14 / Basics of Environmental Science
pollution of the Thames date from the reign of Richard II (1367–1400, reigned from 1377). It was
because of the smoke, however, that Elizabeth I refused to enter the city in 1578, and by 1700 the
pollution was causing serious damage by killing vegetation, corrod-ing buildings, and ruining clothes
and soft furnishings in every town of any size (THOMAS, 1983). Indeed, the pall of smoke hanging
over them was often the first indication approaching travellers had of towns.
Filthy it may have been, but ‘sea coal’ was convenient. It was a substitute for charcoal rather than
wood, because of the high temperature at which it burned, and it was probably easier to obtain. If its
use were to be curtailed, either manufacturing would suffer, with a consequent reduction in employment
and prosperity, or charcoal would be used instead, in which case pollution might have been little
reduced overall. Environmental protection always involves compromise between conflicting needs.
Much of the primary forest that once covered most of lowland Britain, which Oliver Rackham,
possibly the leading authority on the history of British woodland, has called the ‘wildwood’,
had been cleared by the time of the Norman invasion, in 1066, mainly to provide land on which
to grow crops. It did not disappear, as some have suggested, to provide fuel for eighteenth-
century iron foundries, or to supply timber to build ships. Paradoxically, the iron foundries
probably increased the area of woodland, by relying for fuel on managed coppice from sources
close at hand, and reports of a shortage of timber for shipbuilding had less to do with a lack of
suitable trees than with the low prices the British Admiralty was prepared to pay (ALLABY,
1986, p. 110).
As early as the seventh century there were laws restricting the felling of trees and in royal forests a
fence was erected around the stump of a felled tree to allow regeneration (ALLABY, 1986, p. 198).
By the thirteenth century there were laws forbidding the felling of trees, clearing of woodland, and
even the taking of dead wood, although they were seldom enforced, except as a means to raise
revenue by fining an offender the value of the trees felled (RACKHAM, 1976).
For most of history, however, the conflict between farms and forests was resolved in favour of farms,
although in England there is a possibility of confusion over the use of the word ‘forest’. Today, the
word describes an extensive tract of land covered with trees growing closely together, sometimes
intermingled with smaller areas of pasture. Under Norman law, however, it had a different meaning,
derived from the Latin foris, meaning ‘outdoors’, and applied to land beyond the boundaries of the
enclosed farmland or parklands and set aside for hunting. Much of this ‘forest’ belonged to the
sovereign. Special laws applied to it and were administered by officers appointed for the purpose. It
might or might not be tree-covered.
Forests were regarded as dark, forbidding places, the abode of dangerous wild animals and brig-
ands.^4 When Elizabethan writers used the word ‘wilderness’ they meant unmanaged forest, and in
North America the earliest European settlers contrasted the vast forests they saw unfavourably with
the cultivated fields they hoped to establish. Until modern times, famine was a real possibility and
the neater the fields, the fewer the weeds in them, and the healthier the crops, the more reassuring the
countryside appeared.
Mountains, upland moors, and wetlands were wastelands that could not be cultivated and they
were no less alarming. In 1808, Arthur Young (1741–1820), an agricultural writer appointed secre-
tary to the Board of Agriculture established by Prime Minister, William Pitt, in 1793, submitted a
report on the enclosure of ‘waste’ land, arguing strongly in favour of their improvement by
cultivation (YOUNG, 1808).
What we would understand today as the conservation of forest habitats and wildlife began quite
early in the tropics, where it was a curious by-product of colonial expansion. This led government