Cunicularium - Difference Between A Warren and A Cunicularium

Difference Between A Warren and A Cunicularium

Although the words have become nearly synonymous in modern English, the two institutions followed parallel, but separate paths in their development. The common, or domestic warren developed out of the free warren hunting franchise. This was because only by creating a close, or enclosed area for the freeholder's domestic stock of rabbits, could that person claim ownership of the rabbits in it. A domestic rabbit which escaped into a nearby free warren could not be claimed as property, even if the freeholder held title to the soil over which the warren extended, unless that individual also possessed the royal warrant of them, or unless it had escaped from a close. Such a close was called a "cony-garth". A rabbit escaped from the cony-garth was the property of the freeholder.

Note that in the following quote from a medieval law forbidding commoners the means to hunt, warrens are still distinct from connigries.

That divers artificers, labourers, servants, and grooms, keep greyhounds and other dogs, and on the holidays, when good Christian people be at church hearing devine service, they go hunting in parks, warrens, and connigries of lords and others, to the very great destruction of the same; and sometimes under such colour they make their assemblies, conferences, and conspiracies to rise, and disobey their allegiance.