/ The Rabbit and the Medieval East Anglian Economy By MARK BAILEY Abstract The rabbit was a rare beast in medieval England, and much sought after for both its meat and its fur. This investigation plots the early history of commercial rabbiting in East Anglia, and its transition from a low output concern to a growth industry in the later Middle Ages. The development of the rabbit-warren into a highly lucrative source of income is explained in terms of the changing economic and social conditions after ~he Black Death, and the more intensive management of warrens by landlords. The occupational spin-offs from rabbiting, and the social implications of poaching in a region where resistance to the feudal order was endemic, are also explored. Final consideration is given to the economic impact of the rabbit on areas of poor soil, and its ability to compensate for their inherent disadvantages in grain production. A HISTORICAL study of a creature so manifestly commonplace as the rabbit might initially appear uninteresting, for it is the unusual wlaich most readily excites intellectual curiosity. The rabbit is still regarded as prolific, destructive, and of little value, despite its terrible suffering under the myxomatosis virus since the I95os. Yet this modern view is not consistent with the severe attitude adopted by manorial courts towards poachers in the Middle Ages. An example from a court held at Westwood near Dun- wich (Surf) in I442 illustrates the point. In the autumn of that year, three Augustinian canons fi'om Blythburgh Priory had been caught poaching rabbits with their own, specially reared, greyhounds, a flagrant dis- play of the increasing worldliness of religious orders. The outraged court officials fined them the substantial sum of 46s 8d, and also recorded that the operation had the express knowledge and support of no less a person than the Prior himself.' If the medieval rabbit was valueless, why did such illustrious men take up poaching and * This study is concerned with Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. 1 am grateful to Edward Miller and Duncan Bythell for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this paper. t Ipswich and East Suffolk Record Office, HA3o:3t2/195. why were the courts so determined to stop them? In fact, this modern reputation belies historical experience, and for much of its history the rabbit has remained a rare and highly prized commodity. The animal is not indigenous to the British Isles, unlike the hare, but was deliberately introduced from France or its native western Mediter- ranean by the thirteenth century." Its value lay both in its meat and fur, and as one seventeenth-century commentator noted, 'no host could be deemed a good house- keeper that hath not plenty of these at all times to furnish his table'. 3 Fur was used as clothing as well as on clothing, and although neither the most fashionable nor valuable, rabbit fur was increasingly popu- lar from the thirteenth centuryY Yet initially the rabbit found the English climate inhospitable and required careful 2 Tlle rabbit was apparently indigenous to Britain in a previous interglacial but subsequently became extinct, A M Tittensor, The Rabbit Warren at l,Vest Dean near Chichester, published privately, t986, no page ntunbers. For its reintroduction by the Normans, see E M Veale, 'The Rabbit in England', Ag Hist Rev, V, t957, pp 85-90. An excellent general study of the animal is J Sheail, Rabbits and their History, Newton Abbot, 197x. See also O Rackham, A History of the Countryside, t986, P 47. 3 F l-lervey (ed), Reyee's Breviary qfSuffolk, t9o2, p 35. 4 E M Veale, The English Fur Trade in the later Middle Ages, Oxford, x966, chap x. I Ag Hist Rev, 36, 1, pp I-2o