Dartmoors Alluring Uplands

Product Description

This book provides a new perspective on a striking & famous feature of the English landscape Dartmoor. In the middle ages intensive practical use was made from 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 & 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 & Dartmoor farmers provided a service of keeping the cattle gaining substantial revenues from the cattle owners who were pleased to pay for the care & feed of their animals. By contrast in the early middle ages Harold Foxs evidence shows that the lowlanders migrated with their cattle & lived on the moors in the summer. This book describes for the first time the social organisation & 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 countys history. Written with elegance & authority the book distills a lifetimes work in original medieval records & draws together evidence from a remarkable variety of sources. Foxs colleagues at Leicesters Centre for English Local History: Matthew Tompkins & Christopher Dyer have seen the book through to publication.