An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950

The soCial C onTeXTs of Wildlife, C.1650–1750^71

There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,

Lull’d in these flowers with dances and delight.^48

Traditional folksongs, moreover, often suggest an active, intelligent interest
in the natural world. The protagonist in Hanged I shall be describes how he
killed his lover:

‘As we were a-walking and talking

Of the things that grew around’.

Numerous references seem to indicate that then, as now, people delighted
in such things as the sounds of birdsong (‘where the pretty little songbirds
do change their voices’). We need to be a little careful here. Shakespeare’s
audience was probably largely urban, and most traditional folk songs were
only first collected in the nineteenth century, by which time, as we shall
see, widespread urbanization had removed many people from direct contact
with the daily grind of rural life. But wild animals loom large in both folk
and ‘polite’ literature, used as images for human traits, but often reflecting
nevertheless behaviour genuinely associated with the animal in question.
Both plants and animals were woven into a complex mesh of folk beliefs,
partly ancient and indigenous, partly derived from classical mythology.
Hares were magical and shape-shifting; hedgehogs, as we have seen, sucked
the milk of sleeping kine.
There was certainly a great deal of cruelty to animals, both wild and
domestic, in the early modern period. Cockfighting, bear- and badger-
baiting were popular pastimes. But in an age of public executions, casual
domestic violence, witch trials – and of death sentences for wearing disguise
near game reserves – animals were not being singled out for particularly
harsh treatment. Moreover, the difference in this respect between our age,
and theirs, is not quite as marked as some texts might suggest. Thomas
lists the appalling maltreatment sometimes meted out to livestock in the
sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially domestic poultry,
but the fact that most chickens are now kept indoors for their entire lives, in
conditions which – even on many ‘organic’ farms – are cramped, cruel and
unnatural, should caution against too optimistic a view of progress.
The scale of slaughter carried out to protect crops and wildlife, as recorded
in the bounty payments made by churchwardens under the 1566 act, certainly
sounds appalling, and often gratuitous, to modern ears. Lovegrove quotes,
for example, the 6,600 bullfinches killed over a period of 36 years in just one
Cheshire parish – 452 in 1676 alone; or the 3,344 hedgehogs slaughtered at
Sherbourne in Dorset between 1662 and 1799.^49 Reviewers of Lovegrove’s
book were understandably shocked to read of how millions of ‘attractive
wild creatures were slaughtered’, in an orgy of ‘systematic killing on a scale
today almost unthinkable’.^50 Yet these were not wanton acts of cruelty but
the understandable reactions of people living in a countryside still teeming