seTTing T he sCene: The naTure of naTure^13Roman empire, arriving in England by the third century. Remains have
been found in a number of Roman towns, including London, Wroxeter
and York.^54 Like the house mouse, the black rat was closely associated
with humans, both animals living close to them in towns, villages and
farms, consuming their waste and stored cereals. The black rat may have
had a more direct impact on human history as the carrier of fleas which
were the host of Yersinia pestis, if the Black Death was indeed caused by
this bacterium. Other relatively common animals, particularly adapted to
environments modified by man, may likewise be early immigrants. The
bones of the harvest mouse have not been recovered from any prehistoric
excavations and from only two Roman sites, and it probably arrived from
the Continent, and flourished, only as a largely agricultural landscape
developed in England in later prehistory.^55
hunting and ‘intermediate exploitation’.
Many important additions to our fauna were not accidental but deliberate
introductions: they were species brought to these shores to be hunted, or
otherwise consumed, by a social elite. In agricultural societies, the exploitation
of wild resources is unnecessary for survival and hunting is usually restricted
to a powerful minority, and thus expressive of social status.^56 The brown
hare was apparently introduced in the Bronze Age and probably as a quarry,
for it is hard to see why else it would have been brought from the continent,
where it is indigenous.^57 But in addition, by medieval times some animals,
especially introduced ones, were managed through what might be called
‘intermediate exploitation’: forms of livestock management which lay
somewhere between the hunting of truly wild animals and the farming of
fully domesticated ones.^58
Deer parks may have existed in pre-Conquest times, but were probably
a Norman introduction: either way, by the thirteenth century there was
on average one for every three or four parishes in England.^59 They were
enclosed areas in which deer were both farmed, as a source of venison, and
hunted for pleasure (Figure 3).^60 Deer were high status creatures, symbolic of
lordship. Venison could not be bought and sold on the open market but only
received as a gift. Most parks were well-wooded environments, enclosed
with a stout fence, and they usually contained a specialized building called
a ‘lodge’ which served as a base for the park keeper and as a place for the
owner to stay while on hunting trips. Although some parks formed a part
of the ‘landscapes of lordship’ laid out around castles and palaces,^61 most
examples in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries lay in remote places, away
from the homes of their owners, largely because they had been enclosed from
residual areas of waste beyond the margins of cultivated ground. From the
later fourteenth century, however, parks began to be more closely associated
with major residences, and by the middle of the seventeenth century, most