Weasels were common in my early days, and rabbits comparatively scarce, though now sent off in thousands to the Midland towns. Until the trapping began, the weasels kept them down; but the weasels mostly perished in the traps, and after that the rabbits multiplied. Devonshire hedges are inordinately large, and take up a great deal of ground. In my early days people used to say they could increase their acreage quite ten per cent. by doing away with hedges. But when they tried it, they generally found that they lost more in shelter than they gained in space: their fields were swept by every wind that blew. They might have learnt a lesson from the Scilly Islands, where people were putting in hedges then, to cut their fields up into little squares for growing things in shelter. Three of my fields here are eight fields on the Tithe Map, dated 1841. Five hedges have gone: three of them merely wasted space, but the other two gave shelter that is wanted now. Here in Wreyland Manor there were many more hedges than in most places of this size. They were not put here for the sake of shelter, but from four people’s perversity four centuries ago. On the death of the last Lord Dynham in 1501, his property went to his four sisters and their heirs, as he left no children of his own. Apart from Wreyland, he had many manors in different parts of England. Instead of arranging his manors in four groups and taking one group each, they each took a fourth part of each manor and of each tenement in each manor; and by sales and marriages these fractions of the tenements passed into many different owners’ hands. And whenever a tenement was divided, each fraction had to be equipped with a fair share of every sort of land--garden, orchard, meadow, arable, pasture, wood and heath--so that it generally was formed of several patches of ground some way apart. Each of these patches had to be enclosed, and was enclosed in the usual Devonshire way with very big hedges.