An anti-fowling law was repealed because it starved the poor who hunted birds

Evidence

A 1534 law restricting fowling forbade taking eggs of mallards, widgeon, teal, and wild geese from the fens and capturing the birds themselves by “nets and other engines” from June to August when the adults were moulting and could not fly from their captors. Because the latter restriction took its toll on the poor, who often lived by their cunning in surprising water birds, it was repealed sixteen years later. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 295

Categorization

• CANDY: A 1534 law protecting moulting waterfowl was scrapped because the poor depended on catching them — a vivid, tweetable bit of early environmental-law history.
• XREF: Early conservation-as-class-conflict recurs across the polyad’s law-and-institutions thread — regulation aimed at poor subsistence counters richer extraction.