Table 1. Deer parks in Essex, 1867-1976. Parks marked (S) were recorded by
Shirley (1867). The numbers of deer in 1892 are from Whitaker (1892).
outbreak of the Second World War and the present owner, Mrs F. Spurrier,
informed me that her father had the deer killed in 1939. Hatfield Forest Park is
unusual in that it does not appear ever to have been a landscaped park
surrounding a mansion, although early maps (see Saxton, 1579) show it
surrounded by palings as are other parks. In fact, Rackham (1976) considers
that Hatfield still contains all the elements of a medieval Forest: deer, cattle,
coppice, pollards, scrub, timber trees, grassland and fen. Deer have been
associated with the area for centuries but it was not until the 1850s that it was
finally enclosed (Shorrocks, 1955) and preserved as a deer park. The red deer in
the park were killed in 1914-1918 during the First World War (Buxton, 1946)
but there is no record of the fate of the fallow. In Langleys Park, fallow deer
were killed on the instructions of the War Agricultural Executive Committee
when much of the park was ploughed up during the Second World War. The
owner, Mr John J. Tufnell, informs me that the whole herd was shot but ac-
cording to Whitehead (1950) some of the deer survived and 20 fallow deer were
present in 1950. By the early 1940s, the fences of Marks Hall park were in a
poor state of repair and deer escaped into the local woods, where none had been
previously. Other deer were shot by troops stationed at the adjacent aerodrome
during the Second World War (Beale, personal communication). The Thor-
9