(^122) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
indicate.^36 At Congham in Norfolk, for example, the coppice was said to be
‘much injured by the timber’,^37 while at Fulmodestone in the same county it
would have been ‘much better if timber was thinner’.^38
We should also note that the ‘great replanting’ tended to extend woodland
and woodland-edge environments into areas from which these had been
absent for several centuries, even millennia: champion districts, or areas of
heath, down and moor. It served, like the spread of hedges, to homogenize
the lowland landscape. It also changed the distribution of some native trees:
beech was now planted far to the north of its natural range, while the Scots
pine, which had apparently died out in lowland England in the Roman
period, and only sparingly planted in gardens in the seventeenth century,
was widely established in parks and on estates in the eighteenth, and began
to act like an indigenous plant once again, spreading of its own accord. By
1844, William Howitt could describe how the ‘sandy heaths of Surrey are
covered in many places with miles of Scots fir’.^39
hunting and shooting
The upsurge in planting was in part fuelled by the development of organized
game shooting, and in a wider sense it was through an obsession with field
sports that great estates made their greatest impact on the environment.
During the eighteenth century shooting became more organized and
formalized, the consequence of a number of factors.^40 At the start of the
century, as we have seen, guns were large and unwieldy by modern standards.
Birds were generally shot at or near the ground, by small groups of friends
accompanied by setters and spaniels. Shooting was a casual pastime, and
it was generally accepted that legally qualified sportsmen could shoot
without asking over a neighbour’s land. By 1760, however, the average
length of guns had dropped to 3' 6", and by 1790 to 2' 6", allowing birds
to be shot in larger numbers, and in the air.^41 Shooting steadily became
more competitive, and shoots involved larger numbers of participants,
culminating in the emergence of the battue in the early nineteenth century,
in which large numbers of birds were driven towards the waiting guns. The
scale of aerial slaughter was then further increased. In the 1840s and ‘50s
French gun-makers developed breach-loading guns, which broke in two for
loading and which used integral cartridges, fired by a hammer which struck
a central pin, a system which was further elaborated through the 1860s and
‘70s by British gunsmiths. In the nineteenth century, shooting became one
of the great pivots around which the social life of the ‘polite’ was organized,
providing one of the spaces where marriages were negotiated and political
and commercial deals clinched.
Greater numbers of birds were now required, and systematic rearing
and preservation were rendered easier by enclosure and the consolidation
of ownership – there was little point in carefully rearing game if it simply
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