The revoluTion in agriCulTure^101reasonable crop from the poor soils of the arable. Indeed, a modified form
of the old folding system, with daytime grazing on heaths and night folding
on the arable, only declined in parts of Suffolk, for example, in the 1930s.^46
The continuing presence of warrens in some of these districts was a further
disincentive to ‘improvement’, while some heaths survived, in the manner
already described, as ‘fuel allotments’.
Enclosure, in other words, was not the same as improvement and this,
together with the fact that both the total area of common waste enclosed by
parliamentary act, and the amount removed by other means, remain matters
of debate makes it hard to ascertain the quantity of ancient pasture, moor,
heath and fen which was lost in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. But it was clearly a very great deal. Probably around 3 million
hectares in England were affected by parliamentary enclosure, of which well
over half – probably c. 1.8 million hectares – comprised common waste, as
opposed to open-field arable.^47 If only a third of this had subsequently been
‘improved’, it would still amount to an area greater than the counties of
Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Middlesex combined: an
ecological transformation on an awesome scale.^48
Wetlands destroyed
The ploughing of heaths, downs and other commons, and the improvement
of moorland, unquestionably had a significant negative impact on a wide
range of wildlife. But it was probably the draining of wetlands which
caused the greatest amount of damage. As we have seen, early attempts at
draining the Fens of eastern England were only partly successful. Daniel
Defoe, crossing the Gog Magog Hills near Cambridge in the 1720s, saw
the Fens in the distance ‘almost all covered with water like a sea... the
Michaelmas rains having been very great this year’.^49 The poor state of
drainage explains, of course, the vast numbers of birds which continued,
throughout the eighteenth century, to be caught in the local decoys, as well
as the continuing prevalence of malaria in the district, evidence of the large
numbers of mosquitoes still present, carriers of the parasite Plasmodium.
As agricultural prices rose in the later eighteenth century, some
improvements were made to the waterlogged pastures. The formation of
Drainage Commissions allowed local drainage to be better organized, and in
the early nineteenth century there were changes to the main arterial channels,
with the construction of the Eau Brink Cut in 1821, the Ouse cut between
Ely and Littleport in 1827, the North Level Main Drain between 1831 and
1834 and the new outfall to the Nene in the late 1820s.^50 But above all,
drainage was radically improved through the employment of steam pumps
in place of drainage windmills. Steam pumps could lift more water through
a greater vertical distance, and they continued to operate whatever the wind