2nd December, 2018. History of Public Parks, 4.

The study of the history of British ‘parklands’ can seem confusing when different terms are used in different contexts. Examples of these are ‘royal forests’, ‘deer parks’, ‘hunting parks’ and ‘royal parks’.

Royal forests were largely created by the early Norman monarchs after 1066 and some lasted throughout the Middle Ages, the last criminal enforcement of royal forest laws being in the 17th century. The term ‘forest’ can be misleading in that the medieval use of the term didn’t assume continuous woodland but rather a diverse ecology that did include much woodland (cover for the game) but also ‘lawns’, open grassland areas.

Although thousands of acres were designated as royal forest by the 13th century the areas chosen were generally not those where arable agriculture was being practiced by open field villages, but rather across areas unsuited to arable farming, previously ‘wildwood’ or extensive common land. Landscape historians disagree as to the extent to which Anglo-Saxon communities were uprooted to create royal forests. The reason for the creation of royal forests was to provide the monarch with private hunting parks for the enjoyment of the ‘chase’ (a term sometimes used instead of ‘forest’) and kill.

The map above is taken from Wikipaedia and entitled Royal Forests 1327-1336, based on L.G. Simmons ‘ Moorlands of England and Wales’. Some names are familiar today as National Parks or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Royal Forests were sometimes known as ‘Kingswood’. In the Middle Ages areas of bog or extensive wetland, regions such as The Fens, The area that was to become the Norfolk Broads and the Vale of Axholme, were unsuited to the purpose of royal forests. So given that then the Middle and upper River Hull valley was wetland (‘carr-land’) the name ‘Kingswood’ for the northern extension of Hull’s built-up area seems contrived.

Many royal forests had already been ‘dis-afforested’ by the 15th century.

(To be continued).