(^44) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
hedge within the fields themselves, of uncertain function or origin, as at
Murcott and Wollaston.^26 Field ponds for watering stock, long-lived and
stable features of the landscape existed in some numbers, although they
admittedly became more numerous following enclosure.^27 In short, although
‘champion’ landscapes did feature large areas of very open ground, they
were different from the great arable prairies found in many eastern parts of
England today. A survey of Brixworth in Northamptonshire, made in 1688
by Richard Richardson, the local vicar, shows the position of numerous
individual shrubs and trees and also contains such comments as ‘wild thyme
grows here’.^28
We should also note that ‘woodland’ and ‘champion’ are broad
generalizations, and in reality lowland England displayed a complex
range of local field systems and settlement patterns, largely related to
environmental factors, some of which fit rather uneasily into any simple
binary system of classification. Many districts, such as western East Anglia
or the Wessex chalklands, exhibited intermediate characteristics, and both
modern historians, and early topographers, have differed over how precisely
they should be characterized.^29 Moreover, deep within the conventionally
mapped ‘champion’ zone there were districts which displayed many of the
characteristics of ‘woodland’ countryside, with extensive woods, scattered
settlements and irregular field systems. Some lay within royal forests, but
not all. Much of north Bedfordshire, for example, was characterized by
scattered hamlets, isolated farms and complex field systems: Thurleigh
thus had eleven distinct open fields when enclosed in 1805, farmed from a
multiplicity of hamlets and isolated farms.^30
But perhaps the most important misunderstanding about the character of
champion landscapes concerns the date of their disappearance, for not all
were enclosed through parliamentary acts in the period after 1750, as some
ecologists seem to assume. No English county had more than half its land
area enclosed in this way, for the removal of open fields had been continuing
steadily for three centuries or more, especially on the heavy Midland clays,
so that land could be laid to pasture.^31 Equally striking was the extent to
which the area under grass increased through the post-medieval centuries
even where parishes remained unenclosed, extending the ribbons of
unploughed ground which, as we have noted, often existed within the open
fields in areas of heavy soil. By the early eighteenth century, many townships
contained ‘cow pastures’. Morton, writing about Northamptonshire in 1712,
described how:
Many of the lordships, and especially the larger ones, have a common
or uninclosed pasture for their cattel in the outskirts of the fields. Most
of these have formerly been plowed, but being generally their worst sort
of ground, and at so great a distance from the towns, the manuring and
culture of them were found so inconvenient that they have been laid
down for greensward.^32
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