seTTing T he sCene: The naTure of naTure^7between habitat and ownership were often close: coppiced woodland was
thus always a private land, a part of the lord’s demesne.
The broad distinction between ‘woodland’ and ‘champion’ regions,
never as clear-cut as historians sometimes imply, was eroded through
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the progress of enclosure: that is,
the conversion of intermixed holdings farmed according to communal
routines and regulations, into enclosed fields held as absolute private
property.^31 Enclosure was intimately associated with the development of
a more commercial system of farming. Specialized livestock production
was, in particular, difficult on splintered holdings, scattered through the
open fields. Some degree of agrarian specialization had existed in the early
Middle Ages, even in the lowlands, and there was always more scope for
pastoral than for arable pursuits in upland areas.^32 But most medieval
peasants concentrated on the production of the grain upon which, in the last
analysis, their survival depended. Even the ‘demesnes’ of major landowners
were often grain factories, supplying hungry urban markets. Agrarian
specialization increased after the Black Death, however, as average farm
size began to rise, and as the economy generally became more complex and
sophisticated.^33 The old forms of customary tenure gradually evolved into
a range of ‘copyholds’, some of which effectively recognized local lords as
owners of their manors and their tenants as tenants in the modern sense;
others providing farmers with a greater degree of security; and some giving
them so many proprietorial rights that they effectively joined the ranks
of the small numbers of freeholders who had always existed among the
peasant population. Such yeomen farmers, as well as many of the gentry
and aristocracy, sought ways to increase their profits, and the size of their
properties, as a more complex and market-orientated economy developed.
While many lowland districts continued to focus on grain production, others
came to specialize in livestock farming, in dairying, or in fattening sheep and
cattle which had often been reared elsewhere, in remote upland regions. The
result was the development of a number of discrete farming regions, with their
own economies and ways of living, and to some extent their own distinctive
ecologies (Figure 2).^34 By the seventeenth century, large parts of both south-
eastern and western England were devoted to pastoral farming, with three-
quarters or more of their land under grass. They were mainly ‘woodland’
districts, where much farmland had always taken the form of enclosed fields,
or comprised open fields of ‘irregular’ form which could be enclosed with
relative ease in a gradual, piecemeal fashion.^35 In the champion Midlands, in
contrast, although the soils were often well suited to livestock farming, the
large and complex open fields were more difficult to enclose. Large areas were
laid to grass but arable continued to dominate the landscape, at least in the
period up to 1650. We should emphasize, however, that not all ‘woodland’
areas developed pastoral economies. Some, like the Chiltern Hills, remained
important cereal-growing districts: there was no neat correspondence of
ancient landscape structures and post-medieval farming types.