ABSTRACT
The formal legal history of licensed deer parks only provides limited information on their actual existence. Jane Croom, the historian of medieval deer parks in Warwickshire, has summarised the position very succinctly for the period 1100-1530:
“The Patent and Charter Rolls record royal licences to create parks, but only seven [out of a total of seventy-nine] were issued for Warwickshire, so for the majority of parks the actual date of emparking is not known, and we have only the date of the earliest reference . . . However, it seems unlikely that it was always necessary to obtain a royal licence to empark. Only 290 licences are known for the whole of England ...” 1
The first mention of a park at Charlecote was in 1486, when Rous wrote his account of the enclosure and depopulation of villages in War wickshire; he stated that almost all of Charlecote was emparked and that the population had fallen from forty-two people in the seventh year of the reign of Edward I to seven people in I486.2 In 1510 a Sir Thomas Lucy (Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas Lucy’s grandfather) owned “20 acres of wood, one park, several fisheries in the water of the Avon . . . in the Manor of Charlecote.”3 In the same year he was granted, as one of the King’s sewers, the keepership of Fulbrook Park, and fifteen years aftwerwards in 1525 there is record of his ownership of “unus parcus” .4 Given his ownership of a park in Charlecote in 1510, this almost certainly again refers to Charlecote, and in June of 1525 his steward, Richard Cocks, wrote from Charlecote to Lucy’s wife in London, sending her venison, adding that a “buck killed for Master Nethermill had an ill liver” and he “doubted of more” .5 In 1557, Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas Lucy acquired the manors of Bishop’s Hampton and Hatton, which included what had previously in 1549 been known as Hampton Park.6 In 1594, legal note was made of the existence of a warren at Charlecote 7, whereas
in 1618 Sir Thomas Lucy’s grandson obtained a patent to impale on his estates, “ the parcum vocatum Charlecote Park in Comitatu Warwicensi” and “the parcum vocatum Sutton Park in Comitatu Wigorniensi”8, the latter being a deer park in Worcestershire that was inherited by Lucy through marriage during the middle of the sixteenth century.
