sevenTeenTh-CenTury environmenTs: farmland^53been numerous, in houses as well as outside them, not least because much
threshed grain was still stored indoors, in first floor chambers or attics.
Grain was either consumed entirely by them or badly damaged: even today
as much as 10 per cent of the grain in mills is rendered unsuitable for milling
by being ‘kibbled’, or partially eaten, by the common house mouse.^71 Other
mammal species tended to be visitors or raiders: the fox and especially the
polecat, savagely persecuted in large measure because of its ‘great ravages in
hen houses and poultry yards where it destroys great numbers not only of
chickens and ducklings but also full-grown poultry’.^72
Seventeenth-century settlements, in short, offered a measure of cover
in the more open environments of England, and also a wide variety of
food sources. Villages and hamlets also had a distinctive flora, besides
the concentrations of fruits trees and vegetables in orchards and gardens.
Unpaved roads, middens and yards provided niches for the kinds of fast-
growing and often nitrogen-hungry weeds which, as we shall see, constituted
the principal flora of towns – plants like good king Henry (Chenopodium
bonus-henricus), fat hen (Chenopodium album), knotgrass (Polygonum
aviculare), fumitory (Fumaria officinalis), enchanters nightshade and the
like. How far seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century farms and cottages
possessed ornamental gardens, perhaps featuring some of the exotic plants
found in the more extensive grounds of the gentry and aristocracy, remains
unclear. A drawing on a map surveyed in c.1720 of Upper Broomhall Farm
in Kempsey (Worcestershire) shows a garden with parterres and simple
topiary.^73 One of the items mentioned in the probate inventory of the farmer
Loye Aggas of Wymondham in Norfolk, who died in 1614, was a pair of
‘gardine sheres’.^74
The distribution of fauna
I have described variations in the environmental character of seventeenth-
century England in rather vague terms, extrapolating from what we know
of the wildlife found in similar circumstances today. This is risky, not
least because species can alter their habits over time to adapt to changed
circumstances. There is, however, one source which might provide direct
evidence of the varying distributions of certain species in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries: the records of the bounties paid by churchwardens for
particular species killed in their parishes under the terms of the 1566 ‘Acte
for the Preservation of Grayne’, a somewhat misleadingly named piece of
legislation as many of the animals targeted were not, in fact, primarily grain
eaters, but were instead problematic in other ways to farming.^75 The most
frequently targeted bird – the house sparrow – did indeed consume much
grain, but the most commonly targeted mammal – the hedgehog – suffered
in part because it fed off hens’ eggs, but mainly because of an erroneous
belief that it sucked the milk from sleeping cattle. The act listed a total of