(^70) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
properties lay intermingled – taking shots at anything on the ground or near
it, especially hares and partridges, but also woodcock and pheasant. This
kind of shooting must have made virtually no impact on local wildlife. Only
later would more organized shooting, involving the systematic control of
vermin with much more effective firearms, take a terrible toll.
attitudes to wildlife
Whether the kind of hunting and shooting characteristic of the period
before c.1750 should be regarded as ‘cruel’ is not a reasonable subject
for historical discussion. Few contemporaries would have so regarded it.
Indeed, to modern eyes all social classes in pre-industrial England would
have appeared to be routinely cruel and callous to both domestic livestock
and wild animals. To some historians, this situation only gradually changed
in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as more enlightened
attitudes were adopted by the social elite, and gradually spread through
society: a view most clearly articulated in Keith Thomas’s great book, Man
and the Natural World. Thomas moreover, while conceding that ‘popular
taxonomy of plants, birds, beasts and fishes was more elaborate than purely
utilitarian considerations required’, nevertheless suggested that ‘the practical
aspect of this popular knowledge of the natural world... seems to have been
uppermost’.^45 But this is perhaps too simple. The inhabitants of early modern
England were intimately immersed in the natural world, in part because
there was little else in which to be immersed, and regarded it as a source of
beauty and wonder, as well as a resource to be exploited. The nomenclature
of wild flowers is especially striking, showing as it does a great store of
common knowledge which has now largely, although not entirely, vanished
from popular culture. The majority of English wild flowers had traditional
names which varied – before attempts at standardization in the eighteenth
century – from district to district and from region to region.^46 It is true
that some were inventions of sixteenth and seventeenth-century herbalists –
indeed, even some eighteenth-century exotic introductions, like Dutchman’s
breeches (Dicentra cucullaria), were given what sound like folk names. But
most were not, many for example making allusion to pre-Reformation
Catholicism or magical beliefs. Some of these names, since purged by the
writers of Victorian wild flower guides, were humorous and/or obscene:
naked ladies, pissabed, mare’s fart, priests ballacks.^47 Yet ordinary people
appreciated the beauty of wild flowers in a world otherwise often drab, as
suggested for example in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
elle
(Elle)
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