An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950

sevenTeenTh-CenTury environmenTs: farmland^57

usually lay intermingled, a circumstance which would have further increased
diversity. ‘Woodland’ districts, with their abundance of hedges and hedgerow
trees, were particularly rich in wildlife, but we should not underestimate
the extent to which ‘champion’ areas also boasted diverse environments,
and this was increasingly the case as enclosure proceeded. But ‘woodland’
and ‘champion’ are problematic terms and concepts whose simplicity can
obscure the rich variety of English landscapes, and much of the diversity of
the countryside was related more to the character of the regional farming
economies that emerged from the fifteenth century than to these older and
more basic variations in field systems and settlement patterns.