The revoluTion in agriCulTure^113Conclusion
In a host of ways, the impact of the agricultural revolution and ‘high farming’
on wildlife presents an uncertain picture. In part this is because of a lack of
reliable evidence. But is also reflects the fact that changes in the fortunes
of particular species were seldom the result of one development, but rather
of a range of human activities, some of which had little to do with agriculture
per se. In addition, certain species unquestionably benefited from some at
least of the changes I have described. The new crops and rotations, and
perhaps the new geographies of agricultural production, increased the
numbers and the range of species like rabbit and wood pigeon, and perhaps
benefited farmland birds more generally. Yet against this, the dissolution of
the age-old distinction between permanent arable and permanent pasture,
which lay at the heart of the ‘new husbandry’, allowed the ploughing up
of many thousands of hectares of heath and down, while the reclamation
of wetlands destroyed on a significant scale habitats of unparalleled
richness. Enclosure was the enemy of biodiversity: although surviving areas
of common land are generally impoverished by neglect, they still account
for some 20 per cent of Sites of Special Scientific Interest in England and
Wales.^107 Those birds, mammals and invertebrates which benefited from
enclosure and ‘improvement’ tended to be generalists, what we now think
of as the common fauna of farmland: for agrarian change created a more
homogenous countryside, of enclosed fields interspersed with areas of
woodland, in place of the more dramatically diversified landscape of earlier
centuries, with its great tracts of wetland, heath, wood-pastures and the
rest. Specialists like the stone curlew and quail displaced from the wastes
but unable to adapt to the food-rich but intensively cultivated farmland
thus fared badly. But it is possible that even the more common species of
birds and mammals suffered to some extent from the greater intensity of
cultivations, and from the general ‘tidying up’ of the countryside which
accompanied agricultural improvement and the transition to a coal-based
economy. Most contemporaries certainly thought so. As one commented
in 1885: ‘The general enclosure of commons and waste lands, the thinning
of hedgerows, together with various other farming operations resulting
from modern improvements in the system of agriculture, have each, in turn,
affected particular classes of birds’.^108