(^30) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
Common pastures
There was much permanent grassland in the seventeenth-century landscape.
It took a range of forms, some now rare, but the most important distinction
was between meadow and pasture. Meadows were cut in mid-summer to
produce hay, used as fodder to keep livestock through the winter when the
grass does not grow.^54 Pastures, in contrast, were directly grazed by stock.
In reality, this distinction was always somewhat blurred. Meadows were
opened to grazing after the hay had been cut in June or July; while in post-
medieval times, when meadows became less restricted to alluvial soils,
fields were often used alternately as meadow and pasture. Meadows were
usually individually occupied, rather than exploited in common, and so for
convenience are treated as farmland and discussed in the next chapter. There
were also, even in the Middle Ages, some areas of enclosed private pasture,
occupied in severalty, and these increased steadily from the fifteenth century,
as England’s agriculture became more complex and regionally specialized.
But common pastures remained far more extensive, often shading off,
without clear demarcation, into heaths, wood-pastures and other varieties
of unploughed ground. Most examples occupied thin, acidic, waterlogged or
infertile soils unsuitable for arable farming.
Common pastures were permanent and long-lived, and most were rich
in species which survived being destroyed by grazing livestock because they
are low-growing – like hoary plantain (Plantago media) and wild thyme
(Thymus praecox) – or because they are unpalatable, such as mat grass
(Nardus stricta).^55 Variations in soils and climate ensured innumerable
differences in their composition. Dwarf sedge (Carex humilis), for example,
is characteristic of limestones in south-west England: Somerset hair-grass
(Koeleria vallesiana) of south-facing slopes in the Mendips.^56 In general
terms, acid grass lands – which shade off gradually into heath – were and
are less botanically diverse than calcareous ones, probably because acid
substrates are a relatively rare and recent environment, looked at across the
scale of evolutionary time, so that fewer plants have evolved to flourish on
them.^57 The most diverse grasslands are thus found on limestone uplands
and escarpments in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Cumbria and Durham, and in the
Cotswolds, or on chalk. Some areas of common grassland also existed on
neutral soils, especially on poorly draining clays – the numerous greens and
commons of ‘woodland’ countryside, but also scattered among the furlongs
of ‘champion’ country in the Midland ‘shires’. These tended to carry a less
floristically rich sward, although varied enough compared with modern
commercial grassland.
Chalk downland still covers extensive areas of southern England, especially
in Wiltshire, on Salisbury Plain and Cranbourne Chase. Significant areas
also remain on the North and South Downs; in Berkshire; and along the
escarpment of the Chilterns running through Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire
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