Invasive Aliens. Dan Eatherley
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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 and watch-towers to spot poachers, and fitted ingenious vermin traps to divert and capture stoats, weasels and other would-be predators. Trowlesworthy Warren on Dartmoor, which dates back to the seventeenth century, boasted 76 such traps. But not every rabbit predator was quite so unwelcome.
The ferret, a tame version of polecat which originated in North Africa and had been domesticated since the fourth century BCE, appeared in Britain from 1223, soon after the dawn of rabbit-keeping. Warreners co-opted the wiry carnivore to their cause, filing down its teeth and using it to flush bunnies from their burrows. Ferrets also formed an important component of the rabbit-poacher’s toolkit, along with dogs and nets.
Against the odds, the rabbit population started rising, and by the fourteenth century supported a growing export trade in their furs; in 1305, for instance, 200 skins were shipped out of Hull, and by 1398 a certain Collard Chierpetit was granted the right to send 10,000 rabbit pelts to Holland. No fewer than 4,000 rabbits were served at the 1465 investiture of the Archbishop of York and, a century later, the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner noted that: ‘There are few countries wherein coneys do not breed, but the most plenty of all is in England.’ It wasn’t until the late 1700s, however, that the wild population properly took off; rabbits had by then evolved into an altogether hardier proposition, able to capitalise on new rotational field systems, which provided a year-round supply of food. The wholesale removal of weasels, pine martens, polecats, stoats, foxes and other predators by gamekeepers tasked with preserving pheasant and partridge, also indirectly benefited the rabbit whose ubiquity helped consign their high-class status to history. Rabbit farming continued in Britain right up to the twentieth century, with numerous large coastal semi-natural warrens in places like Cornwall and South Wales continuing to be protected from poachers, suggesting that the species retained a certain economic value until modern times. Nevertheless, this once-prized commodity fit for a king generally came to be dismissed as a pauper’s ration, and at worst, vermin to be eradicated.
Rabbits have long had religious connotations, most likely anchored in the supposed proclamation of the sixth-century Pope Gregory that rabbits, or more precisely their foetuses, were fit for eating on fast-days. Plucked from the womb’s watery environment, the reasoning went, laurices could be deemed honorary fish, not warm-blooded animals which would have been off limits. But this turns out to be a case of sloppy scholarship: the Pope never made any such decree. Instead, it was his contemporary and namesake, Bishop Gregory of Tours who had pronounced on rabbits, and merely to report on the practice of laurice consumption during Lent. Chinese whispers did the rest.
Writing in the 1990s, the archaeologists David and Margarita Stocker nevertheless detected an allegorical significance in ‘defenceless’ communities of rabbits being ‘herded and managed like sheep’ by a Christ-like warrener, before emerging ‘from the ground to fulfil themselves’. Warming to their theme, the Stockers evidenced the deliberate, prominent and ‘symbolically meaningful’ placement of pillow mounds within monastic precincts at Sawtry Abbey in Cambridgeshire, Nun Coton Priory in Lincolnshire and Croxton Abbey in Leicestershire. In his own documentary research on rabbits, however, David Gould has found little to bolster, or at least privilege, the sacred connection. ‘In the medieval period it’s basically the elites who first owned rabbits,’ he said, ‘and that meant both lay and clerical elites. In fact, when you look back through the records, warrens are more often linked to secular aristocracy.’
As it happened, Bruton had something to say on fish too (another reason David had suggested we meet here). We trudged to the crest of the dovecote-dominated knoll which gloried in the name of ‘Lusty Hill’. Was this a reference to the renowned reproductive capacity of its former livestock? That was a question for another day. Passing two smaller pillow mounds on the summit, we descended the far side to a series of boggy depressions, the remains of ancient and overgrown ponds. ‘I’m not an expert, but I think they’re medieval and older than the pillow mounds,’ said David. These artificial pools – fed by a stream which flows on to the River Brue – once supplied fresh fish to Bruton Abbey.
Whether or not rabbits were regarded as fish and kept and eaten for their ecclesiastical significance is unclear, but actual fish certainly were favoured by religious orders across continental Europe and, between the ninth and eleventh centuries, appeared ever more prominently on the table at Benedictine monasteries. The stricter regimes at Cistercian and Carthusian communities resisted even fish but later allowed the consumption of small quantities, or ‘pittances’. The medieval period coincided with a massive expansion of marine fishing which targeted herring, cod and hake. While coastal communities enjoyed fresh catch, those living far inland had to make do with salted or