An Environmental History of Wildlife in England 1650-1950

The revoluTion in agriCulTure^109

produced would itself have benefited birds like the greenfinch and linnet,
for a proportion of the crop would always be dropped during harvest, while
stacks in rickyards could not easily be protected from birds. In Shrubb’s
view, supported by a systematic and detailed examination of contemporary
avifaunas, the new cropping systems ‘were overwhelmingly beneficial to
large numbers of farmland birds’.^85 Indeed, some species – such as lapwing,
stockdove, corncrake, skylark and yellowhammer – which had formerly
nested or lived for much of the time on adjacent areas of waste, but from
which they were now displaced by enclosure and reclamation, seem to have
adapted (albeit to varying extents) to a life spent largely in the fields.^86
One bird in particular benefited from the ‘new husbandry’. We have
already seen how, to judge from the churchwarden’s payments for vermin
control, the wood pigeon was fairly rare in England in the early eighteenth
century. Its numbers rose steadily thereafter, for it feasted on the leaves
of turnips and other ‘roots’, and to some extent on clover: Gilbert White,
writing about the Selbourne area in 1780, attributed its recent success to ‘the
vast increase in turnips’.^87 By 1850 there were said to be so many pigeons
in the Cotswolds that in some parishes farmers were ceasing to sow vetches
as a fodder crop.^88 The rabbit likewise benefited from the increased winter
sustenance afforded by the new crops, although its spread in the course of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth century may have also been helped by
the increase in hedgerows in former champion districts, and the cover they
provided. Either way, by the 1820s, it could be claimed that the rabbit was
the most common wild animal in Norfolk.^89
As noted earlier, across the Midland ‘shires’ the enclosure of arable open
fields was generally followed, not by more intensive forms of arable farming,
but by an increase in the area of land under pasture. The responses made by
vicars and rectors to a government enquiry into the standard of the harvest
of 1801 (the ‘Crop Returns’) provide some indication of the scale of this
development. The vicar of Breedon on the Hill, for example, remarked how
in Leicestershire:

Within the last 30 years almost all the country north-west of Leicester to

the extremity of the county has been enclosed: by which means the land

is become in a higher state of cultivation than formerly; but on account

of a great proportion of it being converted into pasturage much less food

is produced than when it was more generally in tillage.^90

At Twyell in neighbouring Northamptonshire, it was said that ‘less corn is
grown since the enclosure... the land being laid down in grass’; at Ufford,
Bainton and Ashton there was ‘less corn of all sorts once the enclosure which
took place three years ago’,^91 while Wilbaston, enclosed in 1798, was still
in 1801 in the process of being ‘laid or laying down, for grazing’.^92 Across
large tracts of ground the weeds of arable fields thus declined sharply, while
those associated with permanent pastures increased. Although it would have