(^56) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
This said, Lovegrove’s carefully collected figures tell us much that
is important about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wildlife. The
absences are particularly noteworthy. There are no payments for rabbits,
partly perhaps because they did not feature in the original act but also
because they were still, even in the eighteenth century, rare in most parts of
England.^81 Wood pigeons, now present in vast numbers in the countryside,
were likewise not mentioned in the act and do not appear in the payments
made by churchwardens: they were still relatively rare, and restricted –
as their name implies – to woodland.^82 The polecat, pine marten and
wild cat, in contrast, were widespread. Indeed, ‘apart from the fox, no
mammal was killed in more parishes in England and Wales between the
seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries than the unfortunate polecat’.^83
The fact that payments for polecats and pine martens were less frequently
recorded in the arable lowlands, as noted, reflects a complex mixture of
environmental factors but also economic ones – the extent to which the
livelihoods of local communities were threatened by their presence. The
county of Northamptonshire illustrates this well. Lovegrove notes a total
of 717 payments for dead polecats here in the course of the seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, low by the standards of northern and
western counties; and no examples of pine martens, both of which doubtless
reflect the paucity of trees and woods in this champion countryside.^84 But
both figures are almost certainly further lowered by the lack of interest in
persecuting these animals in a countryside dominated by grain growing and
cattle fattening. The complete absence of references to pine martens certainly
needs to be compared with the fact that Thomas Isham of Lamport caught
four in a fortnight in December 1673, and another two months later.^85 The
majority of the records for polecats come from places within a few miles
of the royal forests of Whittlewood or Rockingham, another reminder that
the Midlands was not, in reality, a sea of unrelieved arable but contained
many extensive ‘islands’ of wooded ground. Yet polecats were also killed
at Braunceston, on the western edge of the county and far from the forests.
So too is Lamport, in the north of the county, where Isham caught his
pine martens. Even away from the forests, ‘champion’ districts were, by the
seventeenth century at least, more diversified environments than we often
assume.
Conclusion
While it was the extent and biological diversity of the woods and wastes
discussed in the previous chapter which would most have impressed a
modern visitor to seventeenth-century England, farmland also boasted a vast
range of wildlife. These two broad categories of land have, of course, been
artificially separated, for ease of description and discussion. In reality they
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