(^104) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
new hedges planted when the open fields and commons were enclosed. In
the 1970s Max Hooper and his colleagues compared the bird life recorded
in Laxton (Nottinghamshire) – one of the few places in England where
open fields have escaped enclosure – with that found in neighbouring, more
conventional parishes. Laxton ‘only supported populations of the open field
species – mainly skylarks and some grey partridge, red-legged partridge,
and lapwing, and one pair of reed bunting was found in a hollow. Most
of the ordinary farm birds were entirely absent although common enough
in the surrounding countryside’.^60 It is important, however, not to exag-
gerate the impact of the hedges planted during the agricultural revolution
period. By 1750 more than three-quarters of England already lay in hedged
or walled fields; more importantly, particular features of the new hedges
ensured that their ecological benefits were limited. As we have seen, before
the eighteenth century most farmers and landowners had planted mixed-
species hedges. With the spread of coal use the importance of hedges as a
source of firing declined: they came to be regarded simply as barriers to
livestock, and as property boundaries.^61 At the same time, the proliferation
of nurseries made it easier to acquire large quantities of hedging thorn.
Neat, straight, hawthorn hedges now became the norm, and multi-species
hedges on the old pattern were regarded as untidy and old-fashioned.
Agricultural writers also urged that hedges should be maintained, not by
coppicing or even laying, but instead by regular trimming.^62 In reality, in the
Midlands especially many were still regularly laid, but the idea of single-
species planting unquestionably triumphed, and rigorous coppicing went
into marked decline.
The authors of the various General Views, produced in the decades around
1800 to describe the practice of farming in the different counties of England,
regularly contrasted ‘recent’ and ‘old’ hedges in terms of the shrubs they
contained. The Rev St John Priest in the General View of the Agriculture
of the County of Buckinghamshire of 1813, for example, noted that the
hedges ‘are of two sorts, old and new. The old fences consist chiefly of a
mixture of ash, sallow, and hazel, with some whitethorn... The new fences
consist of whitethorn.. .’.^63 John Boys, writing about Kent, emphasized
the difference between ‘old hedges, such as Nature has formed’, and the
newer ‘quickset hedges raised from the berries of the white thorn’;^64 while
in Cheshire the contrast was between the new enclosures, of ‘white, or haw-
thorn’, and the ‘ancient fences’, consisting of ‘hasle, alder, white or black-
thorn, witch-elm, holly, dogwood, birch &c &c’.^65 Nor was the principal
reason for the change lost on contemporaries. As Young put it, a hedge of
thorn, kept neatly trimmed rather than being plashed or coppiced, was ‘a
mere luxury and ornament, and has nothing profitable to recommend it’.
He added, significantly: ‘Hedges thus cease to be the collieries of a country’
(Figure 20).^66
Hawthorn was not the only hedging plant favoured by eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century ‘improvers’. Blackthorn was sporadically employed; in
elle
(Elle)
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