to a brace of partridges or a dozen blackbirds. In 1098, Radulfus, the Prior of Rochester, dispatched to his monks 16 pheasants (along with 1,000 lampreys, 300 hens, 30 geese, 1,000 eggs, 4 salmon and 6 bundles of wheat). A contemporary and perhaps more dependable record – a bursar’s roll at Durham Priory dated to the reign of the Saxon king Edward the Confessor (1042–1066) – includes a purchase of one pheasant and 26 partridge. Pheasants may first have been kept in royal parks and forests, along with fallow deer, and their increasing prominence on banquet menus from the late twelfth century implies that they had by then naturalised. In 1251, Henry III ordered 290 of them for his Christmas feast, and by the late 1400s, pheasants warranted legal protection from the Crown. These early imports were in fact the ‘Old English’, or colchicus, subspecies from the Caucasus and lacked the distinctive white neck ring of the torquatus race, originating in China, which is these days released for shooting.
The pheasant is something of an outlier from this period in retaining a certain aristocratic association. The best explanation is that these poorly camouflaged, clumsy fliers have so far failed to get along in the British countryside, despite repeated reintroduction. Of an estimated 20 million poults (young birds) loosed annually, 90 per cent perish within the year. And not just from the shooting: most evade the guns only to be picked off by foxes or end up as roadkill.
Although pheasants might one day naturalise in Britain, there’s precious little evidence for that so far. The same can’t be said for what is without doubt the most impactful of all medieval introductions.
‘It’s quite a massive hill here, this site,’ I said. ‘And that’s all just made for the rabbits, this big mound?’
‘Well, no. The hill, I think, is natural. It’s just that rectangular mound there that’s made for them,’ responded David patiently.
‘Sorry. I was thinking the whole hill was a warren!’
‘Oh. That would make it the world’s biggest pillow mound, yeah.’
The aroma of wood smoke wafted in the chilly morning air. A distant chainsaw whined. We were standing at the foot of a steep grassy hillock, almost 100 metres high, upon which was broodingly perched a three-storey tower of limestone. Known these days as the Bruton ‘dovecote’ for its later repurposing by pigeon-fanciers, the original function of the pale-yellowish structure, which dates back to the 1500s, is a mystery. One theory has it as the prospect tower for the nearby Bruton Abbey – long since demolished on the orders of Henry VIII during his dissolution of the monasteries – offering the local aristocracy a grandstand view of the abbey’s deer park. But neither doves nor deer, nor indeed the pair of Friesian cows munching contentedly near the base of the tower, had drawn me to South Somerset today.
No, I was interested in rabbits and in particular how and why these shy burrowing mammals from southwest Europe had been introduced to Britain, and then run amok. An important clue was offered by the pillow mound, a characteristic earthwork which to the trained eye shouts ‘rabbit’. Clearly, my eye wasn’t trained because Dr David Gould, a landscape archaeologist from the University of Exeter who had agreed to show me some, needed to point out the example that was right in front of us.
‘You see that ridge coming down the hill?’ he said. ‘That’s one.’
The British population of the European rabbit today numbers in the tens of millions and the species is now regarded as a worldwide menace. Yet the original bunnies were an ineffectual lot, hardly a patch on their vigorous descendants and quite unable to excavate their own burrows. This is where the pillow mounds came in. Created by piling up soil in long, low heaps, and encircled by ditches, possibly to deflect any floodwaters, these artificial structures provided a dry, soft and well-ventilated substrate into which the rabbits could dig. Some even incorporated stone-lined tunnels making life easier still for their feeble tenants. At the same time, pillow mounds concentrated the rabbits in one place for ‘hunting’. If you could call it that. The phrase ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ comes to mind.
The pillow mound was a hallmark of the artificial rabbit warren, or ‘coneygarth’, from the Middle English coning-erth. Coney, coning, conyng, and sundry other derivations thereof, was the original word for the adult animal, the term ‘rabbit’ – from the French rabette – being reserved for juveniles. David had spent three years visiting 650 coneygarths across southwest England, from Cornwall to Wiltshire, racking up more than a thousand pillow mounds along the way. Little wonder he knew one when he saw it.
‘Most are rectangular, like the ones here at Bruton,’ he said. ‘But you get circular ones, oval ones, cruciform ones. Just random, weird little ones.’
I suspected pillow mounds haunted his dreams.
Along with documenting the shapes, David was keen to understand just how conspicuous the pillow mounds were: ‘If you were wealthy, you were expected to have access to these animals. It was kind of like the “in thing”. But I wanted to know whether pillow mounds themselves, as visual components of the landscape, had a symbolic significance in their own right. Was it like parking your expensive car in the front drive to show off?’
In the event, David’s field work revealed no clear pattern: pillow mounds were as likely to be tucked away behind a hill as to be sited ostentatiously on its slopes. It seemed that so long as the lord of the manor could offer distinguished guests fresh rabbit for dinner, whether or not the warren was visible from the manor house was of little concern.
As with other exotic imports, rabbits served multiple functions, offering meat, fur and status. Like pheasants and fallow deer, the association with elites can be traced as far back as the Romans who, elsewhere in their empire, prized rabbit foetuses, known as laurices, as a delicacy and reared the creatures (along with hares) in stone-walled pens called leporaria. The discovery of a fragment of rabbit tibia at Fishbourne, dated to the first century CE, suggests the species was brought to Britain during the Roman occupation, perhaps as a pet. But rabbits don’t seem to have established: there’s no Anglo-Saxon word for them and they don’t get a nod in the Domesday Book. ‘Coney culture’ nevertheless persisted on the continent after the Romans left and, by the Norman period, rabbits had been added to the variety of smaller game that aristocrats would seek permission from the king to hunt under the right of ‘free warren’. (Other free warren species – undoubtedly offering more sport – included fox, hare, wildcat, pheasant and partridge.)
Britain’s current rabbit population dates to the second half of the twelfth century, with animals possibly brought by homeward-bound crusaders. At first, the rabbits were kept on islands off the south coast of England, the benign climate and lack of predators suiting these delicate mammals. Although there’s some dispute about it, the earliest putative record dates to around 1135 when Drake’s Island in Plymouth Sound was said to have been granted to Plympton Priory, cum cuniculus (‘with rabbits’). In 1176, rabbits were being kept on the Scilly Isles, while on Lundy in the Bristol Channel, the tenant was permitted to take 50 a year between 1183 and 1219. One of the earliest allusions to mainland rabbit-keeping dates to 1235 when King Henry II presented ten live coneys as a gift from his park at Guildford.
Soon after the introduction of rabbits to mainland Britain, coneygarth escapees were turning up as pests on nearby arable fields, yet the species remained scarce during the early years. This rarity was reflected in the price, with a single animal costing the same as five chickens. Coneygarths were guarded and poachers subject to the full weight of the law. In England alone, 465 cases of rabbit theft are recorded between 1268 and 1551. Contrary to popular belief, peasants weren’t always – or even mostly – responsible for rabbit-thievery. Break-ins were more often than not the handiwork of fellow landowners in a spirit of aristocratic one-upmanship. Warreners, who were tasked with ensuring the safety of their precious charges, had their work cut out. They constructed lodges
