(^138) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
swarms of rats, broken tiles, rotting floors... swampy meadows, cracked
bridges, flat gates and overgrown hedges’.^2 Depression, moreover, led to a steep
decline in agricultural rents which had disastrous effects on large landowners.
The rental income from the Blickling estate in Norfolk, for example, fell from
£11,685 in 1877 to £9,893 in 1892: a major recalculation of rents in 1894
resulted in a further reduction to £6,018.^3 Landowners were also assailed by
Death Duties, introduced in 1894 and raised to 15 per cent by Lloyd George
and subsequently, in 1919, to 40 per cent on estates valued at more than
£200,000.^4 The dominance of the aristocracy and gentry in the affairs of the
countryside was eroded by the Local Government Acts of 1888 and 1894,
which vested power in elected County, District and Parish Councils. The age of
the country house as the centre of the local universe was over, and many large
estates were placed on the market, broken up and sold to tenants.^5
While economic and social historians have traditionally represented
the period as one of rural decline, historical ecologists and environmental
historians have taken a different view, generally suggesting that wildlife
flourished as the fortunes of farming waned. John Sheail, for example, has
characterized the fate of the rural landscape in the twentieth century as ‘a
study of two halves’.
Whilst farming was generally depressed, the countryside of the first half of
the century was typically diverse, beautiful and rich in wildlife. Farming
boomed in the second half of the century, as those concerned with the
conservation of amenity and wildlife... came close to despair.^6
Shrubb has suggested that the widespread decline in the intensity of farming
benefited wildlife, especially a ‘sharp reduction’ in hedge management, with
‘extensive increases... in the height and volume of hedges [which] would
have affected the size of farmland bird populations considerably’. Rackham
has similarly argued that:
The period 1750-1870 was, on the whole, an age of agricultural prosperity
in which hedgerow timber almost certainly decreased. The period 1870-
1951 was, on the whole, an age of agricultural adversity, in which there
was less money to spend on either maintaining or destroying hedges.
Neglect gave innumerable saplings an opportunity to grow into trees.^7
Indeed, he compared the numbers of trees shown on the First Edition
Ordnance Survey 6" maps of the 1880s, with the 1951 Forestry Commission’s
estimates of the density of farmland timber, arguing that the number of
hedgerow trees in England may have increased in this period from around
23 million to some 60 million.^8
While wildlife flourished in the countryside, however, it was now
seriously assailed by the expansion of towns and industry. The extent to
which countryside gave way to roads, factories and housing escalated
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