sevenTeenTh-CenTury environmenTs: Woodland and WasTe 25or ling (Calluna vulgaris), bell heather (Erica cinera), gorse or furze (Ulex
europaeus) and broom (Sarothamnus scoparius), together with characteristic
grasses such as sheep’s fescue (Festuca ovina), wavy hair grass (Deschampsia
flexuosa) and common bent (Agrostis tenuis) (Figure 6).^25 Some heaths may
always have been open environments, never very extensively colonized by
trees: the vegetation of parts of the East Anglian Breckland, for example,
includes plants like sand catchfly (Silene conica) and yellow medick
(Medicago falcate), which are characteristic of steppe conditions and which
must always have existed in an open landscape. Most, however, developed
from woodland, often in remote antiquity but sometimes during the Anglo-
Saxon period (as with many of the heaths on the Suffolk coast), sometimes
in the course of the Middle Ages (as with Mousehold Heath near Norwich),
occasionally even later.^26 Whatever their origins, all heaths rapidly become
colonized by woodland if they are not intensively managed. In this sense, at
least, they are highly artificial environments.
Most heaths were common land and were intensively exploited by local
populations. They were grazed, by cattle but especially by sheep. Many were
managed as part of a ‘sheep-corn husbandry’ system, with the sheep being
taken down to the arable fields at night, where they were close-folded on
the fallows, in the manner described in the last chapter, treading in urine and
dung and providing a much-needed injection of nitrogen and other nutrients
to the poor local soils.^27 The heaths, in other words, acted as nutrient
reservoirs and the sheep as ‘mobile muck-spreaders’, continuously removing
nutrients and relocating them elsewhere. In addition, from the fifteenth
century (and in the East Anglian Breckland probably earlier) manorial lords
often established rabbit warrens in heathlands.^28 But as well as being grazed,
figure 6 Typical heathland on the east Suffolk coast near Sutton.