(^68) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
busy vandalizing the dovecote belonging to Baron Trevor, told their
commanding officer that:
Pigeons were fowls of the air given to the sons of men, and all men had a
common right in them that could get them, and they were as much theirs as
the barons, and therefore they would kill them... and not part from their
right: upon which the captain was so convinced by their arguments he could
not answer them, and so came away, letting them do as they would.^37
It is thus hardly surprising that the return of political stability at the
Restoration of 1660, in the form of a modified version of the old order,
saw a renewed interest in the these traditional symbols of status as ways of
making money, as well as their ostentatious display beside great houses.
hunting
‘Intermediate exploitation’ shades off, with no clear line of separation, into
true hunting, already the central passion of rural life. By the middle of the
seventeenth century hawking was going out of fashion, largely due to the
availability of sporting firearms, and the great days of deer hunting were
also over. The pressure of population on resources ensured that, even in
royal forests, deer were becoming rare in the wild. The administration of the
forests had collapsed during the Civil War, and was never fully reinstated:
the stints on the forest commons were poorly enforced, so that the livestock
of local villagers competed with the deer for herbage. Parks continued to be
stocked with deer, but while these were still hunted well into the eighteenth
century it was on a declining scale.^38 Parks were becoming more ornamental
in character, and by the later seventeenth century the numbers of deer kept
within them was often reduced, probably to limit the damage they caused to
young ornamental plantings in clumps or avenues.^39
Important acts were passed in 1603 and 1609 for the better protection of
deer kept within ‘inclosed Ground’. But the most significant piece of game
legislation came in 1671. The preamble to the Game Act explained that a
new law was necessary because
Diverse disorderly persons laying aside their lawfull Trades and
Imployments doe betake themselves to the stealing, takeing and killing
of Conies, Hares, Pheasants, Partridges and other Game, intended to be
preserved by former Lawes, with Guns, Dogs, Tramells, Lowbells, Hayes,
and other Netts, Snares, Hare-pipes and other Engines, to the great
dammage of this Realme, and prejudice of Noblemen, Gentlemen and
Lords of Mannours and others Owners of Warrens’.^40
Lords of manors could now have their gamekeepers search any individual
and – with the permission of a local Justice of the Peace – their homes if
elle
(Elle)
#1