikely to have been pollarded, these ‘woodgrounds’ must have been coppiced. In addition to the wood ground in the Little Park, there were also 160 trees ‘growing dispersed in the park’: 140 oaks worth 3s each and 20 ash worth 2s 8d, and in the remaining 263 acres of the Great Park there were 794 trees (3 per acre). The valuations of these trees are set out in Table 3.

As with the previous records, it is impossible to know whether these valuations represent timber trees of different ages or pollards of different ages or at different stages in the pollarding cycle. Valuations of pollards are particularly difficult to interpret: were the surveyors valuing the timber in the trunk or the wood in the lopps, or both, or perhaps the annual revenue derived from lopping the tree?

The surveyors of ‘the greate parke of More’, also in 1556, used slightly different terminology: instead of ‘wood grounds’ there were ‘woods’, and there was also a wood described as ‘copice wood’.252 Within the Great Park were 42 acres of ‘woods set with young timber hornbeam and maple of 100 and [?] 300 years’ growth’ worth £7 an acre and also 261 acres of ‘wood set with very little timber, well stored with pollards’ of maple and hornbeam worth 66s 8d an acre. Six acres of coppiced wood worth 13s 4d per acre were in the Little Park. No trees were recorded in the 300 acres of parkland – the ‘landes & fedinges’ – outside the ‘woods’, but they might have comprised all or part of the 102 oaks recently felled by warrant of the master of the woods. Of these oaks, 62 were timber trees worth 5s each.

There were particularly high numbers of pollards in part of Hatfield New Park, in Cheshunt Park and in parts of Theobalds

247 TNA DL 43/3/38.

248 A. Thomson (ed.), The impact of the first Civil War on Hertfordshire 1642–47 (Hertford, 2007), p. 175 citing HALS M213 copy of a petition of William Capel to the Sequestration Committee of the House of Commons, c.September 1644.

249 TNA E 317/Herts/7 honour and manor of Berkhamsted, 1650.

250 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556, pp. 49–50.

251 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556, pp. 83–4.

252 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556, p. 8.

33

Introduction

Figure 7. Detail of a plan of Berkhamsted Park by John Norden showing the disposition of woodland and open lawns in the middle of the park c.1612. (courtesy of The National Archives (TNA MR 1/603)).

Park, which appear to represent a more intensive method of wood production also recorded on wood-pasture commons in south-east Hertfordshire in the mid-seventeenth century.253 On a 135-acre section of the Hatfield New Park in 1626 there were 5,227 hornbeam trees, in addition to 227 oaks and 520 beeches, giving a density for the hornbeams alone of 38.7 per acre. The oak and beech trees were worth in the region of 12s each but the hornbeams were worth less than 10d each and were almost certainly small pollards.254 The 500-acre New Park was a surviving part of the ancient Hatfield Great Park or Wood over which local inhabitants had common grazing rights, and it is not known whether the hornbeams were planted before or after the New Park was established in 1612, when the common was enclosed. In Cheshunt Park in 1650 the parliamentary surveyors recorded 8,693 ‘lopt pollards of hornebeame and oake’ valued at just over 1s 6d per tree, a remarkably low sum in comparison with the 10s assigned to each of the ‘613 old Dotrills and Hallow trees good for little

save for the fieringe’ that were also in the park.255 The surveyors divided Cheshunt Park into 212 acres of ‘wood land’ and 459 acres of pasture. Seventy acres of the ‘wood land’ were occupied by ‘5 coppices or groves of wood’ valued at £5 6s 8d per acre.

This left 142 acres of the ‘wood land’ unaccounted for, land which was perhaps occupied by most, if not all, of the 8,693 hornbeam and oak pollards, relatively small trees planted at a density of perhaps 60 per acre. Evidence of the same system of wood production can be seen on pieces of wood-pasture common enclosed into Theobalds Park by James I before 1620.

Thirty years later the parliamentary surveyors recorded that the 149 imparked acres of Cheshunt common still held ‘4798 lopt pollards and hollow dotrills and horne beame’ valued at 2s per tree, suggesting a planting density of at least 32 trees per acre. Growing on land similarly imparked from Northaw common were 657 ‘lopt pollards horne beame, oaken doterills and hallow trees’ valued, like those in Cheshunt Park, at 1s 6d per tree.256

253 Rowe, ‘Pollards: living archaeology’, pp. 310–13, 321.

254 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 179.

255 TNA E 317/Herts/16 Cheshunt Park, March 1649/50.

256 TNA E 317/Herts/27 Theobalds Park, March 1649/50. Similar groves of hornbeam pollards can still be seen in Knebworth Park today, planted c.38 per acre.

34

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

One of the most informative surveys was undertaken in Hertingfordbury Park for Edward VI in 1553. It recorded 1,000 oak (half worth 10s and half 8s each), 70 ash (10s), 5 beech (8s) and 2 elm timber trees (6s 8d), together with 547 oak pollards and dotards (worth 4s each) and underwoods of hornbeam, maple, hazel and hawthorn.257 These underwoods, worth £30, were ‘lopped by the keeper for fuel and for browse for the deer’. The species composition of the underwood, a term generally understood to indicate coppicing, is very similar to that noted above in the parks at Hunsdon and The More. Hawthorn (also called whitethorn or thorn) was also recorded in the parks at Berkhamsted, Theobalds (valued at £100) and Cheshunt (£13 6s 8d) in the parliamentary surveys of 1650.258 The map of Berkhamsted Park drawn by John Norden c.1612 (Figure 7) perhaps illustrates the geography of a typical park of the period. It shows c.300 acres of ‘wood’ in seven parcels surrounded by 440 acres of pasture described as ‘laundes and playne ground’.259 Each of the woods is outlined with a dashed line, suggesting there was no physical barrier on the ground – the only solid lines are those marking the park boundary and, tellingly, the boundary of a 67-acre compartment labelled ‘A pasture called the Coppice’, which was presumably formerly coppiced woodland. This suggests that 60 per cent of the park was open grassland, largely devoid of trees – the launds and plains – and 40 per cent was woodpasture – the woods – containing large numbers of pollards.

Hornbeam made good wood-fuel but wood lopped from oak pollards was considered the best for park paling, being the strongest and most durable and rot-resistant wood available.

In 1543 60 oaks in the park at King’s Langley were pollarded to provide wood for new park pales and, in the same year, the wood lopped from 823 oak pollards on the manors of Cheshunt and Bedwell, perhaps from the parks, was used to make new pales for the king’s park of Waltham in Essex.260 Sometimes the supply of wood and timber from the park was insufficient to meet the demands of maintaining the pale. At King’s Langley in 1559 the 240 small oak trees needed to make 286 poles (1,438m) of new paling were to be felled on the demesne grounds of the queen’s manor of Langley as well as in the wood in the Little Park.261 In 1588 Queen Elizabeth was advised that 80 of the oldest and ‘doted’ oaks would need felling in Hertingfordbury Park to repair 327 poles (1,645m) of the park pale, but these might be insufficient unless ‘greater store of the old stuff [was] mingled and set amongst the new

pale’, and an additional 12–16 young oaks ‘not much above the age of 40 years’ were required from woodlands outside the park to make pin wood and new rails.262 There was also insufficient wood and timber in Walkern Park in 1619, when 250 poles (1,260m) of the park pale needed reconstructing.263 Within the park two ‘windfall okes and 7 other dead okes’ were assigned for new posts and shores, together with another two oaks that could be felled if necessary. The wood for the new rails was supplied by 36 young oaks felled in Sanchettes wood, outside the park, and another 40 trees had to be purchased.

Parkland trees were also felled to build or repair park buildings as, for example, in Moor Park in 1558, when 11 loads of timber were needed to repair the four lodges, and at Hatfield in 1612, when 67 loads of square timber worth £83 15s were felled in the Great Park or Wood to build a lodge in the Middle Park.264 The large quantities of wood and timber needed to maintain some parks could become unsustainable: at The More in 1556 surveyors recommended dismantling the decayed paling around the parrocks and courses as there was insufficient timber ‘in the park and within two miles compass’ to maintain them for long.265 A similar lack of timber at Hatfield early in Elizabeth’s reign led to an inquisition in about 1568 into the felling and pollarding that had taken place in the preceding decade; witness statements hint at widespread malpractice and possible fraud or, at best, the inefficient management of resources.266 There were many accounts of trees being ‘unlawfully topped, hedded and lopped’, the jurors maintaining it was unlawful because the lopped branches ‘were so great that a buck could not turn the same over with his head’. Most of the pollarding had been done by the keepers of the three Hatfield parks, who claimed that they were collecting browse for the deer, but the jurors asserted that because the ‘tops’ were ‘very great’ this had led to the ‘great ruin and decay of the trees’. A total of 412 oaks and beeches were reported as unlawfully pollarded in the Middle Park, 78 in Innings Park and about 370 more in the Great Park, indicating that many of the pollards had not been lopped for decades. The lack of suitable trees was still a major problem ten years later when, in 1578, 188 poles (945m) of new paling was proposed to enclose part of the Innings Park. The queen’s commissioners reported there were no mature trees left at Hatfield – ‘the great timber is already felled and gone’ – and they calculated that, owing to their small size, at least 226 young trees would need felling, which they considered would be ‘a great spoil’. Sourcing

257 TNA DL 43/3/38.

258 TNA E 317/Herts/7, 16, 27.

259 TNA WARD 2/61/241/36 1 ‘A survey of certain parcels of the honour of Berkhamsted, viz the castle, park, the Frith, the demesnes and landes demised’, by John Norden, September 1612.

260 TNA E 315/457 accounts of sales of wood and underwood in all the king’s honours etc., 1543–4.

261 TNA DL 44/8.

262 TNA DL 44/413 enquiry as to the repair of the palings of the Park at Hertingfordbury, 1587–8.

263 HALS 9690 estimate of the timber and charge of workmanship about the making of the pale between Benington and Walkern parks, January 1618/19; 9689 bill of charges for making the pale, May 1619.

264 DL 44/3 inquisition as to the state of Moor Park, 1558–9; HHA Accts 9/21 valuation of Hatfield Wood, 1612.

265 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556, p. 8.

266 TNA E 178/7370 inquisition as to Hatfield Woods, c.1568.

35

Introduction

appropriate trees elsewhere on the estate would be ‘very hard’ and, with the added transport costs, very expensive.267 Parkland trees also helped to supply the constant demand for fuel as, for example, in 1498/9, when 12 cartloads of fuel were sold from Sayes Park for 4s.268 At Hatfield in the 1560s the officers of the woodyard felled 16 oaks and beeches to produce 41½ loads of firewood ‘for the queen’s provision’ and in 1592 the lops and tops of 50 trees felled in the Great and Middle Parks, for repairs to the park pale, were ‘to be preserved for the airing of her Majesty’s house at Hatfield’.269 James I used King’s Langley Park as a source of timber and firewood and in 1605 ordered the sale of 500 beech trees to the royal brewer, Jeffrey Duppa, for fuel.270 Some parkland wood was converted into charcoal. At Hertingfordbury in 1523 the park was said to be ‘well stored with trees, fuel, wood, and coal’, and at Walkern in the early seventeenth century the park pollards and the New Coppice in the park contributed to the annual provision of 35 loads of charcoal required to heat Sir Arthur Capel’s home at Hadham Hall.271 Charcoal was also made in the New Park in Hatfield Wood in the 1620s, and in 1633 there were 100 stacks of wood in the park awaiting the charcoal burner.272 Hertfordshire’s parks also provided timber for shipbuilding, parkland oaks being particularly valued because they branched low down, producing the curved timbers required.

Many trees were felled for the use of the navy, including, in 1611, 40 loads of timber from ‘Hartingford Berry Park and other manors in Herts’ for the repair of three of the king’s ships (the Merhonore, Defiance and Dreadnought), for building a new ship (the Bonaventure) and for replenishing the store of planks for the king’s ships at Chatham.273 The navy had first pick of the trees growing in the royal parks at Cheshunt and Theobalds when they were disparked by parliament in 1650: 577 trees were taken from Cheshunt Park and 6,211 from Theobalds, presumably via the river Lea.274 Later in the century the park at Hadham Hall also provided timber for the navy, which was carried to the river Lea at Stanstead for transport to the naval dockyard at Woolwich.275 Other, non-naval ship-

builders also needed timber and in 1635 the earl of Dover felled many trees in his Great Park at Hunsdon, selling 304 loads of timber – both ‘straight’ (worth 32s a load) and ‘crooked’ (40s) – which were transported to Stanstead Abbots, loaded onto barges and conveyed to a shipwright in Wapping.276 Some parkland trees were destined for other uses, including those felled in Pisho Park in 1543 to make the timber framing for a new bridge over the moat of the king’s palace at Hunsdon and a pulley to lower wine from the bridge to the door of his wine cellar below.277 Forty trees from Moor Park were used to repair the bridge and pound in Watford c.1557.278 At Hatfield the yeoman of the toyle took an oak in Hatfield Great Park to make toyle pins in the 1560s and, in the reign of James I, the royal woodward in Hertfordshire was ordered to fell 40 trees in the same park to construct bridges over the river Lea between Hackney and Ware.279 Arable crops in parks There are few records of arable crops being grown in the county’s deer parks and most of those that have been found probably relate to the process of disparking, as at Bedwell, where wheat, oats and peas were grown in the park in the late Elizabethan period, and at Shingle Hall in 1636, when the park was described as 200 acres of ‘arable land, meadow and pasture’.280 Of more interest is the recommendation in 1578 that 30 acres of the pasture in the queen’s Innings Park at Hatfield should be ploughed up and sown with corn for four years and the process repeated in different parts of the park in succeeding years as a means of improving the pasture and reducing the growth of moss.281 This may also explain the ploughing of parts of Brocket Hall Park every 15 years in the early seventeenth century, although in c.1565 the park was described as ‘put to tillage’.282 Park buildings Various buildings and structures are recorded in Hertfordshire’s parks during the Tudor and early Stuart periods, including lodges for the park keepers, banqueting houses, standings, deer houses and buildings for storing hay for the deer.283

267 TNA E 178/1026 certificate as to the destruction of deer by the growth of moss in Innings Park, 1578.

268 HHA Court rolls 10/23 bailiff’s accounts, 1498/9.

269 TNA E 178/7370 inquisition as to Hatfield Woods, c.1568; HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 3, p. 1015.

270 CSP dom. 1603–1610, p. 215.

271 H. Chauncy, Historical antiquities of Hertfordshire, 2nd edn (Bishop’s Stortford, 1826), 1, p. 480; HALS 9607 estate accounts Hadham and Walkern, 1591–1640. The account for 1606 is headed ‘A note of the Chardges for fellinge hewinge and Cuttinge of wood for Coles for yor worshipps house’.

272 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, pp. 178, 181.

273 CCP, 21, 1609–1612, p. 307.

274 TNA E 317/Herts/16 & 19 Cheshunt Park, 1650; E 317/Herts/27 & 28 Theobalds, 1650.

275 TNA ADM 106/331/1/314 and ADM 106/331/1/318 accounts and correspondence re timber from the park, 1678. The ‘knees’ were left in the park.

276 TNA C 6/12/188 legal dispute re timber felled in Hunsdon park, 1635.

277 HKW, 4, p. 156.

278 TNA DL 44/3 inquisition as to the state of Moor Park, 1558–9.

279 CSP dom. 1603–1610, p. 150.

280 TNA E 134/13&14Chas1/Hil29 depositions re Bedwell Park, January 1638; TNA E 44/100 lease of Shingle Hall and lands, 1636.

281 TNA E 178/1026 certificate as to the destruction of deer by the growth of moss in Innings Park, 1578. Ploughing of the park was recorded again in 1610 (HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 233).

282 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 2, p. 956. Evidence of witnesses in the suit of Fulke Onslowe, farmer of the tithes of the rectory of Hatfield v. Sir John Brocket, 1585.

283 For a study of buildings associated with early deer hunting see J. McCann, P. Ryan and B. Davis, ‘Buildings of the deer hunt to 1642, Parts 1 & 2’, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, 58 & 59 (2014 & 2015), pp. 29–59 and 49–69.

36

TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Figure 8. Plan for Hatfield Lodge by John Thorpe, undated. A pencilled correction at the bottom of the plan suggests that Thorpe was confusing commissions for Theobalds and Hatfield, perhaps indicating that the plan was drawn soon after Lord Salisbury relinquished Theobalds and became the owner of Hatfield. © Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Photo: Ardon Bar-Hama.

Lodges Most parks in the early modern period had a lodge to accommodate the keeper and they are documented in at least 27 Hertfordshire parks between 1485 and 1642. The larger parks had more than one: there were four lodges in Moor Park in 1558 and six in Theobalds Park during the reign of Charles I. All appear to have been timber-framed, and tiled roofs are recorded at Hertingfordbury (1588), Cheshunt (1601), Theobalds (1602) and Hatfield (1608).284 Some were substantial houses, built to accommodate the ‘gentleman keepers’ who oversaw the management of the park on the grandest estates. Batchworth Heath lodge at Moor Park was one such, occupied by Henry VIII’s keeper Sir John Russell, Baron Russell from 1539, and his wife. Lord Burghley built a three-storey lodge in his new park at Theobalds – which he used himself as a retreat – and his son Robert Cecil, earl

of Salisbury, had a substantial timber and brick lodge built at Hatfield in 1608. It was perhaps designed by his surveyor John Thorpe, who planned a rectangular three-storey structure built around a central hall with a great chamber above and cellar below (Figure 8).285 A lodge built in 1612 for Nicholas Salter, the new keeper of Hatfield Middle Park, required 67 loads of square timber worth £83 15s from the Great Wood.286 At Theobalds a new timber-framed lodge built in 1611–12 contained ‘a hall and parlour, with four chambers over, all with brick chimneys, and a gallery 30 feet long’, and between 1616 and 1621 a three-storey lodge was built for keeper Sir Patrick Murray, and was supplied with water via a ‘force-house’.287 The Great lodge in Cheshunt Park, surveyed in 1650 when it was occupied by one of the two under-keepers, was ‘built with good timber and Flemish wall and covered with Tyle’. The main range contained a hall and parlour (both wainscoted),

284 TNA DL 44/416 estimate of the cost of repairing Hertford Castle, the lodge in Hertingfordbury Park and the bridges near them, 1587–8; HHA CP 349 survey of the Hertfordshire estates of Sir Robert Cecil by Israel Amyce, 1600/01; CPM Supp. 25 & CP 141/69 Theobalds Park map by Israel Amyce, 1602; HHA Building of Hatfield House, p. 200.

285 HHA Building of Hatfield House, pp. 196, 198, 199, 200, 201.

286 HHA Accts 9/21 valuation of Hatfield Wood, 25 November 1612.

287 HKW, 4, pp. 275–6.

37

Introduction

Figure 9. Old Park Lodge (or Keeper’s House), Ashridge, drawn by H. Edridge, 1805 (courtesy of Ashridge Archives).

a kitchen, a cellar, two ‘Pastrey Roomes’, a larder, two ‘other roomes’ and a pantry, with five ‘faire chambers’ on the first floor and another six small rooms above that. In a second range were ‘three faire chambers wainscotted’, with garrets above.288 A rare survivor from the early seventeenth century still stands in Ashridge Park. The 3½-storey Old Park Lodge, described as a ‘Verderer’s lodge and lookout, now a house’, was refaced with red brick c.1715 and given cantilevered corners to the east side of the roof (Figure 9).289 The parliamentary survey of Theobalds Park in 1650 details the range of accommodation available for keepers on a royal estate near London in the early seventeenth century.

The lodges of the six under-keepers of Theobalds Park in 1650 were given annual values of £12 10s, £10, £8 10s, £4, £3 and £2 10s, the lodge of the highest value being occupied

by Colonel Cecil, son of the earl of Salisbury, who retained his position as keeper of Theobalds throughout the Civil War period.290 Colonel Cecil’s lodge, one of two ‘great lodges’ in the park, was clearly built for a gentleman. Constructed partly with brick and partly ‘with timber and Flemish wall

and covered with tyle’ it comprised a hall, two parlours (wainscotted), another room and a closet, a kitchen, two larders, a pantry and three cellars. On the first floor were a ‘faire dyninge roome’, seven fair chambers (two wainscotted) and three closets, while on the second floor were five chambers and, ‘up another back paire of staires two stories high, four chambers’. In another range was a brewhouse, two dairy houses with two chambers over, plus a barn, two cow houses, a coach house and a stable. The lodges with the lower rentable values were likely to have been more typical of the accommodation provided for under-keepers. The £4 lodge, described as ‘small’, comprised a hall, a parlour, a kitchen, a cellar and a milk house, with, ‘above staires’, four chambers and one garrett; there was also a small barn and one stable. The least valuable lodge, at £2 10s, was described as ‘mean’ and ‘much out of repair’, and comprised a small hall, a kitchen and two butteries, one milk house and, above stairs, two chambers; in addition, it had a washhouse and one small stable. In Moor Park in 1535 accommodation was provided for keepers at the ends of two timber buildings

288 TNA E 317/Herts/16 survey of Cheshunt Park, March 1650.

289 Historic England List entry number: 1174311.

290 TNA E 317/Herts/27.

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TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

erected to provide hay and shelter for the deer in winter.291 Timber-framed buildings were relatively adaptable and could be dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. When a new lodge was needed for a keeper in Hatfield Great Park in 1609, a ‘dwelling house and barn’ were taken down in another park (probably Innings) and re-erected in the new location.292 Keeping park lodges in repair was a frequent – and sometimes very substantial – item of expenditure in park records. The lodge in Weston Park was expected to cost 40 marks (£26 13s 4d) to repair in 1507 and Batchworth Heath lodge at Moor Park, described as ‘very much decayed’, was going to cost £30 and require six loads of timber in 1558.293 These were clearly substantial buildings for ‘gentlemen keepers’. Perhaps more typical were the repairs made to the lodge in Ware Park in 1539–40 costing £3 4s 7d294 and those required on the three lesser lodges at Moor Park in 1558–9: 60s was needed to repair the middle lodge; 26s 8d and two loads of timber for Asshleys Lodge; and 100s and three loads of timber for Winters(?)

Lodge.295 The lodge and its outbuildings in Hertingfordbury Park needed repairs to their groundsills, decayed posts and windows, walls and roofs in 1588. The necessary materials – including tiles, brick, lime and ‘loome’ – were expected to cost £40 in addition to timber from the estate.296 About 30 years later the lodge was converted into a ‘good house’ by the steward of the manor Sir William Harington, who made it his home, one of a small number of park lodges in the county that became – or were replaced by – country houses.297 Earlier examples were perhaps in Benington Park, where the ‘capital mansion or place in the park’ recorded in 1556 (when it was ‘in great decaye’) seems to have replaced the lodge rebuilt 50 years previously,298 and at Hatfield Woodhall, where Sir Henry Boteler was living in Woodhall Lodge at the beginning of the seventeenth century.299 Once the park had fallen out of use, most park lodges, rather than being converted into country houses, seem to have become farmhouses, as, for example, at Bedwell Lodge Farm, Hadham Old Park Lodge Farm300 (now Hadham Park Farm), Sandy Lodge Farm in the former Moor Park at Rickmansworth (now a golf club), Standon Lodge Farm, the farmhouse called Walkern Lodge in 1685301 (now

Walkern Park Farm) and Lodge Farm at Weston. Parts of the original lodge buildings may survive, incorporated into later structures, at Hadham Park Farm, where some of the house, its barns and its stables are believed to date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and similarly at Bedwell Lodge and Standon Lodge farms.

Banqueting houses A banqueting house built for James I at Theobalds Park, probably at the east end of the park near the palace, was taken down and replaced with a ‘fairer and larger’ brick banqueting house shortly before he died.302 Another three – described as ‘standings seates or Banquetinge houses’ – were recorded at the west end of Theobalds Park in 1650. They were built of brick and timber and had slate roofs, but their construction dates are not known.303 The only other Hertfordshire park in which a banqueting house was recorded between 1485 and 1642 was Bedwell, in the early 1630s.304 An oblique reference to this building suggests that it lay near the lane from Hornbeamgate to Church End. Given the decline in the social status of the owners of Bedwell Park over the preceding century, it seems possible that the banqueting house was erected in the first half of the sixteenth century and, although perhaps less likely, that it may have been the ornamental building depicted at the far end of an avenue in Drapentier’s illustration of Bedwell from the end of the seventeenth century.305 By the late nineteenth century there was a Belvedere Farm nearby, which perhaps commemorates the latter building.

Standings A standing could be a simple wooden platform or a substantial building of several stories. Of the two built for Henry VIII in the 1530s in Moor Park, one was 20 feet long by 18 feet wide and 20 feet high, and probably had two stories.306 A woodcut illustration of Queen Elizabeth shows her standing on a railed wooden platform and it was perhaps a similar structure that Henry Cary Lord Falkland fell from in Theobalds Park in 1633, sustaining a broken leg which led to his death a few days later.307 The parliamentary surveyors recorded four standings

291 HKW, 4, p. 168.

292 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers 3, p. 1247. The carpenter’s charges for building the new lodge & barn came to £85 2s 3d.

293 P. Bliss (ed.), Reliquiae Hearnianae, 3 (London, 1869), pp. 51–2; TNA DL 44/3 inquisition as to the state of Moor Park, 1558–9.

294 TNA SC6/HenVIII/6869 minister’s account, 1539–40.

295 TNA DL 44/3 inquisition as to the state of Moor Park, 1558–9.

296 TNA DL 44/416 estimate of the cost of repairing Hertford Castle, the lodge in Hertingfordbury Park and the bridges near them, 1587–8.

297 Chauncy, Historical antiquities, p. 272; V.C.D. Moseley and R. Sgroi, ‘HARINGTON, Sir William (c.1590–1627), of Twickenham, Mdx. and Hertingfordbury, Herts.’, in A. Thrush and J.P. Ferris (eds), The history of parliament: the House of Commons 1604–1629, 4 (Cambridge, 2010), p. 546.

298 TNA E 315/391 survey of royal Hertfordshire manors, lands and possessions, 1556; HHA Court Rolls 10/23 bailiff’s account, 1498–9.

299 CCP, 18, 1606, p. 7.

300 W. Minet, Hadham Hall and the manor of Bawdes alias Hadham Parva in the county of Hertfordshire (Colchester, 1914), p. 31.

301 HALS 9669 lease of Walkern Lodge and farm, 1685.

302 HKW, 4, p. 277.

303 TNA E 317/Herts/27.

304 TNA E 134/13&14Chas1/Hil29 depositions re Bedwell Park, 1638.

305 Chauncy, Historical antiquities, pp. 272–3.

306 HKW, 4, p. 168 citing Bodleian, MS. Rawlinson D. 781, f. 106.

307 G. Gascoigne, The noble art of venerie or hunting (London, 1575), p. 95; CSP dom. 1633–4, pp. 206, 220.

39

Introduction

in Theobalds Park in 1650, three of which were the substantial buildings described as ‘standings seates or Banquetinge houses’ at the west end of the park mentioned above.308

Item for sawing of 10 hundred of board at 20d the hundred Item for one breaking carfe of 12 foot long and two foot deep at 2d the foot comes Item for making the pit The sum is The Kreyght [Crate] Item made of the offal of these two oaks Item paid to Archer the carpenter for grneselenge [groundsilling] the house and bording and making the doors and two windows Item for 4 quarters of lime Item one load of Brick and one load of bates [?bats] Item for underpinning of the same house Item for 13 hundred of 6 penny nails Item for four hundred of 8 penny nails Item for hooks and hinges for the door and windows The sum is Itm for setting up 37 pole of rail at 6d the pole to make a severall for cattell comes to Sume totall of the charge

Deer houses Deer houses were recorded in the parks at The More (1535), Walkern (1603 et seq.), Theobalds (c.1620, 1638 and 1650) and Hatfield (1628 and 1650s) and accounts for works done at Hunsdon between 1525 and 1534 record that a total of 36s 4d was paid to a thatcher (6d per day) and his men (4d and 3d per day) for the ‘Thacking of A great house set with Rackes for the ffeding and drye lying of the dere in the ponde parke’.309 At Moor Park in 1535 two buildings were constructed to provide hay and shelter for the deer in winter. They were timber-framed and each stood on 16 large brick quoins; at one end was accommodation for a keeper, separated from the hay and deer by a partition.310 Deer houses were ‘fitted up’ in Theobalds Park between 1616 and 1621 and were repaired in 1637–8.311 In 1650 two deer houses were recorded by the parliamentary surveyors.312 A deer house was ‘set up’ at Hatfield in 1628 and the following year tiles were brought ‘from Mimms for the deer house in Hatfield park’.313 In the 1650s there are records of a thatched deer house in the Middle Park at Hatfield, to which hay was taken for the deer.314 The most detailed records of a deer house come from Walkern Park in the early seventeenth century. It was built in 1603 at a cost of £7 10s and the costs were itemised as follows: 8 July 1603. A note of charges for felling and for squaring for boards for the deerhouse. Also for the railing in of the place put in severalty.315 Item for felling of one oak Item for hewing of 3 load of timber at 20d the load comes Item one breking carfe of 3 foot deep and 13 foot long at 3d the foot comes Item one other carfe 17 foot long and two foot deep at 2d the foot comes to Item for making of a sawpit Item for sawing of 15 hundred [?foot] of ench [inch] board at 20d the hundred comes Item for 3 score and 14 foot comes The sum is A note for the other oak Item for felling of other oak Item for squaring of two load of timber at 20d the load

16s 8d 2s 8d 24s 46s 8d

40s 13s 7s 13s 6s 2s 4s £4 6s

4d

4d 8d 3d 9d

18s 6d £8 8s 6d

In 1619 an estimate was drawn up of the cost of extending the deer house, as follows:316 26 Maii 1619. An estimate made by Giles Humberston Henry Garrard Edward Hamond Thomas Archer Carpenter and Richard Harvye Bricklayer of the materialls and Charge of workmanshipp about the Inlarginge of the Deerehouse in Walkerne parke, to make the same 22ti foote longer then the same nowe is.

Timber Imprimis for the timber worke of the same, wee doe thincke there will neede about 60ti small trees to be felled in Sanchette wood the next springe, att such tyme as the Coale wood for that yeare is felled £ s Bourdes Itm wee do esteeme that Five hundred foote of bourde wilbe needfull for the bourdinge of the sides therof, wch to be bought at 10s the hundred Cometh to 2 10 Brickes Itm for the underpynninge therof, halfe a yard above the ground, will require about three thousand brickes at 13s 4d the Thousand Cometh to 2 0 Lyme Itm there will neede allso for the same underpinninge about 5 quarters of lyme at 3s 4d the quarter Cometh to 0 16

1s 5s 3s 3d 2s 10d 8d 25s 18d 39s 3d 16d 3s 4d

d

0

0

8

308 TNA E 317/Herts/27.

309 TNA E 101/465/20 declaration of expenditure on works at Hunsdon 22 April 1525–21 April 1534, p. 7.

310 HKW, 4, p. 168 citing Bodleian, MS. Rawlinson D. 777, ff. 24–34.

311 HKW, 4, p. 276 citing TNA E 351/3385 Works and Buildings (Miscellaneous).: R. Treswell, Surveyor-general of woods south of the Trent, 3 Dec. 1614–11 June 1621.

312 TNA E 317/Herts/27.

313 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, p. 206.

314 HHA Hatfield Manor Papers, Summaries 1, pp. 254, 255.

315 HALS 9607 Walkern estate accounts, 1591–1640. Spelling modernised except words in italics.

316 HALS 9688 estimate for extending the deer house, Walkern, 1619. Original spelling retained.

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TUDOR AND EARLY STUART PARKS OF HERTFORDSHIRE

Nayles

Itm a Thousand of Eight peny nayles,317 to nayle on the sayd bourdes and 2 thousand of 4d nayles,318 to naile one [sic] the splentes to Thatch uppon Cometh to 0 Strawe Itm there will neede about Eight loades of strawe for the thatchinge therof wch at 5s the loade Cometh to 2 Carpenters Itm the Carpenters worke in framinge worke and settinge upp therof and naylinge on the bourdes and nailinge on the splentes readye for the Thatcher, as the abovesaid Thomas Archer will undertake the doinge therof, will Come to 4 Bricklayers Itm the Bricklayers worke for worke underpynninge the same with Bricke, halfe a yard above the ground, and a Laborer to helpe him will Come to, as Richard Harvye will undertake the same 1 Thatchers Itm the Thatchers worke to Thatch the worke same for about Eight dayes, at 18d per diem Cometh to 0 Laborors Itm one Laborer to serve the Thatcher worke for 8 daies at 10d the daye, And two to drawe strawe for him at 6d a peece per diem Comethe to 0 Carriages Itm the Chardge of Fellinge the tymber and fellinge and Carrying it into the parke, as allso timber the Carryage of the Bricke, Sand, and Strawe, to be used about the same buildinge will Come to about 2 Sume totall of all the sayd Chardges, besides the above said 60ti Trees Cometh to £16

13

4

0

0

0

0

0

0

12

0

14

8

10

0

Itm for 100 of nayles 6d Itm p[ai]d to the said Will[ia]m Browne for 2 dayes to mend the Deerhowse rayles at 1s 2d the daie 2s 4d Itm p[ai]d to him more for paleinge of 4 rods against the penne at 1s 4d the rodd 5s 4d Itm p[ai]d to him for mending the rayles about the said penn 1s Itm p[ai]d to 2 men for 2 dayes apiece to digg chawlke and gravell for the said penn at 10d the daie apeece 3s 4d Itm p[ai]d for 2 dayes worke of a cart to carry chawke and gravell into the penn at 5s the daie 10s Itm for taking upp of the mole hills in the ould coppie 1li 5s Itm for takynge of 24 moles in the said coppie at 2d the moale 4s Itm p[ai]d to goodman Castell for letting of 6 bullockes blond [?bloud i.e. blood] & for spice for their drincks 3s Itm for butter and beere to make drinckes for them and to 2 men for holding them 1s Sum 4li 11s 9d

Buildings for storing hay for the deer A hay-house was recorded in the New Park at Hunsdon in 1532, when it was thatched at a cost of 2s 4½d, and five years later the cost of repairing and replacing the straw thatch on a house where hay for the deer was stored was mentioned in another account.320 At Ware in 1539–40 a new barn was built to store hay for the deer at a cost of 7s.321

16s 8d

In 1627 the deer-house roof was thatched, the windows repaired and a pen was chalked and gravelled and made secure with new rails. The costs were listed as follows:319 11 August 1627 It[e]m for the workeman Shipp in thatching and lathing of the deere howse the strawe being my owne Itm for 1000 of nayles for the sayd howse at 4d the hundred Itm for gathering of 7 bundles of rodds for the thatcher at 3d per bundle Itm p[ai]d to Will[ia]m Browne the carpenter for 1 daie to mend the deerehowse wyndowes and nayling of the bords there Itm for 2 hinges to hang the windowe on waying 4 li at 4d the pound Itm p[ai]d to James Rayment for 3 dayes to rend the splentes for the deerehowse at 1s 2d the daie

1li 5s 3s 4d 1s 9d

1s 4d 1s 4d 3s 6d

317 Nails at 8d per hundred.

318 Nails at 4d per hundred.

319 HALS 9607 Walkern estate accounts, 1591–1640. Original spelling retained.

320 TNA E 315/273/2 account, 1531/2; SC7/HenVIII/6012 ministers accounts, manor of Hunsdon and Eastwick, 1536–7.

321 TNA SC6/HenVIII/6869 minister’s account, 1539–40.

41