ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role that possessing deer, and especially deer parks, played in and around the medieval diocese of Durham. In particular, it focuses on a trio of loosely related incidents in which parks and deer and hunting rights - and masculine egos - clashed between great men, whether bishop, prior, or knight. In 1291, within a year of Ranulph Neville snubbing the Prior of Durham over the gift of the stag at the shrine of St Cuthbert, Bek allowed the prior to expand his parks and conceded that the walls surrounding them 'be made so strong and high, that the beasts of the chase shall not be able to cross it from the bishop's forest'. The Episcopal island of Crayke was, therefore, surrounded by the hunting grounds of allied, competing forces, which would have seen the Bishop of Durham's rights to draw deer into his own park as a drain on their own resources.
