The phrase ‘chivalric landscape’ most readily evokes an imaginary literary setting from the milieu of medieval romance – the domain of the questing hero in which wild and wooded places inhabited by fantastic creatures contrast with the cultured courtly surroundings of the castle or palace. This chapter considers the growing contribution of landscape studies to our understanding of chivalry by exploring the reality of these sorts of settings on the ground. Drawing upon the evidence of archaeology, documents and the landscape itself, it focuses on the contrived environments of castles and palaces between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, mainly in medieval Britain but understood within its wider European context. Many different features within the medieval countryside could be imbued with chivalric meaning, some much more obviously than others, so the ‘chivalric landscape’ could embrace a multitude of sites, spaces and places, including hunting and pleasure grounds as well as venues for martial performance and action in the form of tournament sites and battlefields. This chapter considers these environments as backdrops for chivalric deeds and events but also in terms of how they were embedded within working landscapes and how they affected human behaviour. This last point is particularly crucial: elite landscapes were in one sense reflections of chivalric culture; but, equally, they were instrumental in its negotiation, development, perpetuation and emulation and need to be studied as such. The same is just as true of landscapes as it is of chivalric texts (see Bellis, this volume); they were not only mirrors to the medieval world but also active in shaping cultural outlooks.

Beyond the walls of the fortress or palace, carefully crafted landscapes incorporating spaces reserved for pleasure, leisure and love were theatres for the noble lifestyle in which chivalric imagery and allusions could play a major part. The most prominent of these were areas dedicated to hunting and sport, especially in the form of enclosed deer parks or open forests and chases, and, usually closer to the residence and sometimes contained within it, gardens. We should also not neglect the role of water in shaping many elite settings and in conditioning how people moved in and around them and experienced castles and great houses. For example, water–filled moats frequently dictated how a residence was approached, accessed and viewed, while artificial ponds sometimes flanked approach routes.