(^66) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
wetlands and coastal areas in the west of England. Daniel Defoe remarked
of the Fenland decoys how
It is incredible what quantities of wild-fowl of all sorts, duck, mallard, teal,
widgeon &c. they take in these duckoys every week, during the season.
It may indeed be guessed at a little by this, that there is a duckoy not far
from Ely, from which they assured me at St Ives (a town on the Ouse,
where the fowl they took was always brought to be sent to London) that
they generally sent up three thousand couple a week.^31
- a clear enough indication of the true character of the Fenland environment,
even after the supposed drainage of the area in the seventeenth century
(above, p. 34).
But it is the expansion of rabbit farming that is the most striking feature
of this period. In the words of the historian E. P. Thompson, warrens ‘became
a craze in the early eighteenth century with lords of the manor anxious
to improve, not their pastures, but their incomes’.^32 Large commercial
warrens, again usually leased to professional operators, now appeared in
the Mendip Hills, the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds and the North York
Moors;^33 while on Dartmoor, in Ashdown and St Leonards in Sussex, or in
Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, where warrens had been common in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was a considerable expansion in
their area and numbers.^34 By the 1750s ‘landscapes of warrening’ existed
in many areas of downland, heath and moor, in which contiguous rabbit
farms extended across many square kilometres, in part because the damage
caused by rabbits meant that areas close to warrens could not easily be
used for much else. In the later eighteenth century it was typically suggested
that land at Allerston on the Yorkshire Wolds ‘must by the vicinity of the
neighbouring Warrens, lose most of its produce, if not converted into a
Warren’.^35
Like earlier warrens, many of those created in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries contained pillow mounds or ‘buries’ for accommodation,
vermin traps and lodges or warren houses (Figure 14). But in addition, many
were run on more intensive lines than before, and contained enclosures
where turnips or other fodder could be cultivated for winter feed. Stocking
densities were in consequence higher and rabbits more likely to stray
onto adjacent properties, so that boundary walls and banks proliferated.
Such was the intensity of rabbit grazing that on the Breckland warrens
in East Anglia the turf was stripped and the sand exposed, sometimes
forming mobile dunes like that which, originating in Lakenheath Warren
in 1688, engulfed the village of Santon Downham in Suffolk and blocked
the river Little Ouse. The growth in the extent and numbers of warrens
was associated with the expansion of feral colonies, at the same time as
genetic mutation was anyway ensuring that the rabbit was becoming better
adapted to the English environment. Not surprisingly, as in earlier periods,