In 1236 the professional hunters May and Luvel were sent to take 50 does in
Havering Park and to salt the venison and transport it to Westminster, so that it
should be there on the Wednesday after St Hilary's day.
Forests probably originated as a utilitarian enterprise. The doe had been a
means of producing meat from poor agricultural land; but by this time she had
become a festive beast. Most of the king's deer were eaten at feasts at Christ-
mas, Shrove Tuesday, Easter, St Edward the Confessor's day, etc. Others
formed official gifts to prelates and statesmen or were given to the king's friends
for their weddings, graduations, pregnancies, consecrations etc.
Deer were ordered either from Havering Park or one of the outlying
Forests; or from the "Forest of Essex"; or specifically from the Forest of
Hainault alias Havering (Waltham Forest is rarely specified). I shall take the
south-western Forests together and assume that the Forest of Essex, otherwise
unspecified, refers to these Forests.
In the 56 years of his reign, Henry III ate 71 harts, 266 bucks, and 409 does
from the S.W. Essex Forests; 417 bucks, 763 does, and 12 wild sows from
Havering Park. The numbers taken varied widely from year to year (Fig. 8)
according to the king's fortunes and where he happened to be for his feasts.
More deer were taken (or the records were better kept) between 1234 and 1263
than at other times, and my further analysis is confined to that period.
Table 5 shows that the king ordered an average of 40 fallow and 4 red deer
annually from the Forests. Epping and Hainault were among the more im-
portant of the fifty or so venison-producing Forests. Together they account for
about a fifteenth of the annual production of fallow deer, comparable with the
Forests of Braydon (Wilts), Bere (Portchester, Hants), and Sherwood. But the
amount produced was small in relation to the area of land: Hatfield Forest, with
less than a tenth of the area, produced a quarter as much venison; while
Havering Park produced the the same venison on a tenth of the area, as well as
providing grazing for the king's cattle and grazing rents from local farmers (e.g.
in 1229).
It is surprising not to find more gifts of live deer for starting parks. Well
over 100 medieval parks are known in Essex (39) and 93 in Hertfordshire (32);
many of these began at about this time. In 1225 arrangements were made at
Havering "to make a certain breach in the park pale and ... to drive the beasts
from the Forest through that breach into the said park". In 1238* 80 does and
40 bucks were put into cages at Havering and shipped to Flanders, presumably
to start a Forest there.
There was then no close season for deer: males were taken from April to
September and females from October to March. The king's apparent
preference for does results from his tendency to visit this area in winter.
How many deer were there? Many poaching cases came before Forest
courts: stealing deer was an imprisonable offence, but the chance of conviction
was so remote as to be little deterrent. For Sherwood Forest these cases have
been analyzed (3). The eyre of 1287, for example, tried 209 "presentments of
venison" accumulated over the previous 23 years. Many cases involved several
animals, and since detection and prosecution are likely to have been very
31