(^14) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
were to be found next to, or even surrounding, mansions.^62 By this stage, as
we shall see, they were becoming primarily ornamental landscapes.
Recreational deer hunting made an important impact on the medieval
environment in another way. Royal forests were large tracts of the country
across which special laws were enforced to encourage deer for the royal
hunt, largely by protecting the scrub and woodland in which they found
shelter.^63 Most comprised a core of common land, often wooded, owned by
the king, but an outer penumbra of ordinary farmland. Many were found
in ‘woodland’ districts, but others were scattered across the ‘champion’
Midlands, in areas where enough uncultivated ground had survived to make
their designation as forests worthwhile. Many could also be found in areas
of upland moor, including Dartmoor, a clear enough indication that there
was no necessity for forests to be densely timbered.
Deer parks contained the native red and roe deer, but their principal
denizens were the fallow deer Dama dama, which was more amenable to
management. The fallow had become extinct across Europe after the last
glaciation, except in a few areas around the Mediterranean, probably as a
consequence of human predation. It was possibly reintroduced into Britain
shortly before the Norman Conquest, to judge from bones excavated at
Hereford, Cheddar and elsewhere, and the evidence – which is contested
- of place names.^64 It did not become widespread, however, until after the
Conquest, and perhaps only gradually. Fallow deer bones are only thinly
figure 3 The medieval deer park at Hursley, Hampshire, as shown on an early
sixteenth-century map.