This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The European rabbit is a common sight in the British countryside today. Yet it was not always so.
They are not native to the British Isles and are one of the most devastating invasive species. The early history of rabbits in the British Isles tells the captivating story of social change in medieval England. From a rare luxury gifted by kings and the Norman aristocracy, rabbits became more commonplace after the living standards of the poor improved in the years after the Black Death (1346 to 1353).
The satirical depictions of rabbits found in medieval books reveal a gallows humor for social inversion that would not feel out of place today. Rabbits were once thought to have been introduced by the Normans, but archaeologists have since uncovered a rabbit bone from Roman Britain. However, documentary evidence of rabbits in the British Isles has only been found from the Norman period onward.
One of the earliest references survives from the Scilly Isles in the form of a tithe, which was a tenth of produce given to the church as an offering. In 1176, the landowner Richard de Wyka admitted that he had withheld paying tithes on his rabbits because he had believed that "tithes were not payable on things of this kind." His confusion suggests that rabbits were a novelty. Rabbits continued to be sufficiently rare to warrant the king's care and attention in the 1200s.
In 1235, Henry III gave a gift of 10 live rabbits to Geoffrey Despenser, the English landowner and lord of Martley in Worcestershire, out of his park at Guildford. A few years later, the king sent men to catch 30 or 40 rabbits in his Guildford park. They were told only to collect them if the warren was well stocked, indicating that the king didn't want the colony to be depleted.
At the time, rabbits were kept for their meat and fur. Henry III sent out orders for the supply of venison, boars, fish, swans, peacocks, hens, eggs and hares for various feasts in the early 13th century. It was not until his Christmas feast of 1240 that he added rabbits to his requisition list.
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