seTTing T he sCene: The naTure of naTure^15represented in the large assemblage excavated from early twelfth-century
contexts at Launceston Castle in Cornwall for example, but increase
steadily after this time, outnumbering those of red and roe deer by the later
thirteenth century.^65 Most fallow deer were kept in parks but they were also
introduced, with some success, into royal forests. Even here, however, they
were carefully looked after by foresters. The very fact that deer of all kinds
were kept in enclosures, or nurtured and protected in other ways, indicates
that they were not common in the wider countryside by the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries.
The rabbit, like the fallow deer, was present in England in previous
interglacials but it did not return. It was reintroduced, probably as a domes-
ticate, in the Roman period, but it did not apparently survive into Anglo-Saxon
times: there is no Old English word for the rabbit and no rabbit bones have
been recovered from secure archaeological contexts (not one, for example,
from among the 45,000-odd excavated from Hamwih, the Anglo-Saxon port
near Southampton).^66 It was reintroduced for a second time by members
of the Norman elite soon after the Conquest. The earliest unambiguous
documentary record dates from 1135, when Drake’s Island in Plymouth Sound
was granted to Plympton Priory cum cuniculi (‘with the rabbits’),^67 and by the
middle of the thirteenth century, colonies had been established throughout
England.^68 Coneys (the word rabbit was, until the eighteenth century, reserved
for the young) were kept in special areas – originally called “coneygarths”,
later warrens – for both their flesh and their fur. Before the fourteenth century,
most examples were located within deer parks or took the form of small
enclosures placed beside elite residences. After the Black Death, however,
warrens proliferated and began to be managed on more commercial lines.
They were a good way of making money from common heaths and moors,
for by a quirk of the law manorial lords holding a grant of free warren –
the right to hunt over a defined tract of ground – were allowed to establish a
colony of rabbits on common land despite the opposition of commoners, with
whose stock they would compete for grass and other herbage. Lords could
thus derive an income from manorial wastes without going to the expense
and the difficulty of enclosing them.^69 Most warrens contained low oval or
rectangular mounds in which the rabbits could dwell and where they could be
easily trapped. These were called ‘buries’ or ‘burroughs’ by contemporaries,
but were christened ‘pillow mounds’ by twentieth-century archaeologists, who
were initially puzzled about their age and purpose. Some were sophisticated
structures containing networks of purpose-built tunnels. Warrens also usually
contained a lodge; most were provided with enclosures for protecting breeding
does, as well as special traps for catching vermin.^70 Not surprisingly, warrens
were hated symbols of feudal privilege and were regularly targeted in times
of social unrest. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the rebels in St Albans
in Hertfordshire placed one of the Abbot’s rabbits, liberated from one of his
many warrens, in the town pillory.^71 As early as 1388 a survey noted that sixty
acres of arable at Wilton in Norfolk were ‘worth nothing by the year because