Download Dartmoor's Alluring Uplands : Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages

Dartmoor's Alluring Uplands : Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages. Harold Fox

This book provides a new perspective on a striking and famous feature of the English landscape, Dartmoor. In the middle ages intensive practical use was made of its resources. Its extensive moorlands provided summer pasture for thousands of cattle from the Devon lowlands, which flowed in a seasonal tide, up in the spring and down in the autumn. How was the grazing organised when so many of the people who wished to use it were peasant farmers living many miles from the moor? In the later middle ages the Crown, manorial lords and Dartmoor farmers provided a service of keeping the cattle, gaining substantial revenues from the cattle owners who were pleased to pay for the care and feed of their animals. By contrast, in the early middle ages, Harold Fox's evidence shows that the lowlanders migrated with their cattle and lived on the moors in the summer. This book describes, for the first time, the social organisation and farming practices associated with this annual transfer of livestock. It presents evidence for a previously unsuspected Anglo-Saxon pattern of transhumance. Harold Fox died before completing the final stages of the book. Devonian by origin, he researched many aspects of the county's history. Written with elegance and authority, the book distills a lifetime's work in original medieval records and draws together evidence from a remarkable variety of sources. Fox's colleagues at Leicester's Centre for English Local History: Matthew Tompkins and Christopher Dyer have seen the book through to publication.

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