sevenTeenTh-CenTury environmenTs: Woodland and WasTe 23Coppiced woods were and are important and diverse habitats – around
250 species of flowers, sedges and grasses occur mainly or only within them^13
- but this is largely a consequence of their essential artificiality. Portions of
a wood were usually felled in turn, on rotation, creating a mosaic of blocks
of coppice in different stages of regrowth – a most unnatural arrangement.
Coppicing opens up the floor of the wood to light, yet at the same time leaves
the ground flora undisturbed, a regime which favours species such as wood
anemone (Anemone nemorosa).^14 Other species (such as water avens (Geum
rivale) and pignut (Conopodium majus) are largely restricted to ancient
woods simply because they cannot survive grazing pressure well: woods
were the only environments in the early modern world neither intensively
grazed nor regularly ploughed.^15 In addition, many of these species remained
in ancient woods because they are slow to colonize new ones, although as
we shall see the extent of this is often exaggerated in the scientific literature.
The flower-rich coppices were and are ideal for sustaining a wide range
of insects, especially butterflies like the pearl-bordered fritillary, the high
brown fritillary, and the Duke of Burgundy. Indeed, the decline of coppicing
over the last century or so has been a major factor in the fall in butterfly
numbers in England.^16
The abundant supplies of food afforded by such a diverse and continually
changing environment attracted a wide range of birds and mammals,
although the former in particular were also directly encouraged by the
structural diversity afforded by traditional management. Bird species display
much variation in terms of their preferences for different stages of coppice
regrowth, and thus the mosaic of fells served to rack up the scale of diversity.
Finches, buntings and the Sylvia warblers will have been more common in
young coppice but tits and thrushes probably increased as they matured.
As the canopy closed after 7–10 years, the number of birds would decline,
but soon after the compartment would be cut, beginning the whole process
anew.^17
Large numbers of birds and mammals were attracted to the margins
of woods, for as already emphasized ‘edge’ environments are of critical
importance, animals benefiting from the opportunities to forage for food in
adjacent fields or pastures, but also enjoying the cover, and further sources
of food, provided by the wood itself. Garden warbler, blackcap, willow
warbler and chaffinch are characteristic birds of the woodland edge, together
with chiffchaff and nightingale in places where the wood has a scrubby
margin. Hedgehog, the common shrew and other small mammals are also
at home here. Some species, such as pygmy shrews, are largely restricted
to the wood edge, and are seldom found in the interior. Conversely, red
squirrels preferred to live towards the centres of large blocks of woodland,
while tawny owls are today absent from some 90 per cent of woods smaller
than 100 hectares, but from only c.18 per cent of those larger than this.^18 In
terms of birds especially, the interiors of large woods were and are home to