(^54) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
thirty species, including other fairly innocuous ones like the kingfisher, for
which bounties were to be paid, although in practice most attention was
directed towards a more restricted range: the hedgehog, fox, badger, polecat,
stoat, weasel, otter, pine marten, wild cat and mole among the mammals;
and sparrow, bullfinch, crow, rook, jackdaw, raven, magpie, jay, red kite,
and unspecified ‘hawks’ among the birds.^76
Large numbers of churchwarden’s accounts were meticulously examined
by Roger Lovegrove as part of the research undertaken for his excellent
book, Silent Fields: the long decline of a nation’s wildlife. Although not his
central concern, Lovegrove examined regional variations in the frequency
with which different species were killed, explaining these largely in terms
of the character of the local environment. There are, however (as he himself
emphasized), a number of problems in using this source in any spatial way.
Relatively few parishes have surviving churchwardens’ accounts, and where
they do these often run for only short periods of time. A surprising number,
rather curiously, contain no record of payments for bounties under the act.
It is possible that payments were made through some other separate parish
account, now lost, for although the terms of the act laid the responsibility
for administration on churchwardens, payments also sporadically turn up
in the accounts maintained by local constables and the overseers of the
poor, while vermin was sometimes controlled by making yearly payments
to professionals, especially ‘mole men’. But it is also probable that in some
places the churchwardens, reflecting the wishes of the local community or
its leading members, were simply not prepared to pay for pest control out
of the hard-pressed parish rates. In the words of E. L. Jones, ‘the chief local
agriculturists who would figure disproportionately among the churchwardens
or could influence them... were, in effect, securing themselves a subsidy out
of the public purse. All ratepayers would have to contribute to the cost of the
campaign but the farmers would benefit most’.^77 This means, as Lovegrove
noted, that ‘the decision as to which vermin, if any, were to be allowed for
payment in a particular parish was determined by the vestry committee, and
not by the prescriptions of the original statute. Parishes themselves decided
what to kill and what payments to make for targeted species’. In 1703 the
vestry at Great Budworth in Cheshire thus declared that ‘for the time to
come’ they would not make payments ‘out of the Parish Purse for any Crows
Heds, ffox Heds or urchin [hedgehog] Heds’.^78
All this means that as well as reflecting the frequency of particular species
within the wider environment, the appearance of particular animals within
the accounts also reflects the economic interests of the communities in
question, and the kinds of eradications that they thought worth funding.
Geographical variations might thus reflect the configuration of regional
farming economies, as well as the suitability of the countryside for particular
kinds of animal. There may well have been other complicating factors.
By the early decades of the eighteenth century, the fox was being actively
preserved in some districts, to provide sport for the gentry, and reductions
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