The W G Hoskins Lecture 2008

The nineteenth Hoskins lecture presented by Dr. Trevor Rowley.

Trevor Rowley, now Emeritus Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford, had been a post-graduate student of W.G. Hoskins in Oxford, and he told a good story of W.G. H. coming face to face with the hunt as it careered across the bottom of his garden in Steeple Barton. We gathered he had not been pleased.

Hunting was the main focus of Dr. Rowley‟s lecture, though having recently published a book on modern landscapes (Twentieth Century Landscapes), he mentioned in passing some obvious sporting creations, still in use, such as Newmarket, Henley-on-Thames and Old Trafford in Manchester, as well the approximately 2000 golf-courses now in Great Britain.

Hunting has a long history, and though our early forebears hunted in order to eat, hunting has also been a sport for a very long time. Dr. Rowley showed a carved comb from Much Wenlock with on one side a game of football, and on the other a hunting scene, and then a Roman floor from Sicily of the 2nd century AD also showing huntsmen. The Bayeux tapestry has Harold riding to hunt with hawk on wrist and dogs at heel, and the Domesday Book includes enclosures called ‘hays’, which might be deer enclosures. The Normans introduced the Forest Law into areas set aside for hunting, the Royal Forests, where the deer could only be taken by the king, but Trevor Rowley pointed out that ‘Forests’ leave few archaeological relics, and the landscape is little altered by this usage.

The idea of a ‘park’, an enclosure where special animals were kept, developed from the 12th century onwards, and became the must-have accessory for anyone with aspirations. At first attached to grand manorial establishments, as time went on even small nunneries and minor gentry had parks, many quite small in extent: at their peak it is thought there were about 3500 in England, mainly concentrated in the Midlands and the South. Many were far too small to hunt in, and there was an illustration from a French MS showing deer being caught in nets: these parks were in fact outdoor larders.

Many of the larger parks also had other and varied uses: there are early estate maps showing parks divided up into compartments with coppicing at various stages. Deer would have to be kept out of the young coppices until the trees were sufficiently grown. Woodward’s map of parks in Oxfordshire showed them to be concentrated in the Chiltern area and in Wychwood: there is a tendency for early parks to be in woody country. The largest number of Oxfordshire‟s parks was created in the 1200s.

Woodstock Park, like many others, was later incorporated into a landscape park for a grand house, and some reminders of a previous existence may survive: Moccas Park, for instance, in Herefordshire, has a ditch and park pale remaining. Linear earthworks such as these are tenacious, whereas many of the buildings of a park were ephemeral, like wooden kennels.

Deer were also ‘coursed’: Windsor Little Park has a map showing ‘The Course’, where deer were run down by hounds, the spectators laying bets on the outcome. But in the 17th century many places were being disemparked, and towards the end of the century fox-hunts were beginning to appear. The great landowners divided up the country between them, and each pack had a specific territory. Many packs were attached to great houses, with many private packs. The newly enclosed landscape which appeared after Parliamentary Enclosure was suitable for this kind of hunting, and could be controlled and enhanced with the deliberate planting of fox coverts, woodlands, hunt-jumps and so on.

Trevor Rowley‟s second big sport was football and its development, but in passing he mentioned the development of shooting as a gentry sport in the 18th century, the proliferation of race-courses in the 17th and 18th centuries, the influence of ‘horsiculture’ in the 20th century which created small fields for purchase by non-farming people, and the official ban in 1835 of bear-baiting and cock-fighting.

Football had originally happened anywhere, but many traditional football matches were very territorial, with two adjacent villages fighting it out, and the whole male community involved: Dr. Rowley cited Hallaton v. Medbourne in Leicestershire, where ‘uppies’ fought ‘downies’ on Easter Monday. Football became more institutionalized and more controlled in the second half of the 19th century. Was this connected with industrialisation? Many early football grounds began as the grounds of ‘works teams’ – such as Woolwich Arsenal. (One of the lectures most surprising facts was that the Old Etonians won the FA cup three times in the 1880s – unthinkable today.)

The first specially designed football stadiums, for example Highbury and White Hart Lane, Trevor Rowley described as an ‘Engineering Archive’. Many of these were built in open country (the move to ‘exurbia’), as was the first Wembley stadium, which became the home of English football in 1923. It was only after the stadium was used for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 (which welcomed 27 million visitors in 2 years) that housing developments grew up round it.

The new 2000 Wembley stadium ended a most entertaining journey around new and old sporting traditions and their settings.

From an original report by Deborah Hayter.