Sphinx

One does have to admire, in a teeth-gritting sort of way, the unscrupulous ingenuity of university press offices: selling a story about the discovery of a rabbit leg bone* at Fishbourne villa dated to the first century CE** by linking it to the Easter Bunny, despite the fact that the earliest mention of the Osterhase comes in an early modern German text and no one has ever suggested either that it was a Roman custom or that it originated in Britain. All credit to Esther Addley in the Grauniad for dutifully summarising all the quotes from the academics, including “this very early rabbit is already revealing new insights into the history of the Easter traditions we are all enjoying this week” from the project leader, Naomi Sykes, and then adding a note of scepticism at the end.

The interesting aspect of this story has been the number of people responding on the Twitter with words to the effect of “didn’t we know this already?” Simple answer: we used to think we did – the rabbit was always included in the list of what the Romans brought to Britain, including in Ladybird books and similar introductions – but then realised that there wasn’t any actual evidence. Of course the Romans in Italy kept rabbits (having brought them back from Spain after their military campaigns there), and agricultural writers like Varro offer plentiful information about how lucrative it can be to have a rabbit warren on one’s suburban villa (it’s one of the elements of the new-fangled get-rich-quick-in-morally-dubious-manner pastio villatica, about which I have recently published a paper) – and so the assumption was naturally made that this must be the obvious means whereby the non-native rabbit made it to Britain as well. Except that no rabbit bones were discovered on Roman sites in Britain, unlike elsewhere, and it was only in the Norman period that we suddenly have copious records of rabbit warrens attached to manorial estates.

So, Normans not Romans – except that the message never got through to anyone who didn’t spend their time studying the subject. It’s comparable to the “whaddya mean there were black people in Roman Britain?!?” controversy of a few years back; academics were amazed that this was news to anyone, and everyone else was amazed at the very idea. It’s revealing of the dominance of out-moded conceptions in most people’s view of the past, and of the tendency to assume the dynamic role of the Romans in bringing civilisation to the barbarians in every possible instance – an assumption shared by earlier historians, simply taking a list of non-native-things-associated-with-the-Romans as their starting point, before they actually examined the evidence for the fauna of Roman Britain.

Without the spurious Easter tie-in, it’s not clear that this is much of a story: the Romans did after all introduce not rabbits but A rabbit (who may well have been a pet), and there have been finds of rabbit bones at other pre-Norman sites, just not in the sorts of quantities that would offer good reason to change the settled view that rabbits were not established as a species in Britain until the 11th century. Except that few people knew that was the settled view, and are now even less likely to take it on board. Personally, to offer my Easter tie-in, I blame Monty Python.

*Strictly speaking, the identification of a rabbit leg bone that was actually discovered in 1964, but who’s counting?

**Giving Radio 4 the opportunity to demonstrate complete ignorance of the precision of dating methods by announcing it was dated to 1 AD, which left me wondering whether there was exciting new evidence of Roman settlement before the Claudian invasion, before realising what must have happened.