(^106) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
the countryside around Horncastle in the heart of the Wolds was ‘the want
of singing birds’:
We are just now in the season when they sing most. Here, in all this
country, I have seen and heard only about four sky-larks, and not one
other singing bird of any description.^71
The spread of hedges in champion districts has often been discussed. Less
attention has been paid to changes in the field boundaries of old-enclosed,
‘woodland’ districts, especially in south-east England and East Anglia. Most of
these areas occupied relatively heavy clay soils, and in the seventeenth century
many had been involved to some extent in cattle farming. They contained
vast numbers of species-rich hedges and farmland trees, and numerous woods
and commons; they were among the most biologically diverse landscapes
in England. Considerable effort and investment were now directed towards
simplifying and tidying these environments, as the spread of coal and rising
population put a premium on producing food rather than fuel, and as the
changing geographies of agrarian production encouraged conversion of land
from pasture to tilth. Small, irregularly shaped fields were inconvenient for
ploughing; tall hedges and hedgerow trees shaded the crops, harboured vermin
and took up potentially productive land. Fields were thus amalgamated on
a large scale, hedges straightened and replanted with hawthorn (Figure 21).
The rector of Rayne in Essex observed in the 1790s how on one farm in his
parish ‘the fields were over-run with wood’, but ‘since Mr Rolfe has purchased
them, he has improved them by grubbing up the hedgerows and laying the
fields together’.^72 In 1791, a government enquiry into the state of the nation’s
timber supplies was initiated which asked a number of questions, including:
‘Whether the Growth of Oak Timber in Hedge Rows is generally encouraged,
or whether the grubbing up of Hedge Rows for the enlarging of fields,
and improving Arable Ground, is become common in those Counties?’.^73
Grubbing out was reported to be widespread, especially in the south and east
of the country. One respondent from Suffolk stated that ‘Much Timber and
the Improvement of Arable Land are incompatible. Arable land in Suffolk
is improved, and therefore timber is lessened’.^74 He added: ‘Underwood,
particularly Blackthorn Bushes, in Hedge Rows that spread Two or Three
Rods wide, is the true nursery of Oak Timber, but such Rows are a dead Loss
and Nuisance in a well cultivated Country’.^75
The density of farmland trees, and especially of pollards, was reduced
more generally. Large landowners regarded pollarding as an unsightly and
backward practice. ‘Let the axe fall with undistinguished severity on all
these mutilated heads’, urged Thomas Ruggles in 1796 in the Annals of
Agriculture, while William Marshall declared that pollards were ‘unsightly;
they encumber and destroy the Hedge they stand in (especially those whose
stems are short), and occupy spaces which might, in general, be better filled
by timber trees; and, at present, it seems to be the prevailing fashion to clear
elle
(Elle)
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