(^20) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
Woodland
There was relatively little woodland in seventeenth-century England. Even
at the time of Domesday probably only around 15 per cent of the country
was tree-covered, and by 1350 this had fallen to around 10 per cent, partly
through deliberate clearance and partly through gradual wastage.^3 There
was some regeneration following the demographic collapse of the later
Middle Ages, but renewed clearances in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
perhaps reduced woodland cover to around 8 per cent of the country’s
land area, something which needs to be set against the modern figure,
of around 10 per cent.^4 Most of this, however, represents plantations of
eighteenth, nineteenth or twentieth-century date, for much of the woodland
existing in c.1600 was grubbed out over the following four centuries, and
now comprises only around 30 per cent of this total.^5 These remnants are
usually referred to as ‘ancient woodland’ by ecologists. Indeed, the accepted
definition of this term is that the woodland in question must have been in
continuous existence since 1600.^6 It represented either areas which had never
been cleared and cultivated (‘primary’ ancient woodland) or ones where
trees had regenerated over agricultural land in the immediate post-Roman
period, or in the demographic decline in the late Middle Ages (‘secondary’
ancient woodland). It is probable that this distinction obscures the dynamic
character of woodland and the extent of deliberate planting in the course of
the sixteenth century or earlier. But either way, woodland of this kind took
two main forms.
Some comprised wood-pasture, areas containing trees which were
sufficiently widely spaced to allow grass and other herbage to grow beneath
them, which was grazed by cattle, sheep or deer. The majority of the trees
were pollarded: that is, repeatedly cut at a height of 1.5–2 metres (out of the
range of browsing stock) every 10 years or so to provide a supply of ‘poles’
suitable for fencing, for using as the minor timbers in buildings, for making
tools, and above all for fuel (Figure 4). Pollarding (and shredding, a related
form of management) was also used to produce ‘leafy hay’ for winter fodder.
The trees regenerated rapidly from their cut trunks, or boles.^7 Some wood-
pastures were private, but in the early Middle Ages most were common
land. The lord of the manor – or the King, in the case of royal forests, where
wood-pasture commons were extensive – owned the trunk, just as he owned
the soil of the common itself, but the commoners usually had the right to
crop the poles.
Wood-pastures were inherently unstable environments. Trees could be
damaged by livestock, and when they were felled, died or were blown down,
could not easily be re-established in the face of continuous grazing pressure.
Woodland of this kind thus tended to degenerate over time to open pasture.
Indeed, there was no neat dividing line between wood-pasture and open
pasture, but instead a continuum, with at one end pasture or heathland
elle
(Elle)
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