(^144) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
which records included this category of land) and 1939.^29 Dudley Stamp,
writing in the 1940s, described the typical condition of ‘the upper fields
bordering a moorland mass’:
Invasion by bracken (Pteris aquiline), often starting from the corners
or margins of a field, and gradually spreading, is a very common
phenomenon, for bracken requires constant cutting to keep it under.
Invasion by gorse (Ulex) is another form of deterioration and so is the
development of brambles.^30
Such changes in the quality of improved and enclosed grazing shade off,
almost imperceptibly, into a decline in the condition of those areas of heath
and moor which had somehow survived enclosure and ‘improvement’ during
the previous centuries. A report on the heaths at Iken in east Suffolk, for
example, drawn up before they were purchased by the Forestry Commission
in 1920, described them as exhibiting ‘very strong growths of heather,
bracken etc with gorse and thorn bushes and a number of pine groups in
scattered form’.^31 By the 1930s, many surviving heaths and commons in the
south and east of England were scrubbing over with whitethorn, blackthorn,
furze and birch. A similar fate was experienced by some of the chalk downs
in southern England, often on the steeper slopes, where the pastures were
steadily colonized by juniper, gorse, spindle, hawthorn and dogwood.
In many cases, this development had additional causes. Most areas of
rough grazing were either parcels of surviving common land or were ‘poors’
allotments’ created, in the manner discussed in Chapter 3, to provide the
poor with firing and – more rarely – with a place to pasture their livestock.
In the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, fewer and
fewer poor people kept livestock, while local farmers made less use of
commons for grazing as the volume of motor traffic increased, for most
examples were crossed by public roads. More importantly, commons and
poors’ allotments ceased to be cut for fuel or fodder. This appears to have
happened gradually through the middle and later decades of the nineteenth
century, and into the early twentieth. Clarke in 1918 noted a number of
places in Norfolk where traditional forms of cutting and mowing persisted,
but in general they had ceased.^32 Bird, describing the use of East Ruston
‘Common’ (really a poors’ allotment) in the same county in 1909, noted
that the cutting of flags, peat and furze for firing had more or less come
to an end, and while fodder was still harvested the use of the common for
grazing had much declined.^33 Some fuel allotments, as already noted, were
never directly exploited by the poor, but rented out from the beginning –
often for shooting – and the income employed for the purchase of coals.
But the number so managed appears to have increased steadily with the
passing decades. In Norfolk, for example, 55 per cent of allotment land was
already, by 1833, used in the latter way; by 1845, 60 per cent; by 1883,
81 per cent; and by 1896, 92 per cent.^34 Even the poorest in society were,
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