BOOK: Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia

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Richard Almond’s study brings vividly to life the universality and centrality of hunting to medieval societies, both as an economic necessity and as an expression love of nature

Medieval Hunting
By Richard Almond
The History Press 2011
ISBN: 9780752474625 (E-book)
ISBN: 9780752459493

ABSTRACT

Hunting was a major economic and leisure activity throughout the European Middle Ages, and while aristocratic practices have featured in studies of romantic and narrative literature, hunting in its wider sense, across the social spectrum with attendant male and female roles, has larged been ignored by modern medieval historians. Richard Almond’s study brings vividly to life the universality and centrality of hunting to medieval societies, both as an economic necessity and as an expression of medieval humanity’s amost atavistic sense of oneness with nature. Medieval Hunting dispels some of the myths and misunderstandings about hunting, including the persistent view that it was exclusively an aristocratic pursuit and a male one at that. Using a wide variety of contemporary textual and art historical evidence, Richard Almond demonstrates convincingly that hunting, including fishing and all manner of poaching, was enjoyed by all classes, and by women as well as men. 

 

Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross Dressing in Medieval Europe

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This richly illustrated book tells the story of Clarendon in Wiltshire, from the Neolithic through to the present

Clarendon: Landscape of Kings
By Tom Beaumont-James and Christopher Gerrard
Windgather Press 2007
ISBN-10: 1905119119
ISBN-13: 978-1905119110

ABSTRACT:

Soon after the Norman conquest, a particular place in Wiltshire became the country retreat of the kings and queens of England. Clarendon was large enough for business meetings of up to 2000 people, but it also had intimate suites for private life: Royalty could govern and relax, while indulging their passion for hunting. Here in 1164 Henry II confronted Thomas Becket and frames the “Constitutions of Clarendon”; here the Plantagenets sustained their grandest palace outside London and the largest deer park in the kingdom. The visitor to the park today will find this medieval landscape still recognizable and more or less intact. Yet until recently, it remained secret and undiscovered.

In this book Tom Beaumont-James and Christopher Gerrard tell the story of this great royal landscape from the Neolithic through to the present. The park is rich in Prehistoric remains, but unusually , it is the historic period, which excites the creates archaeological attention. The authors explore Saxon Clarendon and chart the Norman creation of the deer park and the building of the palace. They bring the royal hunt to life – a time when royalty and their guests hunted fallow deer in the park, when gyrfalcons sought prey from high above and kings and queens dispensed bounty to huntsmen, who brought cranes and wolves killed in the nearby royal marshes and forest. In 1660 Clarendon passed to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, chronicler of the English Civil War. After that the landscape subsequently went through a further transformation, into a private county estate and an expression of Protestant, Tory and military values.

 

In this wide-ranging book, the reader get a very detailed and well-researched introduction to not only the history of deer park, but also their management through time.

Gardens of Earthly Delight: The History of Deer Parks
By John Fletcher
Windgather Press 2011
ISBN-10: 1905119364
ISBN-13: 978-1905119363

This is a highly original, profusely illustrated, and well-researched account of deer parks. With humility and respect Fletcher touches on errors commonly made by archaeologists and historians, taking issue with long held theories while drawing on his lifetime working with deer to formulate plausible explanations as to, for example, why they were not domesticated until the 20th century, how parks evolved from haga and elricks , why deer parks were created throughout Eurasia, why fallow so rapidly ousted red deer from medieval British parks, and much more.

He ranges from meat sharing amongst chimpanzees to the symbolism of venison as the elite product of hunting, ensconced within seven centuries of the English Royal Warrant, through the 300 year long prohibition on its sale within England and the continuing illegality of selling hunted venison within the USA, the aristocratic pursuit of park breaking, and the imposition of the Black Act.

He stresses the cross-cultural importance of rulers being seen to hunt, compares ancient Chinese parks, the colossal Asian ring hunts, and the water hunts of Germany as expressions of man’s urge to contain deer.

Within Britain, which has for a thousand years held more deer parks than any other part of the world, he describes how deer were fed, transported, enclosed, captured, castrated and housed, and how they were hunted in the confines of parks. The recent theory as to the use of trenches for handling deer in medieval Scotland is explored. The international symbolism of white deer, collared deer and enclosed deer is discussed.

Recently, parks provided deer for English carted hunts and Scottish sporting estates; now we recognise their ecological and recreational value. We learn how parklands may be our spiritual home – the environment in which we are most content – and that parks have always been, in a fashion, designed landscapes.

CONTENT:

• 1. Carving out the meat: beyond deep history – the manipulative cunning of apes
• 2. Deep history and why hunting matters
• 3. Our natural habitat: glades, groves and parkland
• 4. Elricks and kites, hayes and ha-ha’s
• 5. Paradeisos and classical hunting parks
• 6. East of Eden: Chinese parks and the Sons of Heaven
• 7. Xanadu and the nomads
• 8. Flowers of the high medieval: how fallow deer came to Britain from the paradise gardens, the Arabic origins of ornamental landscape, and flirtation
• 9. Beautiful and tame: why we chose fallow
• 10. How the deer were hunted in the parks: coursing, and venery
• 11. Noli me tangere – le cerf privé in paradise
• 12. Parks in contention: Forest Law, park breaking and poaching
• 13. The parker’s duties: pales, salters and trenches, browse, grease and fence months
• 14. Ornament: antithesis of utility, bedfellow of status – Tudor parks and beyond
• 15. The Restoration and landscape: from ashes to avenues; purgatory to paradise
• 16. The Black Act: expulsion from Paradise – beyond the pale
• 17. Giving it away: venison as conspicuous consumption, a gift beyond price
• 18. Against the odds – carted stags and show hunts: British and German attitudes to containing deer for sport
• 19. Castles for deer: from hunting to husbandry
• 20. Mounting heads: trophies, monarchs and dictators
• 21. Ecological oases, urban lungs, and venison farms
• Terminology of deer and trees

 

 

 

In the Middle Ages the elite invested heavily in more than just their habitat – their castle or manor-house. New research has shown that their landscapes were heavily designed to afford them both pleasure, fun and a scene to celebrate their power

Designs Upon the Land. Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages
By Oliver H. Creighton, Associate Professor in Archaeology, University of Exeter
Boydell & Brewer 2009 (2014)

The phrase “designed landscape” is generally associated with the great parks and gardens of the post-medieval period, with grand country houses surrounded by parkland, such as Chatsworth and Longleat. However, recent research has made it clear that its origins lie much further back than that, in the middle ages, and numerous examples have been identified.

This book offers the first full-length survey of designed medieval landscapes, not just the settings for castles, but for palaces, manor houses and monastic institutions.

Gardens and pleasure grounds gave their owners sensory enjoyment; lakes, ponds and walkways created routes of approach that displayed residences to best effect; deer parks were stunning backdrops and venues for aristocratic enjoyment; and peacocks, swans, rabbits and doves were some of the many species which lent these landscapes their elite appearance.

The book is richly illustrated with plans, maps, and photographs of key sites showing what can still be seen today and offers a richly rewarding introduction to the elite landscapes of Medieval Britain, demonstrating that these landscapes were just as open and impressive as later on. Having read the book, the reader is no longer able to entertain the idea, that medieval people thought of their habitations as something which had to be fenced of, walled and moated inside seas of uncontrollable wilderness.

Literally, the book opens vast vistas!

 

 

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Series: Garden and Landscape History

A dictionary presents a very important introduction to the scholarly and artistic field of the Nibelungen Tradition

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Deserted Medieval Villages in the Pilsen Region: Catalogue from an exhibition 2008 realised by the Museum of West Bohemia

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