To a child of three, I suppose, there is nothing so very extraordinary about a rhinoceros strolling about in Oxfordshire; it’s just another fact to take in, interesting, but perhaps marginally less so than a ride on a miniature train, or the prospect of an ice cream.

I thought about this when introducing my granddaughter to the rhinos at the Cotswold Wild Life Park, near Burford — which I think is really just as interesting for grown-ups as it is for children.

But what is extraordinary — at any rate to me — is that children might have seen exotic animals from faraway places walking about in Oxfordshire — in Woodstock to be precise — almost 900 years ago.

According to William of Malmesbury (c1080-c1143), writing in his Chronicles, King Henry I “was extremely fond of the wonders of distant countries, begging with great delight from foreign kings, lions, leopards, lynxes, or camels, animals which England does not produce. He had placed there also a creature called a porcupine, sent to him by William of Montpelier”.

The historian — who, incidentally, had a Norman father and an English mother — continued: “He had a park, called Woodstock, in which he used to foster his favourites of this kind. He had placed there also a creature called a porcupine, sent to him by William of Montpelier.”

I gather this information from a lovely new book called Woodstock and The Royal Park: Nine hundred years of history (Chris Andrews Publications Ltd, with contributions from John Banbury, Robert Edwards, Elizabeth Poskitt, Tim Nutt, and Peter Jay), which has been produced to mark the 900th anniversary of the year — 1110 — in which the Royal Park of Woodstock was enclosed within a wall.

Henry I’s grandson, Henry II, Count of Anjou and son of the Empress Matilda, ascended the English throne in 1154 under the terms of the Treaty of Wallingford, signed the previous year, which made him heir to King Stephen — and ended the civil war between Stephen and Matilda.

He immediately set about building a stone palace at Woodstock to replace the wooden one of his grandfather. It stood across the lake — created in the 18th century by damming the River Glyme — from the present Blenheim Palace in a place now marked by a stone block that was put there in 1961. Whether he kept the menagerie is not certain — though his son Richard I is recorded as owning a crocodile. But what is known is that foreign animals were living in the park in early medieval times until — I learn from the book — they were transferred to the Tower of London in 1252.

A menagerie then remained at the Tower until 1835 when the animals were moved to Regent’s Park to form the basis of London Zoo. The sight of the animals on the road to London must have been a source of wonder to villeins peering out of hovels; and indeed their presence at the Tower must have added a surreal quality to the last days of those imprisoned there and awaiting execution.

Little wonder, though, that the Norman kings were able to gather up wild beasts from all over the known world. After all, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitane (both buried in Normandy) between them ruled lands which stretched from Hadrian’s Wall in the north to the Pyrenees in the south.

Their Norman relatives were kings of Sicily from where they made sorties across the Mediterranean to Tunisia — where lions roamed until the 19th century.

As for the Cotswold Wildlife Park, it was opened it to the public in 1970 by owner John Heyworth, exhibiting 230 creatures from 40 different species. To me, Bradwell Grove, the Georgian Gothic revival house at the centre of the park, dating from 1804 and designed by William Atkinson, forms a link to the earlier menagerie at Woodstock Palace — which I fondly believe may have been at least partly built in the Gothic style.

And as for exotic beasts roaming the Cotswolds, I well remember seeing a giraffe, part of Chipperfield’s Circus, chewing the cud near Chipping Norton. Funny old world.