Clearly written and illustrated, authoritative yet engaging, Tom Williamson provides an excellent exploration of the history and archaeology of the managed exploitation of rabbits. The first four chapters synthesize in masterly fashion a now impressive volume of archaeological excavation and fieldwork (to which Williamson has made significant contributions) across much of England and Wales of the warrens, in which rabbits were confined, and pillow mounds, the man-made burrows commonly found in warrens. The last two chapters move from description and explanation to argument – trenchant, original and therefore more contentious. We will return to both.
The book opens with a history of rabbit cultivation in Britain, beginning with their introduction for a brief period by the Romans, and their re-introduction after the Norman Conquest. The second, third and fourth chapters deal in turn with the recognition and interpretation of pillow mounds, other features of the warren and the wider landscapes of warrening. They are models of their kind, useful to both professionals and interested laymen in identifying, understanding and explaining a wide range of earthworks related to different aspects of rabbit farming: these chapters will ensure that this book becomes a classic. The text is well illustrated throughout, with air and other black-and-white photographs, as well as archaeological plans and sections drawn from fieldwork and excavation reports, and explanatory diagrams which outline, for example, the workings of traps designed for catching stoats and ferrets, and for ‘harvesting’ rabbits. Regional variations in the plans of warrens, their boundaries, their constituent earthworks and the architecture associated with them are beautifully outlined in writing which, although narrative and descriptive, carries the reader along with the author’s customary verve without losing any quality of scholarship.
The penultimate chapter provides an interesting yet controversial history of the archaeological interpretation of rabbit-related earthworks. The development of scientific explanation through shifts in underlying explanatory paradigms has become a truism since Kuhn’s classic volume was published (Reference Kuhn1962), and it seems unnecessarily teleological for Williamson to berate earlier archaeologists for failing to recognize interpretations of earthworks which seem so self-evident today, especially as our own explanations are themselves as susceptible to future revision. The large volume of archaeological evidence adduced throughout the book is moreover a testament to the extent to which warrens and their earthworks are recognized in modern archaeology, and to the careful ways in which early twentieth-century archaeologists analysed the evidence before them, even if they reached conclusions which have since been revised.
In the final chapter, Williamson returns to a leitmotif which has been a characteristic of his work for more than twenty years: the use of earthworks and structures by English landowners to signal power, status and authority and to make normative statements about social relations (see, for example, Williamson and Bellamy Reference Williamson and Bellamy1987). Typically provocative and interesting as this chapter is, it is none the less frustrating that such ideas are not explored in greater depth and at a more leisurely pace. The transition from feudalism to capitalism forms a background to the heyday of warrening, and a study of the earthworks of warrening might offer a real opportunity for an innovative archaeological contribution to debates about the changing relationships between manorial lords and peasants in the medieval and post-medieval periods. The assertion of manorial lords’ rights to enclose common land for rabbit warrens at the expense of peasants’ ancient rights of common, and the prevention of commoners from catching feral rabbits outside the warren, despite their potential for destroying crops, are important markers in the gradual shift away from social structures based on personal relationships to those based on status and then on class and could profitably be explored at greater length.
The hermeneutics of rabbit warrens – recreational hunting, locations for warrens which flaunted the wealth in meat and fur that they contained, and which rubbed commoners’ noses in the resources they had lost – are too quickly summarized, although they symbolize the ways in which manorial lords both defined themselves and their relationships with commoners in their parishes. Rabbits as a symbol of the relationship not only between man and Christ, but also between man and lord, might be more significant in this context than Williamson allows, in demonstrating the underpinning of lordliness through the piety and authority of the Church. Had the ideas which are so briefly summarized in the concluding chapter been used to underpin the book as a whole, allowing their range and complexity to be explored more slowly, a very good book might have been a great one.
