Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I GREAT AND GOOD QUEEN
- 1 Matchmaker
- 2 Holy Orders
- 3 Position Wanted
- 4 Business Interests
- 5 Protector and Peacemaker
- 6 Money Matters
- 7 Belief and Benevolence
- 8 The Queen's Disport
- Part II POLITICAL QUEEN
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - The Queen's Disport
from Part I - GREAT AND GOOD QUEEN
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I GREAT AND GOOD QUEEN
- 1 Matchmaker
- 2 Holy Orders
- 3 Position Wanted
- 4 Business Interests
- 5 Protector and Peacemaker
- 6 Money Matters
- 7 Belief and Benevolence
- 8 The Queen's Disport
- Part II POLITICAL QUEEN
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
A number of Margaret's letters attest to her love of hunting. By the fifteenth century, the practice of hunting had become an elaborate ritual. No longer merely a source of food or sport, or even a means to acquire and maintain some of the skills required by warfare, it was a signifier of social status in and of itself. To be noble was to hunt.
In England, long before Margaret's time, the Norman and Angevin kings set aside vast areas of ‘forest’ (which, in fact, might not have comprised wooded land) in which the right to hunt large game was barred to all but themselves or those to whom they gave explicit permission. Over time, such permission was increasingly sought – usually for a hefty fee by those who could afford it – and private, territorially defined reserves were created, which proliferated by the fifteenth century. Such enclosed parks, themselves smaller-scale versions of the royal forests, were surrounded by a ditch and a complementary barricade such as a wall or hedge, and were mainly stocked with fallow deer. Parkers and keepers were employed to look after the game, to ensure that it thrived, and to protect it from illicit poaching by all outsiders. Thus, from their beginning, parks constituted status symbols that set their owners apart and marked them as persons of power and privilege. In 1390 the Game Law completed the physical privatization of hunting, setting a base income requirement for the right to hunt at all and effectively ending any public right to hunt on the remaining free chase (i.e., land that was not afforested or emparked). During this same period, hunting also became culturally privatized through the elaboration of terminology and ritual associated with it. The earliest English example of this codification is The Master of Gameby Edward, second duke of York, the grandson of Edward III. By the mid-fifteenth century, this process had reached its apex, and as the parks’ value for alternate uses such as livestock grazing or wood gathering diminished, making them more expensive to maintain, interest increasingly focused on their possession and on the park-based hunt as essential components of the noble lifestyle.
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- Information
- The Letters of Margaret of Anjou , pp. 158 - 170Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019