neW roles for naTure^119owner of a property in effect a tenant for life, tied by a legal agreement
which prevented sale of outlying portions of land so that the estate passed
undivided to his heir.^17 It was also assisted by the simple fact that, following
the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, royal power was
limited, political authority resided in a parliament of the propertied, and
estates were thus unlikely to be broken up because their owners fell from
royal favour, or supported the losing side in dynastic or religious struggles.
The stability of the political system, and internal peace, as well as providing
the conditions for industrial expansion, thus also created the circumstances
in which landed estates could grow. Lastly, large landowners benefited from
the enclosure of common land, not only receiving their own allotment in lieu
of manorial rights but also often purchasing, within a short space of time,
many of the diminutive parcels allotted to the smaller freeholders.^18
The development of landed estates is central to any understanding the
history of wildlife because their owners had the ability to transform, without
the hindrance of planning authorities or other constraint, the character of
the environment across large areas.^19 But they did not develop to the same
extent everywhere.^20 They tended to be most numerous and extensive in the
more remote districts, and especially in areas of poor, light soil characterized
by arable farming, such as the Lincolnshire Wolds. In such areas small
owner-occupiers found it hard to make a living as a national market in
grain developed in the course of the post-medieval period, especially in times
of depression.^21 They were also characteristic of some upland areas, again
where land was relatively cheap but could be made more valuable through
investment in the necessary ‘improvements’.
The ‘great replanting’
One of the most important environmental consequences of the emergence
of large estates was a marked upsurge in planting which served to reverse
the long-term decline of tree cover in England. Some writers have suggested
that the eighteenth century was a period in which continuing deforestation
brought problems to many of England’s larger animals.^22 Yet while it is true
that many coppiced woods were grubbed out to make way for farmland, and
large tracts of wood-pastures felled when commons were enclosed, many
new areas of woodland were also established, more than compensating – in
area at least – for such losses. In Norfolk, for example, around half the area
of woodland existing at the end of the eighteenth century was probably
less than a century old.^23 The greatest amount of new planting occurred in
districts which had formerly carried relatively little tree cover – champion
areas and uplands especially. Here, afforestation often formed part of wider
programmes of estate ‘improvement’: examples include the huge plantations
established by the Sykes family in the Wolds of Yorkshire; the 150,000 trees
planted annually in the 1770s and ‘80s by the Earl of Selbourne at Bowood