94 THE PEASANT'S YEAR
sights. No peasant was allowed to have one, or to kill these birds
however numerous they were, and however harmful to his
crops.1 After a monotonous fare of salted fish or meat the dove
was a great delicacy, and from Norman times onward the birds
had been protected in the interests of the great. Large dove-
houses, sometimes holding hundreds of birds, were built and
from thence hordes of these voracious feeders descended on the
unfortunate peasants' fields taking their fill and fattening them-
selves for the lord's table at his men's expense. Little wonder
that the dove-house became one of the most hated landmarks of
the lord's position and of the subjection of the villagers. Both
doves and rabbits, however, found their way into the hands of
others than their owners, and men were constantly presented at
manorial courts for taking rabbits with snare or ferret, or for
catching pigeons with nets or divers traps (diversa ingenia)?
Many kinds of wild animals were also abundant, but forbidden
to the villager, for by the thirteenth century most manorial lords
had got from the king a grant of free-warren3 which prevented
anyone entering their lands to hunt wild animals. The legal im-
plications of such rights became very tangled in the course of
time: no one might follow the hunt of a fox or a hare into warren
land; but, on the other hand, to follow the hunt of a deer, in such
circumstances, was no trespass, for deer were "beasts of the
forest", and not "blasts of the warren". Further, the lack of any
clearly marked boundaries delimiting a warren made matters
more difficult. The forest had its " pale "or fence, but the warren
lay open. Within its confines, however, the hare, rabbit, pheasant,
and every kind of bird, as well as many kinds of vermin were all
plentiful, and it was impossible to prevent the peasant, either
out of sheer desperation or sheer devilment, from taking what he
could get whenever the chance offered.
Yet another source of supply was at the peasant's very door.
The rivers were full of fish—sometimes carefully preserved, but
1 Y.B. 7 Ed. II, 183 n.
2 For illustrations and much information, see A. O. Cooke's Dovecotes^ and
A.A.S.R. xxxm, 138 and 368, and many references there.
* This is an excellent example of F. W. Maitland's dictum that when we
read in medieval times of a man having a free this or that, in reality what was
meant was that he was thereby free to oppress somebody else. So here: the
lord's "free-warren" obviously was anything but free to the villager.