Tudor & Early Stuart Parks of Hertfordshire

by Anne Rowe

University of Hertfordshire Press Mar 2019

£18.99 pp304 pb isbn 9781912260119 Reviewed by Paul Stamper amper

This continues Rowe’s 2009 volume on Hertfordshire’s medieval parks, maintaining its excellence. Based on extensive documentary research, each of the 50-odd gazetteer entries (including important royal parks like T Theobolds) deals with ownership, m management, landscape and bo boundaries. There’s less on fieldwork rk an and survival, but this can follow. Of mo most general interest is the int introductory overview, as much less has been written on Tudor and Stuart t par parks than their medieval predecessors rs and landscaped successors. What was hun hunted, and how, varied widely, but almo almost always there was spectacle, enjoy enjoyed from grandstands-comebanq banqueting houses. Parks were econo economic resources too, with managed wood woodland, grazing, fishponds and warren warrens, although here too there could be di display. That was increasingly the

case as parks were laid out around houses rather than lying distant from them. Remarkable artifical features include an ornamental river dug in Theobolds park in 1602, designed for r splashing p ng deer and feeding herons.

• Anne Rowe’sMedieval Rowe’s Medieval Parks of Hertfordshire is now in paperba paperback k (Mar ( M 2019, isbn 978192260102)

Paul Stamper runs his own consultancy, Paul Stamper Heritage

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