(^118) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
and sold, the rents and obligations attached to it simply passing to the new
proprietor. Only the home farm of the manorial lord – the ‘demesne’ – was
his absolute property in the modern sense.
The landed estate began to emerge in the course of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, alongside modern concepts of ownership. In some
cases, lords managed to convert customary tenancies into forms of tenure
- particular types of ‘copyhold’ – which meant, in effect, that they were
freehold owners, and that their tenants were tenants in the modern sense. In
addition, large landowners were always on the lookout for new additions to
their estate, properties which could be purchased from other freeholders on
the fringes of or, in particular, intermixed with their own land. In 1813 the
agent of the Blickling estate in Norfolk described how various parcels had
been purchased over the previous years ‘some of which are so situated as
to have been an eye sore from the Mansion house till Lord Suffield became
possessed of them’.^15 As an earlier steward put it in 1773, ‘If I hear of any
uncultivated land or otherwise if adjoining part of your Lordships Estate to
dispose of I will apply after it and acquaint your Lordship of it immediately’.^16
Growth of large properties was encouraged by the Dissolution of the
Monasteries in 1539, and in the later seventeenth century by legal changes - the development of the entail and the strict settlement, which made the
figure 23 Blickling in north Norfolk, a typical medium-sized landed estate, in
c.1840. Note the size of the park relative to the property as a whole, and the extent
of woods and plantations. Great Wood is partly medieval in origin: the others were
all planted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some small, outlying portions
of the property are omitted.