seTTing T he sCene: The naTure of naTure^5cultivated and populous lowlands. But there was also, within the lowlands,
a distinction between what early topographers described as ‘champion’
and ‘woodland’ districts.^23 The former, characterized by nucleated villages
farming extensive communal open-field systems, occupied a great swathe
of central England running from Yorkshire to the Channel coast (Figure 1).
Farms comprised numerous separate unhedged strips, each around 7 m
wide, which were scattered with varying degrees of regularity through the
territory of the township. For the purpose of cropping, the ‘lands’ or ‘selions’
were grouped into bundles called ‘furlongs’, and these in turn into two or
three great ‘fields’, one of which lay fallow each year and was grazed by the
village livestock, the dung from which replenished some of the nutrients
depleted by repeated cropping.^24 In many places, these highly communal
farming systems survived into the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, when
they were removed by large-scale enclosure, often through parliamentary
acts. Thus was created the landscape of straight-sided fields which is often
referred to – following Rackham – as planned countryside.^25
To the south and east, and to the west, of the champion belt lay the
‘woodland’ areas, sometimes described as ancient countryside by modern
figure 1 The principal landscape regions of England. Oliver Rackham’s broad
distinction between ‘Planned’ and ‘Ancient Countryside’ (left) is mirrored in the map
of nineteenth-century settlement produced by Roberts and Wrathmell (right), with
strongly nucleated settlement patterns dominating a broad swathe of countryside
running through the centre of England.