(^46) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
farming economy, especially the emergence of specialized pastoral districts,
had major impacts on England’s ecology which to some extent overlay and
further confused any simple woodland/champion dichotomy.
hedges and farmland trees
Although the open, biologically degraded condition of ‘champion’ regions
may be exaggerated in some accounts, it nevertheless remains true that,
in general terms, ‘woodland’ landscapes provided a more diverse range of
habitats. Their intricate mixtures of arable and pasture, numerous hedges,
and patches of woodland afforded an ideal combination of cover and feeding
grounds for mammals and birds. Hedges formed a dense and intricate mesh
across the landscape. They were sometimes planted with a single species –
usually hawthorn or blackthorn, sometimes elm – but more often with
several.^34 Ash, maple and hazel were particularly common components.
Pehr Kalm, a Finn who visited England in 1748, noted how in the Chiltern
Hills hedges were planted with a mixture of hawthorn and blackthorn but
that in addition the farmers ‘planted – either at regular intervals or more
casually – small saplings of Salicibus [willow], beech, ash, rowan, lime, elm
and other deciduous trees.’^35 Multi-species planting was usual partly because
it was hard to obtain large amounts of hedging thorn but mainly because
small farmers regarded hedges not merely as a form of stock-proof barrier,
but as a source of fuel, fencing materials and perhaps fruit. At the end of
the eighteenth century, William Marshall was still able to describe how the
hedges in north-east Norfolk ‘abound with oak, ash and maple stubs, off
which the wood is cut every time the hedge is felled; also with pollards,
whose heads are another source of firewood’, adding that the entire supply
of wood in the district ‘may be said, with little latitude, to be from hedge-
rows’.^36 Arthur Young noted how, even in the early nineteenth century, the
need for firewood had induced farmers in Hertfordshire ‘to fill the old hedges
everywhere with oak, ash, sallow and with all sorts of plants more generally
calculated for fuel than fences’.^37
Max Hooper in the 1960s noted that older hedges tend to contain more
shrub species than recent examples. He suggested that hedges, once planted,
were colonized by new species at a steady rate, and could therefore be
approximately dated by counting the number of different kinds of shrub they
contained within a standard thirty-metre length, one new species becoming
established, on average, every century or so.^38 But even if new colonists
arrived with the required punctuality hedges could only be dated in this
way if, as Hooper assumed, most had begun life with a single species. This,
to judge from a mass of evidence, was not the case, and his dating method
is thus largely mythical.^39 Hedges in old-enclosed districts were botanically
diverse for other reasons. Many small woods existed, a rich seed source for
woody shrubs; while hedges and the banks on which they grew sometimes
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