(^32) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
trapped or shot in vast numbers by local people. Richard Reyce described in
the seventeenth century how ‘those we call seapies, coots, pewits, curlews,
teal, wiggeon, brents, duck, mallard, wild goose, heron, crane, and barnacle’
were regularly trapped on the Suffolk coastal marshes.^61 The drier areas of
salt marsh were grazed by sheep during the summer months, and shellfish
were frequently collected. Whatever the value of such land, however, it
could be greatly increased if ‘inned’ from the sea and converted to ‘fresh’
or grazing marsh, a process already under way by the twelfth century in
parts of southern and eastern England.^62 Portions were surrounded with
embankments to prevent the ingress of salt water, and drainage within
assisted by the provision of surface drains (often adapted from the natural
creek pattern) leading to ‘flap sluices’ which were held shut by water pressure
at high tide, but which opened to allow the egress of water at low.^63
Many reclaimed marshes, like those in Essex or on the eastern side of the
Norfolk Broads, were used for grazing – for sheep in the Middle Ages, but
increasingly for cattle from the fifteenth century – and they were managed
from isolated marsh farms. But their rich soils also made good arable
land, and the more extensive areas, such as Romney Marsh in Kent,
the ‘Marshland’ of the northern Fens in Norfolk, or the Lincolnshire
‘Townlands’, had large areas under cultivation in the Middle Ages and
contained, not just scattered farms, but sizeable villages. By the seventeenth
century, however, with the development of a more regionally specialized
farming economy, most marshes were under grass. By this time most of the
largest tracts of salt marsh had been reclaimed but smaller areas continued
to be drained into the eighteenth, nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.
Embanking radically changed the character of marshes, even if they
remained unploughed. Marine animals were immediately destroyed and
the vegetation rapidly altered as the salt was washed out of the soil by
the rain. Petch, describing the recently embanked lands in the Wash in the
1920s, noted that ‘the most striking feature of these lands is the rapidity
with which the salt marsh species disappear. Within a year or two of the
exclusion of salt water, they have been replaced by the common pasture
grasses, and the docks, nettles, thistles, buttercups and daisies of arable
fields’.^64 Nevertheless, grazing marshes acquired a range of other distinctive
plants, such as marsh lousewort (Pedicularis palustris) and marsh valerian
(Valeriana dioica). Moreover, because the dykes functioned both as a source
of drinking water for stock and as ‘watery fences’ to keep them within
particular areas, water levels were maintained almost to the height of the
adjacent pasture, even to the point of allowing fresh water to flow into
the marsh from streams or rivers in summer. Waders thus continued to be
attracted to such areas, for a high water table ensured that worms and other
invertebrates were concentrated in the upper levels of the soil, and could thus
be easily reached by the birds.^65 The rather tall grass sward maintained by
cattle grazing, in particular, was also attractive to ground nesting birds like
lapwing, redshank, black-tailed godwit and avocet. In addition, the plants
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