(^98) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
more intensive cultivation of arable land; the proliferation of hedges and
plantations; and recreational shooting (see below, pp. 122–5). The way in
which the effects of reclamation were compounded by other developments
is well illustrated by the case of the great bustard. This was the iconic
bird of the open downs and heaths – a huge creature with a weight that
could reach 18 kilograms, making it an inviting target for sportsmen.
J. Swayne reported in the 1780s how he had ‘often heard conversations
amongst farmers... [on Salisbury Plain] about the scarcity of bustards on
the Down, which they attributed to the heath, etc., being broken up and
converted to tillage, and to the corn being weeded in the spring, whereby
the birds were disturbed and prevented making their nests’.^27 In the East
Anglian Breckland, similarly, contemporaries reported how the bird had
formerly nested in the arable as well as on heathland, in fields which were
sown broadcast. Now, as crops were more intensively weeded by gangs of
labourers, few nests survived. In addition, the open heaths and common
fields were now divided by hawthorn hedges and tree belts:
Not only entirely changing its aspect but rendering it entirely unsuitable
to the wary habits of the bustard, which soon learned to become as jealous
as any strategist of what might afford an enemy harbour.^28
There were occasional later visits from bustards, flying in from abroad – in 1876
one appeared in Hockwold Fen in Norfolk, the first since 1838, and another
was shot (and eaten) in the county in 189129 – but the species never again bred
in England, until it was reintroduced at the start of the present century.
The areas of light land which saw the greatest feats of reclamation
had been the main centres of rabbit farming in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. Much of this land could now be made more profitable
as arable fields and antipathy to warrens gathered pace. On the chalk Wolds
of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, for example, ‘Few of the warrens listed in the
early nineteenth century directories were recorded in the 1880s’.^30 Warrens
seemed both old-fashioned and unneighbourly. One landowner could hardly
invest in expensive ‘improvements’ if his neighbour continued to stock his
land with rabbits, kept uncertainly within the warren banks.^31 Throughout
the East Anglian Brecklands, and on the Wolds of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire,
the ploughs of the improvers levelled the warren walls and fodder enclosures
with peculiar thoroughness, and the land was given over to grain production.^32
The extent to which warrens declined should not, however, be exaggerated.
In the sandy Breckland of East Anglia, and sporadically elsewhere, some
continued to operate into the twentieth century. But in general, in England at
least, the great age of rabbit farming was over.
In the old sheep-corn districts, extensive and continuous areas of heath
and down were thus destroyed. In the ‘woodland’ districts of England
innumerable areas of common land, ranging from small ‘greens’ to larger
tracts of wood-pasture, also now disappeared. Enclosure was followed by
elle
(Elle)
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