The soCial C onTeXTs of Wildlife, C.1650–1750^65economic propositions in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. In a period of slow or negative population growth, and with
agriculture in a depressed state, deer, pigeons, rabbits and the rest formed
a useful alternative source of income for hard-pressed landowners.
Indeed, while we often think of the exploitation of semi-wild species as
an essentially medieval phenomenon the period between 1660 and 1750
was probably its real heyday. The number of parks being created seems to
have increased after 1660, following a period of decline in the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, and both dovecotes and fish ponds were
regarded with renewed interest.^25 The most comprehensive treatise on the
latter subject, Roger North’s A Discourse on Fish and Fish Ponds, was
published in 1713.^26 There was, moreover, a new method of exploiting
wildlife, introduced from Holland at the start of the seventeenth century.
Birds had been driven into tunnel nets in wetland areas since at least the
fifteenth century but ‘decoys’ were more sophisticated. They consisted
of a number of curving ‘pipes’ – tapering channels covered by netting,
supported on a framework of hoops of wood or (later) iron – leading
off from an area of open water. Each pipe terminated in a long bow-net
which could be detached from the rest of the apparatus. Along one side
of the pipe was a series of overlapping screens, usually made of wood
and reeds, behind which the decoy man would conceal himself.^27 Wildfowl
were lured into the net by using a combination of tame decoy ducks and a
dog called a ‘piper’. The former were trained to enter the pipe in response
to a low whistle from the decoy man; at the same time the dog would run
around the screens, jumping over the low boards or ‘dog jumps’ placed
between them. The wild fowl gathered near the mouth of the pipe were
attracted towards what – to them – must have looked like an appearing
and disappearing dog, or fox. Encouraged by the behaviour of the decoy
ducks, they swam towards it. When they had proceeded a little way the
decoy man would appear, waving his arms or a handkerchief and driving
the birds in flight down the tapering pipe, and into the bow net at the end.
The earliest known decoy in England was perhaps at Waxham on the north
east coast of Norfolk where as early as 1620 Sir William Wodehouse had
constructed ‘a device for catching DUCKS, known by the foreign name of
a koye’.^28 That at Purdis Farm, to the east of Ipswich, must be almost as
old for it is mentioned in a lease of 1646.^29 But it was in the period after
1660 that they really proliferated.
While some decoys were intended to supply the needs of great households,
and to provide polite recreation, most were commercial ventures, leased to
professional decoymen for a rent which was often paid both in money and in
specified numbers of wildfowl. A lease for the decoy at Nyland in Somerset,
drawn up in 1678, laid down a rent of £55 per annum together with ‘one
hundred cupple of wilde Fowle’.^30 Decoys were mainly located in fens and
marshes where wildfowl were numerous, especially in the East Anglian Fens,
in the Norfolk Broads, and along the coasts of Suffolk and Essex, but also in