(^42) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
nucleated villages, and of extensive open fields; the latter characterized by
more dispersed patterns of settlement, ‘irregular’ field systems and early
enclosure, as well as by larger amounts of woodland.^19 Many writers on
historical ecology, like many landscape historians, have emphasized this
distinction. In Lovegrove’s words, the champion landscape was rich in
‘weeds, invertebrates and flowering plants’, but poor in cover. The wide,
empty fields, while providing rich feeding grounds, ‘except for open-ground
species such as brown hare, skylark, corncrake, quail, and grey partridge...
presented limited scope for supporting a wider range of breeding species’.^20
They were landscapes ‘where trees and woodland were scarce’.^21 The densely
hedged and well-wooded landscapes of ‘woodland’ districts, in contrast,
provided a much wider range of opportunities for wildlife. To some extent
all this was true. But the difference between the two types of countryside
can be exaggerated.
To begin with, champion landscapes were seldom as bare and as uniformly
arable in character as some writers suggest. The villages themselves contained
hedged closes and pollarded trees. More importantly, on lighter land, easily
leached of nutrients, large areas of grazing land were usually retained,
beyond the margins of the cultivated area, in the form of the heaths and
downs already described, to provid feed for the folding flocks. There were,
moreover, grassy access ways within the fields which, together with the
narrow unploughed ‘baulks’ which separated the individual strips, provided
a place where species characteristic of the adjacent heaths and downs could
survive.^22 In chalkland areas the steeper slopes often developed as steps or
terraces, partly a natural side effect of ploughing strips parallel with the
contours but in some cases, perhaps, the result of deliberate excavation,
intended to facilitate ploughing in these circumstances. The sheer banks,
which could be six metres or more in height, provided some shelter for
mammals and nesting sites for birds while shrubs such as hawthorn often
seeded both here and in some cases on the unploughed baulks, providing
further cover.
Even on heavier and more fertile soils, in the Midlands, champion
landscapes were never entirely under the plough. In some districts, as on
the Lias clays in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, for example, much
of the land was so badly affected by seasonal waterlogging that numerous
ribbons and pockets of pasture survived within the fields. In western
Northamptonshire, for example, a third or more of the land might thus
consist of unhedged parcels of grassland, managed for hay or grazed under
the supervision of shepherds when the surrounding furlongs were under
crops (Figure 8). The documents drawn up when the open fields here were
enclosed in the eighteenth century imply that some also grew gorse, thorns
and other shrubs.^23 Hedges were also more common in these landscapes
than we usually assume. Parish boundaries were often hedged, as at East
Farndon in Northamptonshire in 1684;^24 hedges sometimes surrounded the
open fields, as at Upper Boddington in the same county, or the meadows;^25
while early maps sometimes show short or discontinuous fragments of
elle
(Elle)
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