(^72) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
with wildlife, and who had no choice but to kill in this way, if they and their
families were to survive and flourish. Scaring animals away, or fencing them
out, would do just as well as killing them: but either way, crops and livestock
had to be protected, in both field and garden, from a host of pests and vermin
and without the aid of chemical insecticides, automatic bird scarers, or wire
netting. Guns, even when people had them, were slow to load and inefficient,
but the various traps and techniques listed in books like Mascall’s A Book
of Engines and Traps to take Polecats, Buzardes, Rattes, Mice and all other
Kindes of Vermine and Beasts whatever of 1590 – box-traps, the smearing
of trees and bushes with sticky ‘lime’ to trap birds, a wide variety of nets
- must have been more effective than they sound, given the scale of killing
recorded in the churchwardens’ accounts.^51 Yet the most striking feature of
this source, perhaps, is the way it suggests that it all made little impact on
the numbers of wild animals. The parish of Lezant in Cornwall, for example,
killed an average of 32 polecats annually over 86 years, but with no reduction
in numbers over the decades. As Lovegrove noted, ‘... during the period
of maximum persecution through the parish system, populations of most
species remained fairly stable’.^52 At least until the middle of the nineteenth
century, but arguably even after that time, it was environmental factors,
rather than the scale of human predation, that determined the numbers of
animals and birds in any locality. It is easy to criticize seventeenth-century
pest control, especially its inability to distinguish real from imaginary threats.
But a society that seems on the brink of exterminating the hedgehog should
be cautious in its criticisms of those who, albeit mistakenly, systematically
targeted this creature because they thought it a direct threat to livelihoods,
yet made little real impact on its numbers.
Conclusion
It is tempting to examine the environmental impact of man in seventeenth-
and early eighteenth-century England entirely in terms of agricultural
communities and farming methods. Towns and industry made as yet a
relatively small impact on the landscape: the vast majority of the land area
was used to grow food or to produce organic raw materials and fuel, shaping
the environment and the character of wildlife in complex, intricate ways.
Yet urbanization and to some extent industry were already beginning to
create distinctive biological communities, which would develop, change and
expand over the following centuries. More importantly, the environment was
already being shaped by activities like gardening and hunting which were
not simply related to the procurement of food. Ideology, status and politics
had for centuries helped mould the natural world, and as the economic
and technological base of society was transformed by industrialization and
agrarian modernization, they were set to do so on an ever grander scale.