Ewelme Park Introduction - parks in history

Little appears about Ewelme Park in books covering the village, the history of Oxfordshire, and the Chiltern Hills. Even those works specifically dealing with parks in history mention it only in passing. What references there are often appear to confuse it with the manor and its small adjoining park grounds in Ewelme village, although they are significantly separated geographically, and in many respects have their own, separate, histories. Even John Leland, in his Itinerary of the early 16th century, mentions only the park around the manor house.

My research was prompted by seeing the park outline depicted on John Speed’s map of Oxfordshire of 1605, and curiosity about the lack of published detail of what was evidently a sizeable park. I had spent my teenage years wandering for hours over farmland that, unknown to me then, had centuries ago lain within the park, and exploring hedgerows which, judging by the varieties of plants growing in them today, almost certainly formed part of the medieval woodland on it.

Parks were an important feature of the medieval countryside, although always the privilege of the wealthy. Many earlier parks had declined and disappeared by this time, but those created in this period were mainly larger than previous ones and often used poorer land on the fringes of manors and estates which was uneconomic to farm. Consequently they could be at some distance from their owner’s house. Following the medieval practice of multiple land use, they were not only for the maintenance and occasional hunting of deer to supply venison for feasts and gifts from the owner, but could supply other meat, timber and wood. The parkers usually worked from a lodge in the central part of the park with a view over the main laund (a compartmented area typically of grassland with pollard trees) from which the deer could be watched.

Construction of the enclosing park pale (also usually with a ditch and bank feature) and its subsequent maintenance was very labour intensive, and therefore costly. Parks were often considerably expanded from their original small area of demesne woodland over the years as their owner’s wealth increased. In around 1674, a legal suit referred to an alleged ancestral manorial right of the owners of the manor of Huntercombe to fell trees within ten feet of Ewelme Park pale, confirming the existence of a pale at least along that section of the Park adjoining Huntercombe.