Gender, Space and Status in the Sixteenth-Century English Deer Park: with reference to the Framlingham Park Game Roll (1515-19) and George Penruddock's Ranger's Book (1572-5)

Sixteenth-century deer parks, sitting awkwardly between their medieval predecessors and the designed country house landscapes of the 1700s, have rarely received singular attention. This paper attempts to leap the traditional medieval/early modern boundary by exploring gendered uses of space in the increasingly subdivided parks of the 1500s. It does so with reference to the Framlingham Park Game Roll (1515–19) and George Penruddock’s Ranger’s Book (1572–5), which list numbers of deer killed annually in Framlingham Park (Suffolk) and Clarendon Park (Wiltshire), alongside the names of hunters and, often, the location of the kill. Special attention is paid to the gender and status of those who hunted, given recent suggestions that the enclosed and relatively private terrain of parks led to their association with women – a gendering of space which may have gained impetus with the increasing internal divisions in parks, such as paddocks and deer courses. The paper concludes that neither source indicates a landscape dominated by women, so that in this case evidence for such claims is inconclusive. However, women, parks and the increasingly ‘feminised’ forms of hunting that took place within them were firmly linked in the sixteenth-century mindset, and this may have popularised masculine risk-taking, manifested in increased levels of poaching and attempts to seek out less obviously enclosed areas. Certainly both sources frequently show men occupying the parks’ peripheries, either by choice of terrain, by virtue of their status and/ or the illicit nature of their hunting