sevenTeenTh-CenTury environmenTs: Woodland and WasTe 21thinly scattered with trees and at the other dense and continuous stands
of pollards. According to some writers, by late medieval times wood-
pastures survived best where portions had been enclosed by manorial lords,
and managed more intensively as deer parks – the private venison farms
and hunting grounds briefly described in the previous chapter. Where they
continued to be exploited as common ‘waste’, in contrast, they tended to
degenerate more rapidly because young planting could not be protected
by fences, which would have reduced the amount of grazing available to
other commoners.^8 But in some areas at least custom allowed commoners
to erect temporary enclosures for planting, usually in locations around the
margins of a common, close to the farms that often existed there.^9 Wood-
pasture also survived well where there was a good market for firewood, as
in the hinterland of London, and where manorial control was particularly
strong, in a few cases giving the lord the right to the poles from pollards,
so that tenants could only crop them at a price. Both circumstances appear
to have applied to the vast tracts of wooded common on the heavy clay
soils of south-east Hertfordshire. In 1695 it was said that there were 24,000
pollards, mostly hornbeams, on the 1,186 acre-Cheshunt Common: that is,
a density of around 50/hectare.^10 All this said, while wood-pastures were
still extensive in some districts in the seventeenth century, especially in royal
figure 4 A wood-pasture common shown on a map of Gressenhall, Norfolk,
surveyed in 1624. The pollards are divided into named ‘plantings’, bearing the name
of the tenant who maintained and exploited them.