Abstract
LUTON MUSEUM has performed a useful service in publishing a summary of “Bedfordshire Vermin Payments”, extracted by J. Steele Elliot from the records of parish officials during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. A recent note in these columns referred to the exceedingly limited distribution of the pine-marten and polecat in Britain at the present day; but up to 1808 the pine-marten was being killed, at 2d. a head, in Bedfordshire, and in forty-two parishes payment was claimed on a total of more than 6,000 polecats, the most recent record in these accounts being in 1835. It is a sorry tale of extermination.
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Destruction of Vermin in Bedfordshire. Nature 138, 614 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/138614c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/138614c0