An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950

The indusTrial revoluTion^75

prevented the periodic dearths which had formerly served to check population
growth, while the development of a more diversified economy encouraged
earlier marriage, and thus higher fertility rates. In addition, although it is true
that living conditions in many industrializing and urbanizing areas were poor,
encouraging disease, on the whole the population was warmer and healthier
than ever before as a consequence of the increased availability of fuel and
clothing resulting from the expansion of coal and textile production. More
people meant a greater demand for food, and for manufactured products,
further stimulating production in both the agricultural and industrial sectors.
There were innumerable other connections.
The reasons why this take-off into modernity occurred in England
earlier than in any other country are complex, and cannot be discussed in
detail here. But some of the key drivers of change need to be highlighted
because they have a direct relevance to the principal themes of this book.
First, both the agricultural and industrial ‘revolutions’, although marking a
step change, nevertheless had their own ‘prehistories’. Not only were major
innovations in agriculture made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
as we have seen in the case of water meadows.^6 In addition, the same period
witnessed a massive expansion in coal production and the scale of small-
scale workshop production – what historians sometimes describe as ‘proto-
industrialization’ – in textiles, metalworking and much else.^7 Approaching
Halifax in West Yorkshire in the 1720s Daniel Defoe noted the density of
housing:

This business is the clothing trade, for the convenience of which the

houses are thus scattered and spread upon the sides of the hills... even

from the bottom to the top; the reason is this; such has been the bounty

of nature in this otherwise frightful country, that two things essential to

the business, as well as to the ease of the people are found here... I mean

coals and running water upon the tops of the highest hills.^8

But proto-industrialization was by no means confined to the north and west
of England. In the early eighteenth century the Weald of Kent was a major
centre for iron working, while East Anglia was one of the main areas of
textile weaving, carried on in cottages and small workshops. Both these
local industries, like most others, had ancient roots, but they expanded
considerably in Tudor and Stuart times.
The two ‘revolutions’ had prehistories in more important yet more
complicated ways. England had long possessed characteristics, shared to
some extent with other countries in western Europe, which predisposed it
to take-off into the modern world: a society organized around individuals
and nuclear families, rather than extended kin groups; one in which private
property was established at all social levels; and in which a mercantile
and artisan class was numerically and economically important. These
characteristics were exacerbated by the political upheavals of the seventeenth