PART 4
18
Steven Bednarski, Andrew Moore and Timothy P. Newfield
Introduction and argument
In the second half of the fifteenth century, a new castle loomed large over the Sussex countryside, surrounded by a recently expanded and enclosed deer park. Herstmonceux Castle, constructed by Sir Roger Fiennes, combined medieval strength and symbols with early modern sensibilities.1 His new dwelling featured an artificial moat, fed by local springs, thick walls, parapets, an elaborate gatehouse with barbican, a drawbridge, and towered crenelated walls that surrounded interior courts. Yet the arrow slits and cannon holes were decorative, too narrow to have ever allowed for adequate aim or genuine defence. Fiennes’ workers, perhaps English, perhaps Flemish, did not construct walls of strong stone, but instead baked red bricks from the local clay. In his choice of brick over stone, Fiennes or his builder followed the custom of northern continental fortresses from the Low Countries to Livonia. The brick his craftsmen used was likely produced in kilns within the estate.2 Herstmonceux Castle, once completed, was the largest brick dwelling in private possession in the British Isles. This impressive, if partially anachronistic, structure was, however, merely the centerpiece for the larger redevelopment of Fiennes’ medieval estate. Over the second half of the fifteenth century, he and his heirs reshaped the landscape of their property, relocating the dispersed medieval settlement that had survived on their lands since at least Anglo-Saxon times, cleared the land, and planted trees.3 The result, come 1500, was a refashioned rural landscape.
The chapter argues that by taking a multidisciplinary approach centred on Roger Fiennes’ late medieval estate,* we see compelling evidence that human decisions to transform radically rural land use may well have been motivated, in large part, by environmental factors – in this case, increased problems of water management moved landowners to transform rural agrarian spaces into an elite hunting reserve with differentiated status and, importantly, more environmentally sustainable and varied natural resources. To demonstrate this, what follows assesses the deep historical meanings brought to light by the mid-fifteenth-century repurposing of Herstmonceux. These meanings, on the surface, point to human socioeconomic and sociopolitical trends. At the same time, however, any holistic understanding of fifteenth-century Herstmonceux must also take into account the estate’s local environmental context. While scholars and local enthusiasts have studied the fifteenth-century construction, or reconstruction, of Herstmonceux, though not in any thorough, recent, or scientific manner, their work has focused on social or economic motivations and consequences. At the same time, while studies of English parks and manors abound, and indeed are experiencing something of a revival, these studies remain largely divorced from parallel methodologies, data, and discourses brought by historians of the environment and natural scientists.4
* The project, Environments of Change, is in fact a formal multiinstitutional partnership directed by Steven Bednarski (University of Waterloo). Environments of Changes pools resources from a dozen partner institutions and organizations including Queen’s University’s Bader International Study Centre at Herstmonceux Castle (East Sussex). For more information, see http://medieval-environment.com. This chapter draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in the form of a seven-year Partnership Grant.
At Herstmonceux, what is required is a collaborative interdisciplinary research program that employs a range of methodologies and discrete but complementary data from history, archaeology and the paleosciences in order to cast Fiennes’ efforts within a broad environmental framework.5 Only then, we argue, can modern observers most fully appreciate and make sense of Herstmonceux’s fifteenth-century transformations. To understand the evolution of noble status, class relations, changes to land laws, modes of production, resource management, or even architectural and aesthetic shifts, we must first appreciate how such changes occurred within a mutable “natural” environment. That environment responded to human interventions, but it also acted sui generis et sui iuris to provoke human reaction. After all, people and nature were (and are) caught up in an ongoing dialogue, the one influencing the other.6 A full study of the castle, estate, and park must take this into account, and integrate both a range of high-resolution climate proxy data, principally based on trees from the southeast, and pollen studies of sediment cores revealing local vegetation change. Preliminary work at Herstmonceux teaches that the conversion of previously cultivated fields, the decommissioning of an earlier, likely Norman manor house, the construction of a massive fortified, crenelated, and moated brick home, and the significant expansion of a private enclosed deer park, had far wider historical significance than can be understood from purely sociopolitical or socioeconomic investigations. In fact, the changes at Herstmonceux demonstrate that even local, rural developments resonate disproportionately on a social and ecological scale. In that sense, they insert local rural history into broader significance. They also remind that preindustrial people had considerably greater awareness and control over their environment, as well as ability to respond to natural variability, than we moderns sometimes concede. Despite that awareness and control, however, they, like we, remained subject to long-term climatic forces and vulnerable especially to extreme weather events and short-term climatic anomalies.
Environmental and historical context to 1440
Human habitation of the medieval site of Herstmonceux extends back more or less continuously to Roman Britain (c. 43–410 CE), and possibly as early as the late European Bronze Age (c. 600 BCE). In ancient, as in modern, times geography and topography drew animal, including human, occupants. Herstmonceux lies in the Weald, that expanse of land nestled between the high parallel chalk ridge escarpments known as the South and North Downs.7 Della Hooke notes that evidence from pre-Conquest charters and place-names establishes the Weald as an excellent example of early medieval transhumance.8 The very name Weald, an Anglo-Saxon linguistic fossil for “woodland,” evinces the region’s most notable physical characteristic through much of the Holocene: a continuous old-growth woodland, now mostly gone. Roman and Saxon inhabitants alike gave this vast woodland a proper name, the woods of Andred (silva anderida, Andredeswald). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions this woody region on a few occasions and tells us, notably, that in 893 CE “the great wood which we call Andred […] is a hundred-and-twenty miles long or longer from east to west, and thirty miles broad.”9 In antiquity, thus, the ancient woodland of Andred, which extended from Lympne, near Romney Marsh in Kent, throughout Surrey and all of Sussex except the elevated Downs, to the coastal regions and into Hampshire, blanketed the Weald.10 It is therefore no surprise that Anglo-Saxon settlers living on our site dubbed it hyrst, meaning “woods” or “forest.” That word, although varied in spelling, acts as a suffix for many local place-names, as well as the beginning of some others.11
Roman settlement in the immediate area began sometime around the invasion of 43 CE. By the third century, a fortified settlement existed at nearby Pevensey, and the Romans mined iron at Crowhurst Park, some twelve kilometres northeast of Herstmonceux. It is not surprising, therefore, to find extant physical evidence of Roman settlement throughout the Herstmonceux estate.12
The “Herst” settlement, located some twenty-two kilometres northwest of Hastings, site of William the Conqueror’s famous battle, and a mere seven kilometres from his (now landlocked) landing port of Pevensey, endured. Around the time of the Norman conquest of England, Domesday Book records that Herst comprised forty-two households. This made it a large settlement, that, at the time of the Conquest and at the time the Domesday survey was compiled, was assessed for taxation at five hides. Here is what Domesday Book has to say about Herstmonceux:
Wibertus tenet de Comite Herste. Edmer presbyter tenuit tempore Regis Edwardi et cum / terra potuit ire quo voluit. Et tunc et modo se defendit pro v hidis. Terra est XII / carucatae. In dominio sunt III carucate, et XXX villain cum XII cotariis habent XVI carucatas. / Ibi ecclesia et VII acrae prati et silva II porcorum. / Tempore Regis Edwardi valebat VI lib. et post XX solid. Modo x lib.
Wibert holds Herst[monceux] from the count. Eadmaer the priest held it at the time of King Edward, and was able to go in the land where he wished. And then as now it was assessed at 5 hides. The land is [assessed at] 12 carucates. In the demesne there are 3 carucates, and 30 villagers with 12 cottagers hold 16 carucates. In that place is a church and 7 acres of field and forest for 2 pigs. At the time of King Edward it was worth 6 pounds and afterward 20 shillings; now 10 pounds.13
Like so many of the assessments provided for in Domesday Book, there is room for speculation as to the precise demographics and productivity of eleventh-century Herstmonceux.14 In particular, the hide-virgate ratio described in Domesday Book raises some interesting questions about the exact extent of the eleventh-century settlement. A virgate typically denoted arable land measured by the rod and held by no more than one peasant household. This designation did carry significant complexities, however, as the hide denoted perceived land value, rather than overall land area.15 Although scholars generally equate the hide to roughly four virgates,16 in the 1960s, Eleanor Searle, while researching a settlement at Battle Abbey, argued for a more complex ratio dependent upon levels of cultivation. In places where land was well cultivated, a high tax rate of 1:4 was indeed used, but in lightly cultivated areas, a more generous ratio of 1:8 came into effect. She made this case only for Battle Abbey and the surrounding Wealden Forest and Hastings rape.17 In light of the findings from Battle Abbey, the Herst settlement’s assessment at five hides, but with a large population of forty-two households, may similarly point to relatively low levels of cultivation at the time of the Domesday survey.
The Conquest had a negative impact on the inhabitants and users of Herstmonceux, and on the land they cultivated, but this was short-lived. We track the devastation imposed by the Normans on the Herst settlement by the fact that Domesday Book records how the land’s value diminished from £6 in 1066 to a mere twenty shillings four years later. Domesday Book also suggests, however, that the site remained productive, and that within twenty years it surpassed its pre-Conquest value to attain a worth of £10. When royal officials compiled the Domesday account, Herstmonceux comprised twelve carucates, somewhere between 1,400 and 2,200 acres of land. The carucate, which derived its name from the Latin carruca, that heavy-wheeled plough so essential to the agricultural revolution of the high Middle Ages, was a measure of land roughly equivalent to that ploughed by a team of eight oxen in a given season; approximately 120 acres or about one half of a square kilometre.18 The equivalent of three plough teams worked the lord’s demesne, and sixteen more ploughed the land used by his men (villain, cotariis).
The Norman property was typical in composition and agrarian diversity. In addition to fields for farming, it contained seven acres of meadowlands, woods, pannage for two swine, and the old Anglo-Saxon church, likely located on the site of the current All Saints parish church.19 While excavations must still confirm where exactly the agrarian labourers of high medieval Herstmonceux resided, Domesday Book tells us that at the time of the Conquest, the land supported forty-two farming households. If we use a relatively standard medieval coefficient of about 4.5 to five people per hearth, and keep in mind that Domesday Book often underreports population values, then the eleventh-century estate of Herstmonceux contained a tenant population of over two hundred men, women, and children.20 This does not include nobles, priests, and other religious, or household staff, which may have increased the eleventh-century population to somewhere less than 300 souls. This does not necessarily imply the presence of a nucleated village, however. Outside the agricultural framework of England’s Central Region, commonly called the “Midland system,” dispersed settlements predominated and often led to earlier examples of enclosure in some areas.21
Early modern and modern historians of Sussex have elsewhere diligently reconstructed the transmission of the newly Normanized “Herst” settlement, and their work informs our understanding of how the estate came into the possession of the Fiennes, the family that most greatly transformed its land usage. The Elizabethan historian and antiquarian William Camden (1551–1623) remarked that almost immediately following the Conquest, a local noble family residing on the site adopted its name as their own, becoming “de Herst”.22 Eventually, one of this line restyled himself by adding Monceux to his name.23 Thus, Camden writes:
This was immediately after the Normans entry into England the seat of certaine noble gentlemen who of that place were a good while named de Herst, until William the sonne of Walleran de Herst tooke unto him the name Monceaux, of the place haply where he was borne, an usuall thing in that age, whereupon the name also was adnexed unto this place, which ever since was of the Lord termed Herst Monceaux. From whose Posteritie by heire generall it descended haereditariliy to the Fienes. These Fienes, called likewise Fenis and Fienles, derive their pedigree from Ingelram de Fienes, who had wedded the heire of Pharamuse of Boloigne of the house of the Earles of Boloigne in France [i.e. the County of Boulogne whose capitol was Boulogne-sur-Mer]. About the time of King Edward the Second Sir John Fienes married the heire of Monceaux, his sonne William married one of the heires of the Lord Say, his sonne likewise the heire of Batisford, whose sonne Sir Roger Fienes married the daughter of Holland, and in the first yeare of King Henrie the Sixt built of bricke a large, faire, uniforme and convenient house heere Castle-like within a deepe mote.24
By the mid-fifteenth century, Herstmonceux had passed from the de Monceux family to that of the well-connected Fiennes.25 These Fiennes were a prominent English family of French origin who were connected to the English monarchy and who rendered various forms of service, not the least of which was military support, first in England and Outremer, and later in the wars with France.26 By the late fourteenth century, the crown acknowledged generations of loyal service through the office of sheriff of Sussex and Surrey. This tradition of royal patronage continued throughout the fifteenth century as Sir James Fiennes, himself sheriff of Sussex and Surrey (1438–39), became Lord High Treasurer of England (1449) to Henry VI.27 In 1447, the king summoned James to Parliament as Lord Say and Sele and declared him a baron of the realm.28 James’ elder brother, Roger, the builder of Herstmonceux Castle, accompanied Henry V at Agincourt. Roger was equally treasurer to the household of Henry VI.29
Given the close relationship in the mid-fifteenth century between the Fiennes and the crown, it is no surprise that the family also began to exercise dominance and independence over the land they controlled at Herstmonceux. The family’s first task was to sever Herstmonceux from fees and duties owed to its feudal overlord at Hastings. In 1430, Sir John Pelham provided a deed to release Fiennes and his heirs and assigns from all obligations owed to Hastings except fealty.30 Two years later, in 1432, Pelham similarly released the men who held land on the manor, and their heirs and assigns, from all obligations save fealty.31 These acts effectively removed the land at Herstmonceux manor and its lords from duties to the rape of Hastings.
Nearly one decade later, in 1441, Sir Roger obtained from the crown a license to crenelate (licentia kernellandi), which he in fact interpreted broadly as justification to build a brand new moated brick castle, and to expand and reorganize the manor of Herstmonceux and its land holdings. Below is the translation of the original charter roll issued by the Chancery, as it has appeared in calendars, books, and articles.
For Roger Ffenys, knight
The King to Archbishops, Bishops, etc., to whom etc., greeting. Know that of our special grace we have granted and given license on behalf of ourselves and our heirs, as much as in us lies, to our beloved and faithful knight, Roger Ffenys, that he may with walls and lime, enclose, krenellate, entower, and embattle (turrellare et batellare) his manor of Hurst Monceux, in the County of Sussex, and that he may hold the aforesaid manor so enclosed, krenellated, entowered, and embattled, for himself and his heirs for ever, without impeachment (impetitione) from ourselves, or our heirs or our other officers or heirs whosoever. Given by our hand at Westminster on the 5th day of February.32
The complete text is thirteen lines long.33 The modern English translations, reiterated wherever the license is mentioned, however, only present the first half of the text. In point of fact, for over a century now, scholars and local historians have overlooked the second half. It reads:
[6] […] et quod prefatus Rogeris sexcentas acras quas suas cuidam parco suo ibidem adiacentes
[7] cum palo et fossato34 in elargationem eiusdem parci includere et parcum illum sit inclusum et elargatum tenere
[8] possit sibi et heredibus suis improprium. hiis testibus venerabilibus prioriibus: H[enricus Chichele] archiepiscopo Cantuario tocius anglie primate
[9] et Bathonia et Wellenia cancellario anglie et W[illiam] Sarum episcopis carissimo
avunculo nostro Humfrio Gloucestre35 et - -
[10] carissimo consanguineo nostro Johannes Foxffi? ducibus carissimis consanguineis
nostris Humfrio Stafford36 et Williamo
[11] Suffi senescallo hospicii nostri comitibus dilectis et fidelibus nostris Rado[lphus] [sic]
Cromwell37 Theo[doricus] anglie et Rado[lphus] —
[12] Botiller38 camerario hospicii nostri militibus magistro Williamo Hyndewode39
custode primati sigilli nostri et aliis
[13] datis per manum manum apud Westminsterum quinto die ffebruarii pro beris de
primato sigillo et de datis ——— dencia etcetera /
The license to crenelate was not, therefore, merely the act that allowed for the construction of Herstmonceux Castle. Tellingly, it also permitted the enlargement and enclosure of the estate’s parklands (i.e., hunting grounds) by an impressive 600 acres of adjoining land. This expansion signals a significant transformation in land use, since the estate had already contained extensive arable farmland and pasturage in previous generations.40 The foundations for this enlarged park however, had been laid centuries earlier.
We know that the medieval manor of Herstmonceux contained hunting grounds as early as 1243 and this parkland was no doubt attractive to the Fiennes from the start. We provide the date of 1243 since there is evidence that servants of the Countess of Eu attempted to assert her claim to the manor by hunting deer in the park in that year.41 Then in 1264, Waleran de Monceux fought alongside Simon de Montfort in his rebellion against Henry III. On his way to the Battle of Lewes, Henry III and his men stayed the night at Herstmonceux and “hunted and destroyed the park”.42 Members of the Fiennes family had themselves long been interested in the hunt. In 1283, a warrant from Edward I gave a Fiennes ancestor permission to remove three bucks from Epping Forest, and commanded the assistance of the royal forest warden.43 Twelve years later, in 1295, John de Fiennes wed the daughter and heiress of the hereditary Forester of Windsor Park, and that office remained with the Fiennes family for generations, well after the Fiennes inherited Herstmonceux.44 The Herstmonceux park itself had even been enlarged once already, in 1412, when Sir John Pelham obtained permission to enclose a road passing through the middle of the park.45 Herstmonceux, which had maintained a medieval hunting park since at least the mid-thirteenth century, was a natural object of desire, then, for this forested family.
Herstmonceux, thus, was an enduring agricultural site that supported a sizeable human population from at least Anglo-Saxon times, though physical remains point to Roman and Bronze Age residents, too. We also know that by the high Middle Ages, the property maintained a hunting park alongside grain fields, and that, by the fifteenth century, its owners obtained permission to enlarge substantially and to enclose part of their estate for the hunt.
We posit that this transformation in landscape, from largely agrarian, to mixed-use agrarian and wooded hunting grounds, to mostly enclosed private space, was not the result of, or at least not solely the result of, aristocratic whimsy. While the transformation of landscape undertaken by the Fiennes after 1441 no doubt made a powerful statement about wealth, social class, and conspicuous consumption, it was also driven by environmental factors. In this case, social and cultural change dovetailed with significant changes to weather and climate patterns.
Local weather and broader climate
In terms of natural conditions, concisely, the period in which the owners of Herstmonceux emparked their rural estate coincides with pronounced shifts in climate and extreme weather events. Hubert Lamb identified the “Medieval Warm Epoch” in 1965 as roughly 300 years of generally warm-dry conditions in temperate Europe that began about 1000 and petered out over the course of the thirteenth century. While temperatures began to fall around 1300, according to Lamb, the dryness of this “epoch,” referred to by later scholars as the “Medieval Warm Period” and now more commonly as the “Medieval Climate Anomaly” (MCA), gave way to increasing wetness from 1200.46 Much subsequent scholarship has confirmed the general contours of Lamb’s high medieval climate in and oftentimes beyond temperate Europe. Historical- and paleo-climatologists, however, have scaled back Lamb’s temperature estimates, drawn more attention to temporal and spatial variability within the MCA, and employed a range of close but different dates to bracket it (often revealing regional or proxy biases), but a warm period coming gradually to an end c. 1250–1350 is standard.47
Recent dendroclimatology has also confirmed an onset of increased precipitation in temperate Europe from about 1200, though precipitation patterns continued to be variable.48 Two dendro-based English precipitation reconstructions published in 2013 push the onset of this wet phase back fifty to hundred years: East Anglian trees have it setting in about 1100, and trees from southern and central portions of the country place it about 1150.49 There is as yet no similar palaeo-climatogical proxy specifically for the southeast (of the 1,540 historical trees employed in the latter study, only forty-two came from West Sussex, thirty-nine from Surrey, twelve from Kent, and none from East Sussex), but it is clear that climate in the region was progressively wetter and more capricious from 1150, and cooler from 1300 on, though it should be stressed we currently know more about summer climate than winter.
We are, of course, hindered due to problems of scale when we consider climate versus weather, since, for example, we cannot draw specific conclusions about precipitation and hydrology in, say, Sussex using large-scale temperature generalizations such as the MCA and LIA. For a specific region such as the South-East of England, we still want for good, local indicators. What we do know is that, on a general scale, the climate “reorganization” at the beginning of the transition from the MCA to the Little Ice Age (LIA), which tended to see a cooler and sometimes-dryer climatic regime, for many historical- and palaeo-climatologists, anyway, began in earnest about 1450 after a sequence of abrupt fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century false starts.50 And, certainly, this major transitional phase in European climate spans the arable contraction and emparkment of medieval Herstmonceux.
The impact of this transition was not everywhere equal. Low-lying wetlands undoubtedly suffered disproportionately. Extreme weather events and climate variability were characteristic of the MCA-LIA transition. For low-lying medieval Herstmonceux, severe storms, coastal flooding, and waterlogging were major concerns. While the castle is perched about eleven metres above sea level, some of the medieval arable was at an elevation of one half metre. Herstmonceux sits next to the Pevensey Levels, an expansive wetland extending from Bexhill-on-Sea to Eastbourne in East Sussex that was an open tidal estuary as recently as 4,000 years ago and briefly again about 1,500 years later. More recently, as written records, archaeological reports, and sediment cores teach us, the Levels were a marshland that flooded seasonally at first, then occasionally as sea levels fell and the land was reclaimed, through natural tidal deposits and human intervention. Once this happened, humans used the rich soils of the former lagoon for arable and grazing. Multiple variables influenced the number of tilled acres and hooves found in and near the Levels at any given time, but water management and vulnerability to flooding, storms, and waterlogging were always important.
The written evidence for inundations and severe storms in England, and along Channel and North Sea coasts, grows dramatically in the thirteenth century, a reflection of increased storm intensity and storm frequency but also heightened vulnerability to flooding following centuries of reclamation and intensifying human occupation on reclaimed lands.51 Much of this stormy evidence is encountered in narrative sources. It is therefore, as Mark Bailey noted, descriptive and hardly exact, and, as Jan Titow lamented, occasionally exaggerated and inaccurate.52 While it would be ill-advised to employ narrative sources alone to measure trends in the occurrence and severity of storms and floods over space and time, as most accounts are imprecise and the record of events is incomplete, chronicles and the like can help flesh out underlying causes of difficult years registered in administrative sources and natural archives. Storms do crop up in other written sources, of course. For example, James Galloway has employed charters among other administrative sources to reconstruct storms in recent studies on medieval flooding of the Thames Estuary, and in the 1970s Peter Brandon drew on manorial accounts to comment on extreme weather events in late medieval Sussex.53 Brandon used the data from the compotus rolls preserved from estates owned by Battle Abbey, mostly dating from 1340 to 1444, as surrogate “weather stations” from “a period for which meteorological information is very deficient.” Through them, he was able to “amplify and check the authenticity of the sporadic information supplied by the medieval chroniclers.”54 Brandon found excellent records of flooding in Sussex, mostly marine, and believed it to be a constant characteristic of the era, a phenomenon that only increased in severity over time.
In the southeast, severe storms throughout the thirteenth century culminated with the Great Channel Flood of 1287, which caused seawater to overcome the seawalls at Pevensey and to flood the extensive marshes immediately south of Herstmonceux.55 So extreme was the destruction to Sussex that the sizeable village of Winchelsea, built on a shingle spit thirty-four km south-east of Herstmonceux, was swept away. The devastation to Sussex prompted the creation of its first Commissioners of the Sewers. These Commissioners, against the wishes of farmers, dammed the Pevensey Haven (one of two rivers that feed the Levels) to prevent future inland floods. The measure helped protect the region against inundation, and land reclamation efforts resumed, though marine flooding continued on occasion into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In an important early article, L.F. Salzmann summarized some of the extant reports of landowners struggling with one another and against the nascent state to maintain irrigation and drainage, in part through the mandated requirement that they preserve ditches, dikes, and canals. This was not always possible or economically desirable and the records show cases of neighbour fighting neighbor, and of the Crown chastising delinquents, including, at least once, the lord of Herstmonceux.56
Seawater was only part of the problem as heavy rains also posed a real threat. In 1341, farmers at Hooe, immediately to the east of Herstmonceux, lost four hundred acres of arable. In 1375, sixty-five years before the expansion of the deer park, most the Herstmonceux estate waterlogged. The Nonarum Inquisitiones of early 1342, a parish-by-parish inquiry intended to explain to Edward III the drop in land values since Pope Nicholas IV’s 1291 Taxatio Ecclesiastica, demonstrate that in the fifty years leading up to 1341 more than 10,000 acres of arable were removed from cultivation or lost throughout all of Sussex, though mostly in the south of the county along the coast. Only three other regions are identified as sustaining comparable losses to ploughland. Peasant poverty, soil sterility, and maritime raids are given as causes in the inquiry, but at least 3,500 acres (and likely many more) had been lost to the sea.57 Inundations continued to claim tilled land through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.58 Inhabitants were resilient and arable remained important throughout this period, though land was increasingly converted to pasture. A diminished labour population and demand for grain following the Black Death exacerbated this phenomenon, though admittedly less so in the southeast than elsewhere in England.59 Land reclamation and land conservation were, we posit, of tantamount concern to late medieval southeastern English farmers. Yet few studies graft the transformations in weather and climate in late medieval Sussex to manor records to see how they impacted peoples’ lived experiences on the land. The early work of Brandon is the notable exception and in many ways this project seeks to build upon his essays, introducing novel dendroclimatological and palynological data, to contextualize and understand better the local medieval experience at Herstmonceux.60
Conclusions on rural lands and culture
Roger Fiennes built Herstmonceux Castle when most other wealthy landowners were abandoning such impractical and technologically outdated medieval structures in favour of more fashionable country homes. This commonly accepted and convincing perspective explains why later medieval parks barely resembled their older counterparts in form and function. Many historians tend to use the Black Death as a watershed moment to divide noble homes into two distinct evolutionary phases; an earlier emphasis on hunting and deer-keeping was increasingly superseded by “landscaped” (visual settings for increasingly opulent manors) and “mixed-use” (mainly stock fattening and wood-production) parks.61 This fits the general assumption that late medieval castles reflect a shift away from defensive, militaristic structures and toward the architecture of grand country homes, even if some scholars have argued against the very concept of a “military versus social dichotomy.”62 Other evidence also suggests favourable economic conditions for emparkment in the later Middle Ages that resulted from higher wages and increased standards of living in the decades following the Black Death.63 The history of the Herstmonceux estate requires an interdisciplinary analysis that draws on landscape studies, deer park histories, and the tide of new paleoscientific data, namely high-resolution climate proxies and pollen studies of sediment cores revealing local vegetation change.
This type of approach inscribes local, rural history into larger contexts. It helps us to understand better how local landowners and agricultural operators developed strategies in response to environmental factors; this is important in and of itself. It also helps us, however, to see how, through the development of new strategies, humans renegotiated their very core social structures. At risk due to extreme weather events and flooding were not merely organic concerns such as soil and plant, but also sweeping organizational concepts such as class, law, and wealth. Farmers had to discern new ways to derive sustenance from wetter, colder climates. But they equally had to confront the harsh realities of what Marxist historians once called the modes of production. In that sense, the reorganization that occurred at Herstmonceux, through the reduction of farmland and expansion of parkland, is telling.
The social effects of enclosing common land and the construction of deer parks has been well documented, even by contemporaries. This tension over socially divisive land use manifested itself in several ways. Many people excluded from the right to hunt resorted to poaching instead, sometimes travelling remarkable distances to do so.64 Others expressed their hostility through literature and popular folktales like Robin Hood.65 Sometimes, resentment over limited access to land resulted in openly violent conflict. In the late-fourteenth century, the most celebrated example is that of the Wat Tyler’s rebellion of 1381. In 1450, though, some rebels in the Jack Cade Rebellion imprisoned and beheaded James Fiennes, then Baron Saye and Sele, brother to our castle-builder. And such land-based tensions persisted throughout the Tudor era. A common theme across at least a century of tensions and class conflict was access to elite hunting grounds (and, consequently, game for food). A principal grievance of many of the rebels in these various manifestations of unrest centred on the issue of enclosure and access to common lands.66 These uprisings, while challenging to royal authority for a time, did little to reverse the growing trend of aristocratic control over common areas and hunting rights.
Throughout the later Middle Ages and early modern period, the nobility moved to introduce legislation that gave it increased power over common areas. As early as 1236, the Statute of Merton allowed lords to appropriate commons as long as commoners were left with “sufficient.” These trends continued throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Richard II introduced the first Game Law in 1390, which restricted the use of hunting dogs and other methods to people with a minimum amount of wealth, in this case land and tenements worth at least forty shillings per year. It was also the first statute officially to appoint conflicts to the common law courts, rather than the forest eyres. This Game Law eroded the ancient right of anyone to take game from common land, and established precedent for hunting to become the privilege of upper classes.67 Parallel to this legal development, English nobles increasingly sought to distinguish themselves visually and physically in a social setting, namely with the increased construction of elaborate deer parks. Parks were quite popular throughout the Middle Ages, with at least 2,000, and as many as 3,200, at various times in England.68 Later kings and elites continued this trend. With a revival of the Game Laws, starting in 1485, Tudor monarchs passed extensive new statutes that placed further restrictions on who could hunt, when they could do so, and what methods they could use. This decentralization of park management, combined with increasingly centralized law enforcement, allowed nobles to maintain their own deer populations independently, but with the security of the state’s legal apparatus.
Park owners actively managed their properties, with careful monitoring and preservation strategies for both flora and fauna. Much of the land used for parks and game preserves also served as an alternative source of grazing area and timber, which therefore required careful woodland and pasture management to maintain that dual function. They also left strips of woodland to create field boundaries, which can still be seen today in the irregular field patterns of the Sussex Weald. However, these were controlled, not wild, forests. Coppiced wood speeds up natural cycles, decreases biodiversity, and tests limits of sustainability. Owners also hired teams of foresters to protect certain areas and then used their personal courts to enforce regulations. Evidence from manorial court rolls demonstrates that lords actively monitored property damage and enforced oversight on their officials.69 Traditional histories of Herstmonceux and Sussex have never before linked the radical transformation in land that occurred on the estate in 1441 to anything more than noble entitlement. The same is true, not incidentally, of more specific fields of historical inquiry such as the history of deer parks.70 While it is clearly misguided to discount or ignore entirely the social, cultural, and economic factors that contributed to emparkment, it is equally clear to us that changing environmental conditions, weather and climate, posed challenges to Herstmonceux’s owners and operators. While traditional sources and approaches to history emphasize class struggle, modes of production, or law, and while written sources may well naturally lend themselves to such lines of inquiry, emerging approaches brought about by interdisciplinarity call out for more nuanced consideration of motives and context. In considering emerging climate data, it becomes unthinkable that the fifteenth-century inhabitants of Herstmonceux could have ignored extreme weather and climate as they reassessed land use.
We have suggested here that the natural climate “reorganization” of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries exacted a devastating toll on low and high elevation sites, and other areas along the “margins”. Though arable and settlement contraction were the norm in post Black Death England, inhabitants of many of these vulnerable sites, undoubtedly including at least initially Herstmonceux, demonstrated resilience and employed a number of strategies to absorb and deflect the challenges the changing climate posed to agriculture.71 Drainage programs and sea defences evolved, as did crop varieties, crop rotations, and stocking densities, to work with and against the mutable physical environment.72 At the same time, social structures and culture responded, sometimes through innovation, as in the case of new legislation requiring landowners to drain swampy wetlands, sometimes in the form of rigid protectionism, which could have led to class tensions.
While medieval people lacked the long-term perspective or gradually emerging data we possess today, they experienced firsthand the lived reality of an increasingly unstable, cool, and wet environment and vulnerable agriculture. Changing temperatures, increased precipitation, and floods certainly have factored into any decisions around land transformation, and in particular a decision to reallocate previously and potentially arable farmland into parkland. In light of these findings, it seems certain to us that the decision to enclose this rural estate, to reshape its boundaries, to plant trees, and to import and encourage animal and plant populations, was motivated in part by the realities of climate change, falling yields, heightened levels of precipitation, and the increased risk of flood. In that light, the preliminary evidence from Herstmonceux suggests a strong connection between culture and climate. While this connection is well known to environmental historians, it is one easily and often overlooked in more traditional histories. Today, as the modern world grapples with the realities of climate change, and as environmental issues become ever more central to policy decisions and lived realities, historians must take up these themes and apply them onto the past. In so doing, we see arms-length examples of how our forbearers adapted their civilization alongside nature and, through their lessons, learn much about how our world – physical, natural, and symbolic – actually works.
Notes
1. This brick castle contained a fully enclosed hall, marking it as a particularly early example of the move away from traditional open halls. For more on the abandonment of open halls and the architectural shift, roughly between 1500 and 1700, to enclosed halls, consult Matthew Johnson, English Houses 1300-1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 97. While Johnson traces the evolution through architecture, no scholar has yet considered the possible environmental or weather-related causes of such structural changes to human habitation.
2. The construction of large brick buildings at the time often employed foreign, generally Flemish, craftsmen and overseers. Edmund Venables, in his comprehensive history of the castle, assumed this was the case for Herstmonceux Castle, but provides no evidence. See Edmund Venables, The Castle of Herstmonceux and Its Lords (London: John Russell Smith, 1851), p. 49. In point of fact, there does not appear to be any documentary evidence that Fiennes used Flemish craftsmen to build Herstmonceux. L.F. Salzman, ed., The Victoria History of the County of Sussex, vol. 9 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937) pp. 131–2.
3. This may not be an isolated incident of a lord creating a deer park on the site of an earlier medieval settlement. Bottisham Park in Cambridgeshire presents an interesting comparative example. There, an eighteenth-century park was created on empty land that once housed a (by then abandoned) medieval village, likely known as Angerhale. Some details show similarities to the Herstmonceux example several centuries prior: the diversion of a road around the park prior to the construction of the manor house, as well as the presence of possible moated areas now hidden in groves. See Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1986), p. 128.
4. See, for example, the recent park studies produced by S.A. Mileson, Parks in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and Robert Liddiard, ed., The Medieval Park: New Perspectives (Macclesfield, UK: Windgather Press, 2007).
5. This paper represents a first step towards this framework.
6. The most convincing conclusions for this perspective are in Richard C. Hoffmann, An Environmental History of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and for England specifically, Bruce M.S. Campbell, “Nature as Historical Protagonist: Environment and Society in Preindustrial England (The Tawney Memorial Lecture 2008),” Economic History Review 63 (2010), pp. 281–314.
7. The Downs are part of a larger geological feature, the Weald-Artois Anticline, which extends southward to Dover, with its more famous White Cliffs, and across the English Channel into French coastal Boulonnais, the region around Calais.
8. Della Hooke, “The Woodland Landscape of Early Medieval England,” in Place-Names, Language and the Anglo-Saxon Landscape, eds., Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), p. 145.
9. M.J. Swanton, trans., The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 84.
10. In geological terms, the Weald is essentially a decayed rock formation created in the Lower Cretaceous. Over time, a band of those rocks broke down naturally, through atmospheric contact, rainfall, and inundation, to reveal their composite internal layers, the oldest of which date to the Jurassic. Above Jurassic sediment, though, rests higher strata of sandstone, clay, grass, and, more generally, soils well-suited to flora. For more, see Peter F. Brandon, The Kent and Sussex Weald (Chichester, UK: Phillimore and Company, 2003).
11. For example: Penshurst, Lyndhurst, Sandhurst, Midhurst, etc. and Hurstbourn, Hurstpierpoint, etc. The first syllable of Horsebridge, Horseye, etc. is also likely a corruption of the same word; Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 8. The spelling “Herst” has become the standard version for Herstmonceux, largely based on its spelling in the Domesday Book. This follows a general trend of preference for e-formsover u, o, or i for the Old English y. See the explanation in A. Mawer and F.M. Stenton, eds., The Place-Names of Sussex, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929), p. xxviii.
12. Physical remains on the modern estate, unearthed as early as 1953, confirm Roman activity and suggest pre-Roman habitation. The accidental discovery in 1953 of several cinerary urns containing the remains of at least six individuals was never fully elaborated by their excavators, Norris and Salzman. More recently, the draft report for consecutive years (2008–11) of excavations done at the Beech Tree Field site notes that, in 2008, the Herstmonceux Castle Archaeology Group (HCAG) excavated two 1 × 3 metre trenches and uncovered the base of an East Sussex ware pot from between the late Iron Age to the early Roman period. The report also points out that in 2009, the HCAG excavated tests pits over an area identified through resistivity testing, southwest of Beech Tree Field, which contained a small quantity of pottery from between c. 50 and 100 CE. In 2010, excavations near the southwestern corner of Beech Tree Field, adjacent to the current Science Centre, produced further evidence of Roman settlement: two small pots, purposefully broken, and a large quern-stone for grinding. A nearby pit to the west revealed three small broken pots, and one to the north of these. In an area to the west of the last, archaeologists discovered three small broken pots and, to the north, evidence of burnt timbers. At the northern edge of the site, excavations revealed further examples of early Romano-British pottery and the possibility of sand quarrying. In 2011, a brief excavation along the northwest side of Plantation Wood uncovered two ditch features, one possibly prehistoric, the other based on pottery, clearly early Roman. See also A.F. Pearson, “Building Anderita: Late Roman Coastal Defences and the Construction of the Saxon Shore Fort at Pevensey,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 18 (1999), pp. 95–117.
13. Domesday I, 18. The “count” named above was William, Earl of Eu. According to Venables, William’s father, Robert, received Herste from his royal relatives for his service along with 107 other manors and the Castlery of Hastings, “of which Herstmonceux was long accounted a member:” Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 2.
We adopt the convention used at The Domesday Book Online (http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk) and translate vilain as villager, that is, “a member of the peasant class with the most land”; similarly, we translate cotarius as cottager, the “lowest and smallest of peasant.”
14. On the problematic issue of using the Domesday Book to reconstruct population, see H.C. Darby, Domesday England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 57–94.
15. This stems from the concept of charters bestowing use of the land, and a kind of dominion over it, rather than absolute ownership as in classical Roman law. See Martin J. Ryan, “That ‘Dreary Old Question’: The Hide in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” in Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J, Ryan, eds., Place-Names, Language and the Anglo-Saxon Landscape (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), p. 213.
16. For background, David Roffe, Decoding Domesday (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 203–9; Darby, Domesday England, pp. 95–136.
17. For more, see Eleanor Searle, “Hides, Virgates and Tenant Settlement at Battle Abbey,” The Economic History Review, New Series, 16, no. 2 (1963), pp. 293–5.
18. According to Lennard, the term carucate is Scandinavian in origin and may have entered the British Isles via Danish settlers. See Reginald Lennard, “The Origin of the Fiscal Carucate,” The Economic History Review 14, no. 1 (1944), pp. 51–63. In the Danelaw there were eight ‘bovates’ per ‘carucate:’ Debby Banham and Rosamond Faith, Anglo-Saxon Farming and Farms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 286. In reality, significant variations likely superseded the 120-acres ideal of Domesday. Some ‘hides’ may have been as small as forty acres in actual size. Ryan, “The Hide in Early Anglo-Saxon England,” p. 209.
19. There is little or no physical evidence of the Anglo-Saxon church structure contained in the current All Saints church, the earliest parts of which likely date back to the twelfth century.
20. Early in the historiography of English rural demography, no less an authority than J.C. Russell argued that 3.5 to 4 was a likely coefficient for the average number of people per household in England c. 1300. J.C. Russell, British Medieval Population (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1948), pp. 24–6. Within a decade H.E. Hallam had pushed the multiplier to 4 and J. Krause to 4.5. H.E. Hallam, “Some Thirteenth-Century Censuses,” Economic History Review 10 (1958), p. 352. J. Kraus, “The Medieval Household: Large or Small?” Economic History Review 9 (1956–57), p. 420. The eminent U.S. medievalist Joseph Strayer adopted Russell’s estimate for Normandy c. 1300. See his Medieval Statecraft and Perspectives on History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 21–2. Judith Bennett, Women in the English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 60–1, notes that 3.5 to 5.9 per household had been used by the time of her writing as the appropriate multiplier for establishing population in high medieval England. P.R. Schofield’s brief survey of medieval English household size and complexity, “England: family and village community,” in S.H. Rigby, A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 30, suggests 5 as an absolute maximum, while noting household structure varied across England according to local standards/customs and forms of agrarian economy.
Philip Slavin suggests to us that a coefficient of between 4.25 and 4.5 is appropriate and reminds that Domesday Book underreports population values and that the forty-two peasant households indicated in the source may only represent 80% to 90% of the households on the manor.
21. David Hall, The Open Fields of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 10. See also Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain 850-1520 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 20. Dyer takes up the theme of dispersed settlements and marginal land throughout his Everyday Life in Medieval England (London: The Hambledon Press, 1994). Our thanks to our colleague and project collaborator, Christopher Whittick, Senior Archivist at The Keep, for his insights on early settlements in the area and extant medieval documents from the Herstmonceux manor.
22. William Camden, Britain, or, a Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland. http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/text/contents_page.jsp?t_id=Camden (Accessed 15 April 2015). See section “Berkshire, Surrey and Sussex” part 13. Venables also states that the earliest extant use of the name in the records is that of “Idonea de Herst, probably the widow of one of the owners of the manor.” Venables places her sometime between 1176 and 1199, Castle of Herstmonceux, pp. 10–11.
23. Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 11, writing in the nineteenth century, says the reason for this addition is unclear, despite the fact that Camden, writing in the sixteenth, claimed Monceux must have been the place of Waleran’s birth. Venables disagrees, noting that the Monceux were a prominent Norman family originally from the area around Bayeux.
24. Camden ibid. The license to crenellate, which gave royal assent to Roger Fiennes to construct Herstmonceux Castle, is clearly only dated 1441. So Camden is unreliable when he places its construction in the first year of Henry VI’s reign, i.e., 1422; his text should be amended to reflect that it was actually in the nineteenth year.
25. “John de Monceux died without issue, and his sister, Maud, who inherited his estate, carried them into the noble family of Fiennes, on her marriage with Sir John de Fiennes about the middle of Edward the Second’s reign.” Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 16.
26. “Prince Edward and his cousin Henry took the cross, and set out for the Holy Land, accompanied by nearly one hundred and fifty English lords and knights. Among them were Sir William de Fienes and his brother Sir Giles. They probably left Palestine with Edward in the year 1273, and returned to England.” Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 26.
27. Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 29.
28. James Fiennes represents a rare example of political advancement attained solely through royal patronage, partly due to the introduction of his more influential older brother. See the discussion in John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 175–6. He especially benefitted from Henry VI’s generosity after 1436, despite being widely unpopular. Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422-1461 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 330–2.
29. Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 29. For a brief discussion of the Fiennes’ growing influence, see Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI, pp. 339–40.
30. 20 April, 8th year of the reign of Henry VI.
31. 28 May, 10th year of Henry VI. Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 31 incorrectly dates this deed to 1409 rather than 1432.
32. We provide the English translation available in William Henry Blaauw, “Royal Licenses to Fortify Towns and Houses in Sussex,” Sussex Archaeological Collections 13 (1861), p. 115.
33. The National Archives C53/87.
34. Meaning “ditch, trench, canal, moat, or dyke, embankment or rampart.” William Z. MacDonald, “At the Crossroads of Culture, Economy and Climate: Herstmonceux Park in the Late Middle Ages” (University of Waterloo: MA Major Research Paper, 2013), p. 98.
35. This is Humphrey Gloucester, 1st Duke of Gloucester, 1st Earl of Pembroke, (3 October 1390 to 23 February 1447). Humphrey was youngest son of Henry IV and is sometimes called simply Humphrey Plantagenet.
36. This is Humphrey Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham (1402–60), grandson of King Edward III.
37. Possibly Ralph de Cromwell, 3rd Baron Cromwell (c. 1393–456), who fought with Henry V at Agincourt, and who received one of four places for knights on the council for the Governance of England during the minority of Henry VI. Ralph was Treasurer of England between 1433 and 1443.
38. This is William Botiller or Boteler (c. 1380–455), Baron Sudeley (c. 1394–473), soldier and administrator. He was the youngest surviving son of Thomas Boteler of Sudeley, Gloucestershire, and he became chamber knight of the king and chief butler of the royal household.
39. William Lyndwood – English Bishop of St. David’s, most notable for the publication of the Provinciale.
40. The 1361 inquisition post-mortem for William de Fienes describes Herstmonceux as having a capital messuage with garden adjoining, with 350 acres of arable land lying in marsh worth 9d. per year; 199 acres of arable land worth 4d.per year when sown and 3d.when used for pasturage; ten acres of often-flooded meadow; and some other areas of overgrown arable and bush. The rents from free tenants and nativi totaled £17. 6s.2d.and the labour of the bondmen was worth 58s.TNA: C135/151/14, as outlined in Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, 27. Contemporary manorial records from Herstmonceux record a flock of 200 sheep belonging to tenants. Mark Francis Gardiner, “Medieval Settlement and Society in the Eastern Sussex Weald before 1420” (PhD diss., University College London, 1995), p. 118.
41. Mileson, Parks in Medieval England, p. 8.
42. (… Apud Hers tunc nocte hospitatus ubi, dum exercitus venationi et destruction parci …) MS. Chron. in Bibl. Bodl; Lower’s Chronicle of Battel Abbey, p. 201 as cited in Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 14.
43. Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 26.
44. Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 26.
45. Venables, Castle of Herstmonceux, p. 30.
46. H.H. Lamb, “The Early Medieval Warm Epoch and Its Sequel,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 1 (1965), pp. 13–37. An important revision of Lamb’s English data appears in Astrid Ogilvie and Graham Farmer, “Documenting the Medieval Climate,” in Michael Hulm and Elaine Barrow, eds., Climates of the British Isles: Past, Present, Future (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 112–33. The authors praise Lamb (and his predecessor Charles Britton, on whose work he drew) but note that their work occurred “before the need for careful historical analysis was fully realized [although] indeed it was work initiated by Lamb in the Climatic Research Unit that led to this realization.” Ogilvie and Farmer, p. 113. Ogilvie and Farmer, thus, revisit the sources used by Lamb and test their reliability as potential examples of proxy data. They omit derivative textual sources (those based on earlier texts) and those not based on contemporary knowledge and they subject their sources to a rigorous methodology. Having discarded unreliable data, they extract weather events from England between 1200 and 1439. They conclude that,
… the century from 1260 to 1360, based on our improved historical dataset, appears to have been one of relatively cold winters in England. Lamb’s discussion of a ‘Medieval Warm Period’ is not supported by the documentary data, neither his nor ours. This is not necessarily a contradiction because his basis for a ‘Medieval Warm Period,’ is largely biological and phenological. Nevertheless, if such a ‘Medieval Warm Period’ did exist, it was clearly less well-defined and climatologically more complex than has been popularly believed.
S. Stine coined the current preferred term, “Medieval Climatic Anomaly.” See S. Stine, “Extreme and Persistent Drought in California and Patagonia during Mediaeval Time,” Nature 369 (1994), pp. 546–9.
47. Rudolf Brázdil, C. Pfister, H. Wanner, H. Von Storch and J. Luterbacher, “Historical Climatology in Europe – The State of the Art,” Climatic Change 70 (2005), pp. 388–96; M.E. Mann, Z. Zhang, S. Rutherford, R.S. Bradley, M.K. Hughes, D. Shindell, C. Ammann, G. Faluvegi and F. Ni, “Global Signatures and Dynamical Origins of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Climate Anomaly,” Science 326 (2009), pp. 1256–60; J. Guiot, C. Corona and ESCARSAL members, “Growing Season Temperatures in Europe and Climate Forcings over the Past 1400 Years,” PLoS One 5 (2010), pp. 1–15; F.C. Ljungqvist, “A New Reconstruction of Temperature Variability in the Extra-Tropical Northern Hemisphere during the Last Two Millennia,” Geografiska Annaler 92 (2010), pp. 339–51; Ulf Büntgen, W. Tegel, K. Nicolussi, M. McCormick, D. Frank, V. Trouet, J.O. Kaplan, F. Herzig, K.U. Heussner, H. Wanner and J. Luterbacher, “2500 Years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility,” Science 331 (2011), pp. 578–82; N.E. Graham, C.M. Ammann, D. Fleitmann, K.M. Cobb and J. Luterbacher, “Support for Global Climate Reorganization during the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’,” Climate Dynamics 37 (2011), pp. 1217–45.
48. Büntgen et al., “2500 Years of European Climate,” p. 579; U. Büntgen, R. Brázdil, K.U. Heussner, J. Hofmann, R. Kontic, T. Kyncl, C. Pfister, K. Chromá and W. Tegel, “Combined Dendro-Documentary Evidence of Central European Hydroclimatic Springtime Extremes over the Last Millennium,” Quaternary Science Reviews 30 (2011), pp. 3947–59.
49. R.J. Cooper, T.M. Melvin, I. Tyers, R.J. Wilson and K.R. Briffa, “A Tree-Ring Reconstruction of East Anglian (UK) Hydroclimate Variability over the Last Millennium,” Climate Dynamics 40 (2013), pp. 1019–39; R. Wilson, D. Miles, N.J. Loader, T. Melvin, L. Cunningham, R. Cooper and K. Briffa, “A Millennial Long March-July Precipitation Reconstruction for Southern-Central England,” Climate Dynamics 40 (2013), pp. 997–1017. A recent dendroclimatological study using trees from the Swiss Alps identifies a warm/wet MCA spanning 900–1300, though it too highlights the thirteenth century as particularly wet: A. Kress, S. Hangartner, H. Bugmann, U. Büntgen, D.C. Frank, M. Leuenberger, R.T. Siegwolf and M. Saurer, “Swiss Tree Rings Reveal Warm and Wet Summers during Medieval Times,” Geophysical Research Letters 41 (2014), pp. 1732–7.
50. The south-central English dendro-based precipitation proxy reveals a dry LIA, like other natural proxies, though the East Anglian trees depict long periods in the LIA of above average wetness, as early as c. 1350–450 following a dry early 1300s not registered in the south-central reconstruction, underscoring regional moisture variation within the LIA and the need for a similar southeastern proxy. Wilson et al., “Millennial Long March-July Precipitation Reconstruction,” p. 1012; Cooper et al., “A Tree-Ring Reconstruction,” pp. 1031–4.
51. H. Lamb, Climate: Present, Past and Future, Volume 2 (London: Methuen, 1977), pp. 119–28; Mark Bailey, “Per impetum maris: Natural Disaster and Economic Decline in Eastern England, 1275-1350,” in Bruce M.S. Campbell, ed., Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 188–91; James A. Galloway, “Coastal Flooding and Socioeconomic Change in Eastern England in the Later Middle Ages,” Environment and History 19 (2013), pp. 173–207; Tim Soens, “Flood Security in the Medieval and Early Modern North Sea Area: A Question of Entitlement?” Environment and History 19 (2013), pp. 209–32.
52. Bailey, “Per impetum maris,” p. 189; Jan Z. Titow, “The Evidence of Weather in the Account Rolls of the Bishopric of Winchester, 1209-1350,” Economic History Review 12 (1959–60), p. 360. Inundations are described mostly in generic terms and not necessarily for posterity. Indeed, they served annalists and chroniclers a variety of more immediate purposes, as exampla and portenta for instance. Michael Prestwich, “The ‘Wonderful Life’ of the Thirteenth Century,” in Michael Prestwich, Richard Britnell and Robin Frame, eds., Thirteenth Century England VII: Proceedings of the Durham Conference 1997 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1999), pp. 162–3. H.E. Hallam highlights the unreliability of narrative evidence for weather between 1250 and 1350 in particular: “The Climate of Eastern England, 1250-1350,” Agricultural History Review 32 (1984), pp. 124–32.
53. James A. Galloway, idem, “Storm Flooding, Coastal Defence and Land Use around the Thames Estuary and Tidal River, c.1250-1450,” Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009), pp. 171–88; idem, “Storms, Economics and Environmental Change in an English Coastal Wetland: The Thames Estuary, c.1250-1550,” in E. Thoen, ed., Landscapes or Seascapes? The History of the Coastal Environment in the North Sea Area Reconsidered (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 379–96; idem, “Coastal Flooding and Socioeconomic Change,” pp. 173–207; Peter F. Brandon, “Late-Medieval Weather in Sussex and its Agricultural Significance,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 54 (1971), pp. 1–17; idem, “Demesne Arable Farming in Coastal Sussex during the Later Middle Ages,” Agricultural History Review 19 (1971), pp. 113–34; idem, “Cereal Yields on the Sussex Estates of Battle Abbey during the Later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review 25 (1972), pp. 403–20.
54. Brandon, “Late-Medieval Weather in Sussex,” 1–2.
55. On the development of sea defenses at Pevensey in the eleventh- and twelfth-century see A.J.F. Dulley, “The Level and Port of Pevensey in the Middle Ages,” Sussex Archaeological Collections 104 (1966), pp. 26–45.
56. L.F. Salzmann, “The Inning of Pevensey Levels,” Sussex Archaeological Collections 53 (1910), pp. 32–60. For a good overview of the historical changes to the Pevensey region over time, and its gradual conversion from lagoon, in Roman times, to arable farmland in the late Middle Ages, consult A. Ballard, “The Sussex Coast Line,” Sussex Archaeological Collections 53 (1910), pp. 5–25.
57. Alan R.H. Baker, “Evidence in the Nonarum Inquisitiones of Contracting Arable Lands in England during the Early Fourteenth Century,” Economic History Review 19 (1966), p. 523.
58. Mavis Mate, “Kent and Sussex” in Edward Miller, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales Volume III (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 125–7.
59. Peter Brandon and Brian Short, The South East from AD 1000 (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 103–4.
60. Cited in n. 52 above.
61. See an overview of this perspective and some of its potential pitfalls in Mileson, Parks in Medieval England, pp. 6–7. The park at Herstmonceux in 1570, for example, contained a herd of 200 deer (sixty with antler) within a three-mile area, most of which was “well set with great timber trees.” There were also “four fair ponds well replenished with Carp, Tenche, &c.,” a heronry, and a “fair warren of Conies.” Burrell MSS, as quoted in J.D. Parry, An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Coast of Sussex (London: Longman & Co., 1833), pp. 247–8.
62. Matthew Johnson, Behind the Castle Gate: From Medieval to Renaissance (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 13. Another important study of castles is Robert Liddiard, Castles in Context: Power, Symbolism and Landscape, 1066-1550 (Macclesfield, UK: Windgather Press, 2005).
63. R.H. Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050-1530: Economy and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 41. Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages.
64. I.M.W. Harvey, “Poaching and Sedition in Fifteenth-Century England,” pp. 169–82 in Ralph Evans, ed., Lordship and Learning: Studies in memory of Trevor Aston (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2004), p. 176–9. Some examples he mentions are an attack on the Duke of Buckingham’s park at Penshurst in Kent (22 October 1450) and the Earl of Arundel’s fishpond at Littleworth in Sussex (March 1457).
65. For an excellent discussion of the significance of the Robin Hood folktales in late medieval English society, see Richard Almond and A.J. Pollard, “The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-Century England,” Past & Present 170 (February 2001), pp. 52–77.
66. Some of the rebels during Wat Tyler’s rebellion symbolically carried a rabbit tied to a lance as a standard. One of his major demands of Richard II was that “All warrens, as well in fisheries as in parks and woods, should be commen to all.” Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337 – 1396, ed. and trans., G.H. Martin, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
In many cases, these revolts brought attention to enclosure issues, but did little to resolve them directly. Emma Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain Since 1066 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 47. Similar issues arose on the continent during the Peasants’ War of 1524/1525. Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 17.
67. In addition to hounds, it also prohibited the use of ferrets or snares. Richard Almond, Medieval Hunting (Cheltenham, UK: The History Press, 2011), pp. 94–5, 139.
68. The lower estimate comes from Leonard Cantor, “Forests, Chases, Parks, and Warrens,” in Leonard Cantor, ed., The English Medieval Landsape (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 81. According to Oliver Rackham, that number may have been much higher. Rackham, The History of the Countryside, p. 123.
69. See a discussion of the benefits and problems of using manorial court rolls as sources to encounter lord-tenant relationships, in Ralph Evans, “Whose was the Manorial Court?” pp. 155–68 in Evans, ed., Lordship and Learning.
70. The study of deer parks remains an under-developed field. Some detailed studies of specific parks exist, and there now seems to be a trend towards more general surveys. The best of these general surveys, and the most comprehensive, is S.A. Mileson’s Parks in Medieval England, but see also Liddiard, ed., The Medieval Park: New Perspectives. Mileson divides his deer park study into four parts, or purposes: hunting, economy, landscaping, and status. The historiography suggests that these four distinctions undoubtedly encouraged the elaboration and protection of parks, albeit for different reasons. There may have been other factors at work, however, which influenced cooperative land-use decisions by the lord and peasants. Regardless, deer park analyses, whether specific or general, tend to lack a clear environmental perspective, although, conceptual environmental histories of land use can serve to fill in the gaps. See, for example, S.W. Green, “The Agricultural Colonization of Temperate Forest Habitats: An Ecological Model,” pp. 69–103 in W.W. Savage, Jr. and S. Thompson, eds., The Frontier: Comparative Studies, vol. II (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979); J. Pretty, “Sustainable Agriculture in the Middle Ages on the English Manor,” Agricultural History Review 38 (1990), pp. 1–19; John Howe and Michael Wolfe, eds., Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Place in Western Europe (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002).
71. Stephen Rippon addresses the issue of resilience in regards to British wetlands in this period in particular in his works. See, for example, “Adaptation to a Changing Environment: The Response of Marshland Communities to the Late Medieval ‘Crisis’,” Journal of Wetland Archaeology 1 (2001), pp. 15–39.
72. Salzmann, “The Inning of the Pevensey Levels.”