SC - rabbits and hares

[Stephen Bloch]

> > >if you are in england between the romans and the normans then
> > >rabbits are out.  the romans wiped them out, the normans reintroduced
> > >them.  not sure what date the romans finally manged to wipe them out
> > >but certainly before the 600AD start of SCA period.
> > 
> > >keep well
> > >jays
> > 
> > If anyone knows _how_ the Romans managed to wipe out rabbits, even in
> > such a relatively small area as England, there are a few thousand
> > farmers in Australia who would be _very_ interested!
> > 
> > Aramanth
> 
> I'd have to say that if the Romans managed to "wipe out" rabbits in
> Britain, it was presumably prior to 410 C.E. .
> 
> On the other hand, hares appear to have been unaffected throughout. True,
> they aren't the same as rabbits, but they are largely interchangable from
> a culinary standpoint, apart from their size.

Miscellaneous bits of information from various secondary sources:

1) From C. Anne Wilson's _Food and Drink in Britain_,

"The hunt scenes on Castorware pottery, with running figures of dogs,
hares and deer in low relief, reflect the continuing popularity of the
sport in the third and fourth centuries AD.  The Nene valley potteries,
where Castorware was made, were on the edge of thickly wooded hunting
country...."
"One creature which disappeared temporarily [during the early medieval
period] was the rabbit.  The _leporaria_ were lost when the villas
decayed, and escapers were unable to withstand the many predators in the
vast forest tracts of early medieval Britain...."
[in the later medieval period] 
"Rabbits had been reintroduced from France, and their earliest
settlement on islands such as Lundy and the Scillies towards the end of
the twelfth century was followed in due course by the establishment of
coneygarths on the mainland.  As the forest receded and beasts of prey
became rarer, escapers from the rabbit warrens bred more readily
outside, and eventually there was a large wild population to supplement
the enclosed groups.  In Scotland, too, every burgh soon had its rabbit
warren and warrener.  But highlanders had no truck with coneys, and
instead coursed the native mountain hare...."
"Hares and coneys were the poor man's game, coursed on foot with
dogs.... Henry VIII had to forbid the sport for a time, for hares in
the snow were too easy a prey, and in his day they had become 'decayed
and almost destroyed' at the hands of the hunters...."
"Coneys had continued in France from Roman days... By the sixth century
AD domestic rabbits were being bred for their litters in French monastic
courtyards.  But when they eventually reached England again, they were
usually enclosed in warrens....

2) From _The Complete Book of Greyhounds_, ed. Julia Barnes,

"... if the Romans did not bring the Greyhound with them, they imported
something even more important -- the brown hare.  The indigenous hare of
the British Isles is the blue hare, which lives in high uplands in
Britain and everywhere in Ireland.  The Romans obviously considered the
bigger and faster European or brown hare as a more suitable quarry for
their Greyhounds, and it has flourished in the lowlands and downland of
Britain ever since.

3) From "Twelfth Century Greyhounds in Merry Old England", by Laurel E.
Drew, in _Celebrating Greyhounds -- the magazine_,

"... greyhounds as such were termed _leporariis_.  The entire document
[the 1183 _Boldon Book_, a census similar to the _Domesday Book_ but
covering northeastern England], written in Latin, was issued by the
ecclesiastical scholars in the bishop's retinue."
The article (and presumably the _Boldon Book_) discusses using greyhounds
to hunt deer, but doesn't mention using them for hare or rabbit, aside
from the etymological clue in the name _leporariis_.

Summing all this up, it appears that
(a) One kind of hare was native to at least parts of the British Isles.
(b) Another kind of hare, and possibly the coney or rabbit as well, was
introduced by the Romans from Europe.
(c) Coneys were largely or entirely wiped out by British predators 
(which presumably found them an easy target by comparison with the
larger, faster hares) when the Romans left.
(d) Coneys were re-introduced from Europe in the 12th or 13th century.

					mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib
                                                 Stephen Bloch
                                           sbloch at panther.adelphi.edu
					 http://www.adelphi.edu/~sbloch/
                                        Math/CS Dept, Adelphi University