For those scholars interested in the history of deer parks, Anne Rowe’s work will already be well known, with her 2009 volume on Hertfordshire’s medieval parks one of the most detailed county-based surveys carried out to date. This new book is the natural successor to this earlier work and examines the county’s deer parks from the end of the fifteenth century to the Civil War. The format remains broadly similar with parts one and two comprising discussions of familiar themes in parkland studies, such as numbers, distribution, ownership management trends and poaching, with part three a gazetteer, which takes the form of a case study of each park detailing its location, origins and development. Just a glance at the references and illustrations gives a sense of the sheer quantity of archival work that underpins the whole study, which a close reading of the text shows to be backed up with a systematic programme of field surveys of park remains. The hunting down (no pun intended) and synthesis of this huge quantity of otherwise disparate and fragmented source material is hugely impressive and gives the narrative its authoritative edge. The result is not only a thorough treatment of Hertfordshire’s parks in the Tudor and Stuart periods, but a study whose central conclusions are relevant far beyond the county boundary.

For this reviewer two points, among many, stand out. First, it shows fluctuations in the numbers of parks in existence at any one time, in a level of detail that has not been achieved before for any county. While the late sixteenth century has traditionally been characterised as a period of declining numbers, in Hertfordshire the late sixteenth century actually witnessed an increase in the number of parks before a slight fall in the early seventeenth. On the eve of the Civil War, the county had approximately the same number of parks as it had at the end of the Middle Ages. Secondly, there is little evidence presented here for a decisive turn in how parks were either used or managed in the decades after 1500; rather, the author stresses the continued use of parks for a range of hunting practices and a continuation of mixed regimes of woodland, coppice and grazing. Such a conclusion implies that whatever the precise changes taking place within the pale in this period, the deer park of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was not so much of a different beast to its medieval ancestor.

The county case study approach to the investigation of parks was pioneered by Leonard Cantor in the 1970s, but has been taken to a new level here by the author’s thorough and meticulous approach to the evidence. When this book is placed alongside its companion, Hertfordshire must now surely rank as the most-studied English county as far as deer parks are concerned. Rowe’s achievement has been to provide a model of how this kind of work should be undertaken and it sets a standard for others to follow.