sevenTeenTh-CenTury environmenTs: Woodland and WasTe 35The management of commons
With the exception of coppiced woods and many marshes, most of the
environments discussed in this chapter were common land, exploited in diverse
ways, potentially in conflict. Areas of low-lying fen, for example, once dug for
peat, could not easily be used for grazing, for the resultant pools took several
generations to ‘terrestrialize’. It was also important to prevent different users
from taking more than their share of the resources the commons provided.
The intensity of grazing was usually regulated by stinting – that is, by laying
down the numbers and types of stock which different tenants could graze on
the common – or through the rules of levancy and couchancy, which related
the numbers of stock which could be grazed to the amount of arable land
each farmer held, or to the quantity of animals which could be over-wintered
on their farmstead.^77 With materials cut from the common, the situation was
more difficult. In the Middle Ages there was a general idea that commoners
could take what they required to sustain their households, and no more,
but sometimes, and probably increasingly in the course of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, portions were ‘doled’: that is, allocated in the form
of strips to individual commoners, who could then harvest whatever they
required. The entire area of the common, however, continued to be open for
grazing. Pressure on the commons was particularly acute by the middle of the
seventeenth century because the population had been rising steadily through
the previous century and a half. Many were in a poor state. Large areas in
royal forests, especially in southern England, lost their tree cover in this
period and degenerated to open heathland. Problems were exacerbated by the
breakdown of traditional forms of management and regulation, by manorial
courts and forest authorities, as a more commercial, market-orientated
economy developed. In the early seventeenth century, Thomas Blenerhasset,
writing about Horsford heath in Norfolk, complained that the old practice
of allowing each commoner a ‘dole’ from which to take firing was being
abused – people sold what they cut from their dole and then illegally took
whatever they needed from other parts of the heath.^78 Lords and commoners
were frequently at loggerheads; neighbouring communities argued over rights
and access where commons were shared. Those in Cawston in Norfolk, the
subject of a long-running dispute during Elizabeth’s reign over the conflicting
claims of warreners and commoners, were described as having ‘Sand and
gravel... cast upp in such great heapes upon the playne ground... that ther
will noe grasse growe upon the said grownde in a verie long tyme’.^79
Conclusion
Across much of seventeenth-century England, high levels of biodiversity
were associated with a range of habitats which are today often referred to
as ‘semi-natural’, but which were all largely artificial in character, in the