(^88) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
faster than the coppicing of woodland, which was still continuing on some
scale at the end of the nineteenth century.
As I have already emphasized, coal was a high-density material which
was difficult and uneconomic to transport. William Harrison, writing at the
very end of the sixteenth century, noted how its use was just beginning to
spread ‘from the forge into the kitchen and hall, as may appear already in
most cities and towns that lie about the coast, where they have little other
fuel except it be turf or hassock’ [my italics].^67 This importance of water
transport was still being noted by Pehr Kalm in 1748, who observed that
coal could be found in London, and was widely burned in villages within
a fourteen-mile radius, but ‘in places to which they had not any flowing
water to carry boats loaded with coals’ the population continued to burn
wood – mainly from ‘trees they had cut down in repairing hedges’ – or ‘fuel
of some other kind, as bracken, furze etc’.^68 The marked improvements in
roads which took place in the course of the eighteenth century may well
have encouraged the wider use of coal, but it was the creation of the canal
network and the spread of railways that ensured the demise of traditional
fuels; the longer it took for improved transport to reach an area, the
longer traditional fuels were exploited. Well into the nineteenth century
most of the kilns on the land-locked Bedfordshire brick fields were fired
using heathland vegetation.^69 But coal began to replace gorse and heather
here following the arrival of the local rail lines after 1838. The Duke of
Bedford’s steward, Thomas Bennett, recalled in 1869 how ‘Furze used to
be grown for a demand for brickmaking, but this fell off some years ago’.^70
Traditional fuel use also persisted longest among the poorer elements of
society, and when commons were enclosed by parliamentary acts, especially
in the east of England, a ‘fuel allotment’ or ‘poors’ allotment’ was often
created. While the rest of the former common was allotted to individual
owners and often ‘improved’ – converted to arable fields – here the local
poor could continue to cut gorse or turf or to dig peat, and in some cases
graze livestock, although some allotments were rented out from the start, by
the committees of the local worthies who controlled them, to purchase coals
for them to burn instead.^71 In the county of Norfolk alone no less than 250
parishes had such allotments, some relatively small in size but others – as at
Bridgham or Feltwell – extending over more than 100 hectares.^72 In some
upland areas, especially the more inaccessible ones, enclosure commissioners
often went further and allocated a ‘moss dale’ where not only the poor, but
also those receiving their own allotment of land – farmers, smallholders
and cottagers – could continue to cut peat.^73 Such allotments continued to
be made into the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as at Troutbeck
in Westmoreland in 1840.^74 Elsewhere, in places where extensive areas of
heath, moor or fen survived enclosure, traditional fuels likewise continued
to be exploited on a significant scale into the nineteenth century. As late as
1858 a total of six million heather turves were still being cut each year in
the New Forest.^75 For the most part, however, the cutting of peat, furze and
elle
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