MacDonald: At the Crossroads of Culture, Economy and Climate: Herstmonceux Park in the Late Middle Ages
This major research paper takes an interdisciplinary approach, using archival records, paleoclimatalogical studies, chorographical accounts, and historical maps to take up the question of medieval land-use practices and climate awareness. Herstmonceux lay on the northern edge of the Pevensey Levels, East Sussex, a low-lying coastal marsh that was subject to constant inundation and flooding from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. Sussex landowners, and officials reclaimed marshland to support local agriculture, and industry.
Sir Roger Fiennes constructed Herstmonceux Castle, and expanded the estate’s existing deer park in 1441 during a time of extreme weather events, agricultural strife, and reduced large-scale construction projects. The royal license to expand the park reveals that Sir Roger intended to stock the park with deer, at the expense of economic and agricultural revenue production. Along with the existing corpus of modern deer park studies and environmental scholarship, a nuanced interpretation of the medieval deer park appears, in which the local environment, and individual landowner’s wealth dictated the character of the park. The expansion of Herstmonceux Park, and the concurrent efforts to combat costal inundation and flooding illustrates medieval environmental awareness, and the importance of the deer parks as a late-medieval social marker.
