> This Elizabethan convenience food, however, was not available to all. “Dovecotes for the time were a badge of the elite,” says John Verburg, a dovecote devotee and self-styled “Jane Goodall of pigeons.” During the reign of Elizabeth I, a pigeon tower was a privilege reserved only for feudal lords. And this law was enforced: Cooke wrote of a case in England in 1577 in which a “tenant who had erected a dovecote on a royal manor was ordered by the Court of Exchequer to demolish it.”

This is actually how a lot of manorial/serf institutions worked. You weren't allowed to build anything unapproved that might compete with the services "offered" by the local lord. In many places, building an oven was illegal as it would undercut the dues the lord would be paid for using his.

Most pigeons were probably sold to the local peasants, and the rules were about enforcing state monopoly.