When the intrepid antiquarian John Leland travelled across Yorkshire around 1540, on leaving the archbishop's ‘very fair castel’ at Cawood, he described the route to Sherburn in Elmet as ‘wel woodid, and almost stil riding by a riveret caullid Bishop's water’, and passing ‘by a parke (as I thinke) of the bishops of Yorke’. The maps of Christopher Saxton of 1577 (Figure 9.1) and John Speed of 1611 show three enclosed parks in the area that Leland described, represented by circular fenced enclosures, at ‘Rust park’ (Rest), where the archbishops had created another residence, at Scalm park, and at Thorpe (which had belonged to Selby Abbey), among a wooded area named ‘The owt wood’. A man-made watercourse running from Sherburn to Cawood is also clearly shown on the two maps, which Leland called ‘Bishop's water’ and is known today as Bishop Dyke. The site of the archbishops’ former parks, now Bishop Wood, although largely replanted, still forms the largest area of woodland in the Vale of York, and this study examines what the digitised and indexed archbishops’ registers can reveal about this and the other medieval parks of the archbishops of York.

Administrative registers might seem unlikely and unpromising sources in which to discover details about the parks of the archbishop, but they offer important new insights into these recreational and economic assets, which are otherwise little documented. The registers of the archbishops offer the opportunity to understand more about the distribution, use and management of the medieval parks and associated woodland during the high and late Middle Ages. Entries in the registers include references to hunting, gifts from parks and forests, income generated, the appointment of foresters and parkers and the punishment of poachers, which can be examined alongside historic maps and landscape evidence to identify these parks and understand their operation.

Historians, archaeologists and ecologists often take varying perspectives to interpreting medieval parks, depending in part on the types of evidence used. They have debated whether medieval parks functioned primarily for hunting and amenity purposes, as enclosed areas for keeping deer, or whether they were predominantly of value for grazing, timber and woodland produce. The most recent comprehensive study sees the persistent importance of the aristocratic hunting culture as the defining feature of medieval parks and argues that they were maintained predominantly for leisure rather than as economic assets.