that “it shalbe lawfull for any man to kill any swine that comes into his corne”; the dead animal was to be returned to its owner only after payment had been made for damages to crops. The inadequacy of this solution is suggested by the proliferation of swine laws in the ensuing years. Colonists were glad to have swine reproducing and fattening themselves in forested areas distant from English settlements – where only Indians would have to deal with their depredations – but towns tried to restrain the animals whenever they wandered too near English fields. By 1635, Massachusetts had ordered towns to construct animal pounds to which untended swine could be taken whenever they were found within one mile of an English farm. A year later, the Court went so far as to declare an open season on any stray swine: unless pigs were restrained by fence, line, or pigkeeper, it was lawful “for any man to take them, either alive or dead, as hee may.” Anyone so doing got one half the value of the captured animal, while the Commonwealth of Massachusetts claimed the other; the owner got nothing. Ownership rights to swine were thus much more circumscribed than similar rights to cattle. The law produced so much protest from pig-keeping colonists that it was repealed two years later, but the battle of the swine nevertheless continued for many years. Complaints against pigs were a near constant feature of colony and town court proceedings, where the animals were sometimes portrayed almost as a malevolent force laying siege to defenseless settlements. The Massachusetts Court in 1658, for instance, reported that “many children are exposed to great daingers of losse of life or limbe through the ravenousnese of swyne, and elder persons to no smale inconveniencies.” To modern ears, such statements perhaps seem a little comic, but that reaction is surely one of ignorance: swine could indeed be vicious creatures, and no animal caused more annoyances or disputes among colonists.14
Ultimately, swine were relegated either to farmyard sties, where they could be fed corn, alewives, and garbage, or to relatively isolated areas, where they could feed as they wished and do little harm. Favorite swine-raising locations were coastal peninsulas and offshore islands, where the animals were free to do their worst without interfering with English crops. In the late 1630s, both Roger Williams and John Winthrop were moving swine onto islands in Narragansett Bay, and colonists elsewhere did likewise. Along the coast, the animals wreaked havoc with oyster banks and other Indian shelfish-gathering sites, but caused little trouble to the English. Roger Williams described how “the English swine dig and root these Clams wheresoever they come, and watch the low water (as the Indian women do).” In one important sense, then, English pigs came into direct competition with Indians for food: according to Williams, “Of all English Cattell, the Swine (as also because of their filthy dispositions) are most hateful to all Natives, and they call them filthy cut throats.” Pigs thus became both the agents and the emblems for a European colonialism that was systematically reorganizing Indian ecological relationships.15
In the vicinity of English settlements, regulations were eventually passed requiring that hogs be yoked so that they would be unable to squeeze through fences, and ringed through the nose so that they would be prevented from rooting out growing plants. But the chief goal of swine regulations was to keep uncontrolled pigs away from settlements. At a heated New Haven town meeting in 1650, farmers declared that, if swine were allowed to forage freely, “they would plant no corne, for it would be eaten up.” The compromise solution was an order that no pigs should run loose unless driven at least eight miles from town center. Other communities passed similar regulations. And yet driving swine to the edges of town was obviously a temporary solution that lasted only so long as a town had edges beyond which were unenclosed common lands where pigs could run. Moreover, this “solution” tended to provoke conflict between towns when swine crossed town boundaries to descend on other settlements. Massachusetts Bay in 1637 pointed to the long-term solution of this problem by disclaiming any direct responsibility for the regulation of swine and delegating that burden to individual towns. “If any damage bee done by any swine,” it said, “the whole towne shalbee lyable to the parties action to make full satisfaction.” By making the control of swine a community responsibility, the Court redefined the property boundaries that applied to this particular animal so as to ensure its proper regulation. As the landscape gradually became peopled with settlements, the effect of legal liabilities was increasingly to restrain the movements of wandering hogs, until finally the beasts were more or less entirely confined to fenced farmyards.16
What became true of swine also became true of horses, sheep, and cattle: each was allocated its separate section of a settlement’s lands. The interactions among domesticated grazing animals, demographic expansion, and English property systems had the effect not only of bounding the land with relatively permanent fences but of segregating the uses to which that land was put. Even the earliest colonial towns had divided their territories according to intended function, and colonists had been granted land accordingly. Fences thus marked off not only the map of a settlement’s property rights, but its economic activities and ecological relationships as well. At the center of a family’s holdings was its house lot, around which a host of activities revolved, most of them controlled by women: food processing, cloth, and tool making, poultry keeping, vegetable, and herb gardening, and domestic living generally. Nearby were the outbuildings where animals spent their winters and some of their summer nights, as well as the various lots in which sheep, horses, milch cows, and pigs could be fed when not free to graze. In order for such animals to survive the winter, hay had to be cut in mid- to late summer, dried, and rationed out to them from November through early spring. This necessitated reserving large tracts of land for mowing, an activity which generally took place along the banks of streams, in salt marshes, and anywhere else that grass could be found. Aside from grain fields, all other lands were committed to grazing, including the upland woodlots where families cut their fuel and lumber. The key functional boundary in an English settlement was always the one between pasture and nonpasture: it was because the barrier between these two had to be so rigid that colonial towns presented such a different appearance from that of earlier Indian villages.17
English colonists reproduced these broad categories of land use wherever and however they established farms. Early land divisions had been done communally, each town deciding what agricultural activity would take place in different parts of its territory. Later divisions were generally made through the abstract mechanism of land speculation and tended to ignore both the ecological characteristics of a given tract of land and its intended agricultural use in order to facilitate the buying and selling that brought profits to speculators. This marked an important new way of perceiving the New England landscape, one that turned land itself into a commodity, but from the point of view of ecological practices, it merely transferred land-use decisions from the town to the individual land-owner. Every farm family had to have its garden, its cornfields, its meadows, and its pastures, no matter who decided where they would be located and how they would be regulated. In so dividing their lands, colonists began to create the new ecological mosaic that would gradually transform New England ecosystems.18
Livestock not only defined many of the boundaries colonists drew but provided one of the chief reasons for extending those boundaries onto new lands. Indian villages had depended for much of their meat and clothing on wild foraging mammals such as deer and moose, animals whose populations were much less concentrated than their domesticated successors. Because there had been fewer of them in a given amount of territory, they had required less food and had had a smaller ecological effect on the land that fed them. The livestock of the colonists, on the other hand, required more land than all other agricultural activities put together. In a typical town, the land allocated to them was from two to ten times greater than that used for tillage. As their numbers increased – something that happened quite quickly – the animals came to exert pressure even on these large amounts of land.19
Before examining the ecological relationships of domesticated animals, it is well to remember their economic relationships. Livestock very early came to play a role in the New England economy comparable to that of fish and lumber: they proved to be a most reliable commodity. By 1660, Samuel Maverick, who had been one of the earliest English settlers in Massachusetts Bay, could point to increased numbers of grazing animals as one of the most significant changes in New England towns since his arrival. “In the yeare 1626 or there-abouts,” he said,
there was not a Neat Beast Horse or sheepe in the Countrey