(^60) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
less than four square kilometres, similar to that of a small country town
today like Bicester in Oxfordshire or Wymondham in Norfolk, although
it was ringed by separate but swelling villages like Paddington.^2 This said,
most of the larger towns would have boasted distinctive ecological features,
some no more than the characteristics of rural settlements writ large, but
others definably urban.
Before the nineteenth century towns were characterized by low levels of
public services, and waste of all kinds tended not to move very far. Moreover,
large amounts of food was imported into them, and processed there, including
livestock brought in ‘on the hoof’ and killed in urban slaughterhouses.
Bylaws – pioneered in London in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – were
passed in most major towns in an attempt to control the disposal of waste
in public places, but all were nevertheless characterized by cess pits which
leaked into wells, piles of dung and straw from stables, household middens
and refuse from slaughter houses and fish markets. Success in removing
the worst waste from the streets, moreover, usually led to it being dumped
nearby, or disposed of in watercourses and rivers. In seventeenth-century
Bedford the authorities attempted to stop pigs wandering the streets; at
Warrington they tried to prevent householders from dumping rubbish in the
market place.^3
Major towns and cities thus attracted large numbers of scavenging birds,
especially ravens and kites. In London their contribution to city hygiene –
especially in terms of tidying up some of the more unpleasant wastes from
butchery – ensured that both were protected by local bylaws, although such
protection waned in the course of the eighteenth century.^4 The conditions
in towns and cities were well suited to other kinds of wildlife. It is not
clear precisely how early pigeons became a standard feature of the urban
environment, attracted by vegetable food wastes and grain, but they were
well-established in London by the later fourteenth century.^5 Escapees from
manorial pigeon houses, they made themselves at home on the churches
and other tall buildings which provided nesting places analogous to the
cliffs frequented by their ancestor, the wild rock dove. Mice, the common
shrew and above all rats were also abundant. The black rat had been in
England since at least the third century AD, as we have seen, but the Brown
rat only arrived in the early eighteenth century, probably in the 1720s,
the consequence of increasing maritime communication.^6 It came from
Russia, as part of a general westward expansion of the species, although
its popular name, Norway rat, indicates that people thought (possibly
rightly) that it had come via that country. Rattus norvegicus was soon
widespread in rural as well as urban areas, and as early as 1777 Gilbert
White considered a black rat killed at Shalden in Hampshire something
of a rarity: ‘the Norway rats destroy all the indigenous ones’.^7 But rats
of both kinds were particularly at home in towns, attracted to refuse
tips, middens, grain stores and cess pits, and the larger urban centres like
London positively heaved with them.
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