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

Fox, Harold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0859898652 ISBN 13: 9780859898652

Publisher: University of Exeter Press, 2012

Synopsis

A striking and famous feature of the English landscape, Dartmoor (in the southwest of the country) is a beautiful place, with a sense of wildness and mystery. But 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.  

This book describes, for the first time, the social organization and farming practices associated with that annual transfer of livestock. It presents evidence for a previously unsuspected Anglo-Saxon period of transhumance, by which the cattle's lowland owners moved with their animals and lived temporarily on the moor every summer.

About this title

About the Author:

Harold Fox (1945–2007) was professor of social and landscape history at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester; and had been president of the Medieval Settlement Research Group; chairman of the Society for Landscape Studies; and president of the Devon History Society. Christopher Dyer is emeritus professor at the Centre for English Local History at University of Leicester, where Matthew Tompkins is Honorary Visiting Fellow.

Review:

"His affection for its community meant he wrote more for pragmatic Devonshire people and practical historians than for outsiders with romanticised views of Dartmoor.            He wished to encourage and support local farmers by preparing an authoritative account of their history, regarding them as the wisest of Dartmoor’s ecologists, defending customs and grazings developed over many generations. The Moor, marginal to many, is in Fox’s hands in Devon’s enormous pool of available common pasture. . . . Harold Fox, in his final work, encourages all with an interest in our historic landscape to acknowledge the possibility that their own local patterns, colours and character were shaped by accommodation and servicing of seasonal movements of people and livestock..."   (Landscape History)

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0859898652
• ISBN 13: 9780859898652
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320
• Editor: Tompkins Matthew, Dyer Christopher