ChapTer four
The social contexts of
wildlife, c.1650–1750
The nature of towns
So far I have discussed the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century environ-
ment entirely in terms of farming communities and the practice of
agriculture. But this is only part of the story. Already, a significant
proportion of the population was not directly involved in farming. Some
lived in towns or industrial areas. Others were members of the social elite,
whose involvement with agriculture, while often close, was only a part of
their interaction with the natural world. Towns, it is true, were relatively
minor intrusions in a largely rural landscape in the seventeenth century.
Although by 1650 as much as a fifth of the population may have been living
in towns and cities they were usually closely packed into them: most people
lived within walking distance of their place of work.^1 Few country towns
covered more than a square kilometre. Even Norwich, probably England’s
third largest city in the seventeenth century, was still almost entirely
confined within its medieval walls, embracing an area of just over two
square kilometres, equivalent to less than five per of the built-up area of the
city and its suburbs today. Typically, much of this comprised orchards and
market gardens, ensuring that in environmental terms Norwich was more
like the villages already discussed than a distinctly urban environment. This
would have been truer of smaller towns, some of which contained working
farms at no great distance from their central market places. London was
more densely and continuously occupied but it remained tiny by modern
standards. Although, with its satellite settlements, it is said to have been
home to around half a million people, its continuous built-up area covered