The soCial C onTeXTs of Wildlife, C.1650–1750^67the establishment of warrens aroused strong opposition from local people.
In 1749, for example, there was a major riot in Charnwood Forest in
Leicestershire when commoners attacked the warrens newly established on
the local commons. One rioter was killed, many were arrested and tried,
and a contemporary ballad described:
... How they troop from ev’ry Town
To pull these Upstart Warrens down,
All praying for the Church and Crown
And for their Common Right.^36
The expansion of warrens and parks, and the proliferation of fish ponds
and dovecotes, in this period was driven by social and ideological as well
as economic factors. Intermediate forms of exploitation had traditionally
been reserved, by virtue of their cost or because of legal prohibitions,
to the landed elite. Warrens, as we have seen, could be established
by lords and squires on manorial waste, regardless of the wishes of
commoners, while dovecotes and pigeon houses were reserved by law
to the manorial gentry. But during the Civil War and Interregnum in the
middle decades of the seventeenth century such rights and privileges had
been threatened. The deer parks of the king, and of leading royalists,
had been sequestered by the revolutionary government, their timber
felled and their deer destroyed. Ponds and dovecotes had been casually
trashed by parliamentary troops. Those stationed at Leamington,
figure 14 A large ‘pillow mound’ on one of the Dartmoor rabbit warrens. Note
the typical moorland scenery in the distance, with the area of heather much reduced
by the encroachment of bracken.