Table Of ContentAn Environmental
History of Wildlife
in England,
1650–1950
ii
An Environmental
History of Wildlife
in England,
1650–1950
Tom Williamson
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2013
© Tom Williamson, 2013
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Tom Williamson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or
refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by
Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-0863-0
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ConTenTs
Acknowledgements vi
List of Figures vii
1 Setting the scene: The nature of nature 1
2 Seventeenth-century environments:
Woodland and waste 19
3 Seventeenth-century environments: Farmland 37
4 The social contexts of wildlife, c.1650–1750 59
5 The industrial revolution 73
6 The revolution in agriculture 91
7 New roles for nature 115
8 Wildlife in depression, c.1870–1940 137
9 New urban environments, c.1860–1950 161
10 Conclusion: Nature, history and conservation 183
Notes 195
Bibliography 239
Index 265
aCknoWledgemenTs
This has not been an easy book to research or write, for it has involved
excursions into fields of knowledge – ecology, biology and ornithology –
which are in part new to me. Producing it would not have been possible
without the help, advice and information provided by a large number of
people. These include, in particular, members of the Landscape Group
within the School of History at the University of East Anglia: academic staff,
Jon Gregory, Robert Liddiard and Sarah Spooner; Research fellows, Gerry
Barnes and Andrew MacNair; and many past and present students, especially
Jane Bevan, Sarah Birtles, Patsy Dallas, John Ebbage, Rory Hart, Sarah
Harrison, Adam Stone and Clive Walker. Thanks also to Hadrian Cook,
Jon Finch, David Hall, Tracey Partida and Anne Rowe, on whose knowledge
I have also extensively drawn. Above all, I would like to thank my wife,
Liz Bellamy, for all the support, advice and encouragement she has provided
over many years.
The photographs, maps and diagrams are my own, with the exception
of 19, by Jon Gregory; 13 and 28, Anne Rowe; 10, D. T. Grewcock/FLPA
images; and 22, Tracey Partida. Figures 8 and 9 are redrawn from maps
produced by Tracey Partida for a project funded by the AHRC. Figures
13 and 28 are reproduced courtesy of Hertfordshire Archives and Local
History; Figure 16, with the permission of Shrewsbury Museum; Figure 7,
courtesy of the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading; Figures 4 and 12,
with the permission of the Norfolk Record Office; and 26, courtesy of the
Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library and Mrs Flowerdew; Figure 27,
courtesy of Country Life.
lisT of figures
Figure 1 The principal landscape regions of England 5
Figure 2 Early-modern farming regions 8
Figure 3 The medieval deer park at Hursley, Hampshire, as shown on
an early sixteenth-century map 14
Figure 4 A wood-pasture common in Gressenhall, Norfolk 21
Figure 5 Wayland Wood, Norfolk 22
Figure 6 Typical heathland near Sutton, Suffolk 25
Figure 7 A water meadow at Charlton-all-Saints, Wiltshire,
in the 1930s 39
Figure 8 Reconstructions of the layout of open fields in
Northamptonshire before enclosure 43
Figure 9 Typical Midland landscape in the early eighteenth century 45
Figure 10 A typical laid hedge 47
Figure 11 A coppiced hedge 48
Figure 12 Beeston-next-Mileham, Norfolk, in 1761 51
Figure 13 Sopwell House, St Albans, Hertfordshire, on an undated
seventeenth-century map 64
Figure 14 A ‘pillow mound’ on a former Dartmoor rabbit warren 67
Figure 15 Graph showing the growth of the population of England
between 1550 and 1950 74
Figure 16 William Williams’ ‘Afternoon View of Coalbrookdale’
(Shropshire), 1777 80
Figure 17 The growth of the canal and rail networks in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century England 84
Figure 18 Farming regions and land use in mid-nineteenth-century
England 94
Figure 19 The distribution of parliamentary enclosure in England 96
Figure 20 Typical nineteenth-century hawthorn hedge 105
Figure 21 Modernizing the landscape of Weston Colville in 1825 107
Figure 22 Ridge and furrow in Northamptonshire 111
viii lisT of figures
Figure 23 The Blickling estate in north Norfolk 118
Figure 24 The elimination of the pine marten and polecat in
England 125
Figure 25 The distribution of arable land in England and Wales,
c.1940 141
Figure 26 Harvesting at Marjoram’s Farm, South Walsham, Norfolk,
in the early twentieth century 142
Figure 27 Loading a game cart at Studley Royal, Yorkshire, in 1901 148
Figure 28 Kangaroos in the park at Tring, Hertfordshire, c.1900 149
Figure 29 The growth of London, 1850–1958 163
Figure 30 Changing land use in Middlesex, 1865–1955 164
ChapTer one
Setting the scene: The nature
of nature
The natural landscape?
This book discusses the history of wildlife in England in the three centuries
between 1650 and 1950. It examines how the number, and distributions, of
different species altered over time, and describes the changing ways in which
various wild plants and animals were regarded, controlled and exploited
by the human inhabitants of this country. Above all, it explains how the
environments in which such creatures made their homes developed over the
centuries. Most people today probably think of the countryside as in some
sense ‘natural’, certainly in comparison with the environment of towns. But
nature, as Raymond Williams once observed, is the ‘most complex word in
the language’, and problems over its definition underlie many current issues
in conservation, and lie at the heart of this book.1 In truth, rural landscapes as
much as urban ones are largely or entirely artificial in character, the creation
of particular social, economic and technological circumstances. Heaths,
woods and meadows are, in most ways, no more ‘natural’ than suburban
gardens or inner-city waste grounds. Indeed, one indication of how far
removed we are from a truly ‘natural’ landscape in England, uninfluenced
by human activity, is the fact that natural scientists argue over what precise
form this might have taken.
Following the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 BC, England was
gradually colonized by plants and animals as the temperature warmed, and
as a continued connection with Continental Europe – the English Channel
and the southern North Sea were only flooded in the seventh millennium
BC – allowed them to move northwards with ease. Until relatively recently it
was assumed that the natural vegetation developed through what ecologists
