warren
Pluralwarrens
- 1A network of connected burrows in which rabbits live.
Rabbits had dug a sprawling warren under the old hedge.
Researchers counted the entrances to each warren on the hillside.
Note
The name began with the land, not the burrows: Middle English warenne meant a game park, probably from a Germanic root meaning to ward off or defend, and the rabbits bred there lent the word to their own tunnels. A warren is the whole system rather than a single hole; a large one can have twenty or more entrances, not all of them in use.
- 2A mazelike place of passages or rooms where it is easy to get lost, especially an overcrowded one.
Behind the main square lies a warren of narrow alleys and courtyards.
The newsroom had become a crowded warren of cubicles and stacked boxes.
Note
In its figurative use the word usually takes of and a plural: a warren of rooms, a warren of dirt roads and adobe, the warren of narrow passageways under a London Underground station. What it takes from the rabbits' burrows is branching and crowding together, which is why it suits places that are confusing and cramped at once.
- 3An area of land authorized by law for keeping, breeding, and hunting small game, especially rabbits.
The estate's warren supplied rabbits for the kitchen and sport for the owner's guests.
The keeper patrolled the warren at night to catch poachers.
Note
This warren was managed land with a trade of its own: the men who kept one were warrenders. It could put poor ground to use; Richard John Lloyd Price's Rabbits for Profit and Rabbits for Powder (1888) describes one on a mountaintop flat, the very worst land he ever saw. Unlike the burrows themselves, it had owners, keepers and legal bounds.
- 4A legal right to keep and hunt small game over an area, like free warren but more limited, for example not extending to land held by freeholders.
The charter granted the bishop a warren on his manors, though not over his freeholders' land.
Warren grants contained prohibitions on fishing more frequently than forest grants did.
1988, David Maxwell Walker, A Legal History of Scotland: The beginnings to A.D. 1286Note
Land records treat it as a franchise, claimed by charter from the king: Henry de Greye claims many franchises in Toveton, that is to say a warren. Lawyers told a warren in gross, held on its own, from one appendant or appurtenant to land. Grants had their own terms, and in Scotland, David Maxwell Walker notes, they barred fishing more often than forest grants did.
Less common meaning
- 5The class of small game, such as hares, pheasants and stoats, as distinct from beasts of the chase such as deer, bears and foxes.
His charter let him hunt beasts of warren on the manor but left the deer to the king.
Grouse are not birds of warren ( 2 ); and trespass on a free warren will not lie for shooting them .
1844, Archibald John Stephens, George SharswoodNote
Old game law sorted wild animals into legal classes, and this one stands in fixed phrases beside forest and chase: beasts and fowls of forest, chase, and warren. Which creatures counted could matter in court; Archibald John Stephens and George Sharswood's The Law of Nisi Prius (1844) holds that grouse are not birds of warren. Outside legal history, small game is the plain term.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English warenne, from Anglo-Norman and Old Northern French warenne (compare Old French guarenne, garenne, “game-park”), probably ultimately from Frankish *warjan, from Proto-Germanic *warjaną (“ward off, defend against”); compare also Old French warir, guarir, borrowed from the same Germanic root. Alternatively, it may come from Gaulish *warrennā (“enclosed area”), from *warros (“stick, post”), Proto-Celtic *warrā (“post, prop”).