(^16) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
of destruction by the coneys of the duke of Lancaster’s warren there’.^72 But in
the seventeenth century most rabbits still lived in private warrens, rather than
in the wild.
Other species were brought into England in medieval times by the
landed elite and either hunted or exploited in an ‘intermediate’ fashion.
The pheasant, a native of Central Asia, was probably – like the rabbit and
the fallow deer – introduced soon after the Norman Conquest, perhaps via
Sicily, and was likewise kept in parks.^73 Here it was hunted with hawks
to some extent, but mainly managed to provide food for great feasts. Fish
ponds were known in the early Middle Ages, stocked with bream and pike
but exploited on a fairly casual basis. Their management appears to have
been revolutionized by the introduction of the carp (Cyprinus carpio) from
central Europe in the fourteenth century.^74 The fish were mainly bred and
kept in large ponds, ‘great waters’, usually created by damming a stream
running along a narrow valley: often two, three or more were arranged in
sequence, and provided with complex systems of bypass channels. Smaller
rectangular ponds called ‘stews’ or servatoria were widely established beside
manors houses, abbeys and castles, watery larders where the fish were stored
prior to consumption.^75
Another form of ‘intermediate exploitation’ common in the Middle Ages
was the keeping of pigeons or doves in dovecotes, some of which contained
more than a thousand nesting holes.^76 Each pair of pigeons produced two
chicks, between eight and ten times a year. The young birds were culled
when around four weeks old, before the pin feathers had developed, and
the tender meat was usually treated as ‘spatchcock’ and baked in pies.
Unlike rabbit, carp, pheasant and fallow deer, the pigeon was an indigenous
creature, descendant of the wild rock dove: but as that bird only ever
had a limited distribution, largely restricted to rocky shores, the situation
was perhaps broadly similar. Pigeons battened freely on the crops of local
farmers and dovecotes thus represented, in effect, machines for turning other
people’s labour into the owner’s meat protein. Not surprisingly, they were
by law restricted to the manorial gentry. In the words of one seventeenth-
century commentator, they were a ‘power and libertye wch in reason and
policye of state ought to belonge to great estates and persons of qualitye
and commission’.^77
Conclusion
The environment of England in 1650 had been shaped by thousands of
years of human activity. Farming had completely transformed the landscape,
creating habitats – often extending over vast tracts of land – with no real
parallels in the natural world, and plants and animals once rare were widely
established. The emergence and crystallization of distinct farming regions
in the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have
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