OF WOOD-PASTURE AND SAVANNA
While [the wood] is Inclosed the Commoners & Sharers can have no benefit by the feeding therein Except it be by reaping the Grass & carrying it away in Baggs wch would be a great hindrance to them in neglect of Business of greater Weight. … Except it be a poor Body that hath nothing else to do … and he perhaps may lye in a Copice reaping grass a whole day together.
ABELL HURLEY, REPORTING ON HATFIELD FOREST, 16121
[In this compartmental Forest, each coppice was fenced for nine years every time it was cut, which the holders of common-rights regarded as a grievance. Note the grassy vegetation, typical of grazed woods (p.215f).]
Wood-pasture is a neglected biome. The eighteenth-century Age of Reason decreed that trees belong in forests and grassland on farms; tree’d grassland was ignored by foresters as not being forest, by agronomists as not being grassland, and by ecologists as an artificial ecosystem beneath their notice. But it is of immense historical and ecological importance. On the Vera model, pre-Neolithic wildwood had more in common with savanna than with modern forestry. Are people’s love of parkland, and their edginess about entering woodland, relics of the human species’ origin in African savannas? Most ‘common-or-garden’ birds – robin, blackbird, rook, starling – are more at home in savanna (or edges of woods) than forest; countless butterflies,2 hoverflies and bees require some combination of trees and non-tree vegetation.
Wood-pasture exists in many European countries, although compartmentation seems to be an English refinement. In Spain the various types of monte (conifer forest, coppice-wood, maquis etc.) contrast with what academic writers call dehesa, grassland bright with spring flowers, interspersed with millions of pollard evergreen oaks, grazed by merino sheep, fierce with brave bulls, and grunting with the viper-fed pigs that turn into fine hams. The Romans distinguished between silua (woodland) and saltus (savanna).3 In the Old Testament, Absalom, riding hastily off a battlefield, came to a sticky end when his head caught in the boughs of a low oak (or was it a terebinth?), ‘and the mule that was under him went away’4 – as once nearly befell the author in the Wild West.
In other continents tree’d grassland or savanna forms a wide transition zone between forest and prairie or steppe. European explorers of North America found mainly forest in the east, mainly prairie west of the Mississippi, and between them such formations as the Oak Openings of Michigan and the Post-Oak Savanna of Texas. Africa is a land of tropical forests and savannas. In Australia, various densities of savanna cover half the entire continent, between the rather limited extent of forest and the central desert.
Ecologists, obsessed with ‘wholly natural’ vegetation uncontaminated by human influence, have tried to distinguish the savannas of other continents from the wood-pastures of Europe. The former were supposed to be ‘natural’: some influence, especially drought or fire, allows trees but not forests to grow, in contrast to the tree’d grasslands of Europe, maintained by domestic livestock. However, this is partly a false distinction, and it is impossible to draw a line between them. Savannas in North America were largely maintained by Native Americans’ land management, which involved periodic burning. In Australia the ecology of an entire continent has been altered, ever since the last ice age, by Aboriginal land management involving particular burning regimes. Tree’d grasslands are the result of various limiting factors – drought, fire, cold (as at high altitudes), natural or artificial grazing. The savannas of other continents are part of a continuum that passes gradually into the uncompartmented wood-pastures of Europe. The relation of savanna to drought is discussed later.
WOOD-PASTURES IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND
In England, wood-pastures and woodland presumably go back far beyond written record, either to the Vera model of wildwood or to the Neolithic beginnings of livestock keeping.
Wooded commons
The earliest allusions to common woods or wooded commons are in Anglo-Saxon charters; there is nothing to suggest that they were then new. By 1086 they seem to have been the predominant type of ‘woodland’.
Like commons in general, wood-pastures had a characteristic straggling shape, with concave outlines, different from the more compact shape of woods. Houses – the dwellings of some of the commoners – fronted on the common and backed on to their private land.
Commons in theory belonged to the lord of the manor. They were regulated by manorial courts, staffed by the body of commoners, which made and enforced regulations for their use. Thus they did not incur the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’: the theory that communal land uses are not sustainable because each of the participants will exceed his rights to the detriment of the commoners in general.fn1
Wooded commons were only part of commons in general. They could lose their trees and still remain commons; as when Thorpe Wood, Norwich turned into Mousehold Heath. Conversely, a woodless common could gain trees in a period of slack grazing. Like other commons they could be privatised – by agreement among the parties or by Act of Parliament – and turned into ordinary farmland. Or the lord of the manor and the commoners could agree to divide the common between them.
Wood-pasture commons having ancient trees include Burnham Beeches (Buckinghamshire), Ashtead Common (Surrey) (Fig. 181) and The Mens (West Sussex). Hampshire is noted for wooded commons. Many, such as Southampton Common, have become wooded comparatively recently, but others have ancient pollards, such as Gosport Common. A curious one is Binswood, still grazed and having the characteristic shape of a common with funnel-like entrance horns, but enclosed within the outline of a somewhat larger medieval park.5
Parks
Wood-pasture gained a new impetus from the husbandry of deer as semi-domestic animals. The practice was known to the ancient Romans,6 but there is no telling whether they had parks in Britain.
The prototype deer-park may have been Ongar Great Park in southwest Essex, mentioned in an Anglo-Saxon will of 1045. This huge park, 3 miles by 2 (5 × 3 kilometres), was presumably for native red deer; it remained substantially intact until the 1950s (Fig. 182). Surviving fragments include a massive boundary bank, with ditches on both sides. (However, R. Liddiard proposes that other parks existed in late Anglo-Saxon times, developing out of corrals for catching wild deer.7)
The Normans favoured deer husbandry, and c.1100 introduced fallow deer, an oriental beast that was easier than native deer to keep on a limited area of land. Parks multiplied from 35 in Domesday Book to well over 3,000 around 1300.8 Most were not ‘hunting parks’ but deer-farms producing venison for the table as well as providing pasture for cattle and sheep. (I have very few medieval records of hunting in parks, and most are of foxhunts.) At least 40, however, were country-house parks, forerunners of the designer parks of the eighteenth century.9 A deer-farm park, and the feasts it engendered (Fig. 35), was a status symbol somewhat higher than a manor house; a country-house park would symbolise the greater nobility.
The medievals assumed the fallow deer to be a woodland animal, and nearly always provided it with woodland or wood-pasture. Parks were typically shaped as a rectangle with rounded corners, a compact shape for economy in fencing. Deer, stronger than pigs and more agile than goats, had to be confined by a special cleft-oak fence called a pale (Fig. 36) or a wall; this characterises a park and distinguishes it from a Forest, where the deer stay from force of habit.
Many parks – but few wooded commons – were compartmented, divided into woods that were fenced after each felling to keep out the deer (and other livestock) until the underwood had grown up out of their reach. There would also be one or more launds, open areas accessible to the deer at all times, in which any trees would be pollarded. Launds would have waterholes and a park lodge where the parkers did their business.
In the later Middle Ages parks were revived, this time for ceremonial hunts (in addition to their deer-farm and ornamental functions).10 The sixteenth century introduced a new kind of hunt in a confined space: according to Christopher Taylor’s researches, it was the forerunner of the modern dog-track, with spectators betting on greyhounds that sprinted along a fixed course after a live deer (sometimes reuseable) instead of an electric hare.11
The third age of parks was the eighteenth century, when country-house park design became an art form in the hands of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, Humphry Repton and their contemporaries. There was a fourth, little-known age of parks in the nineteenth century, when country-house and municipal parks were involved with exotic trees and with the estate branch of modern forestry.
Parks preserve features from previous landscapes: especially ancient trees, but also moats, ridge-and-furrow, and sometimes the earthwork remains of whole medieval villages. These were often consciously preserved. A park that contains medieval oaks may look like a medieval park, but is not necessarily one.12
Some examples of parks
Forests
The idea of Forests originated in the ethos of Merovingian France, where ownerless land belonged to the king, who was entitled to the wild beasts living therein. In contrast, an Anglo-Saxon king – the first among equals – might honour huntsmen and hunt deer, but only as any other landowner would.
William the Conqueror introduced Forests to England, but in a modified form, since everywhere in England already had an owner. He asserted the right to keep deer, and to set up Forest courts and a Forest officialdom. William was no first among equals: the kingdom and all that was in it was his, and he asserted his supremacy by keeping his deer on other people’s land and by setting up officials to protect the deer’s interests. In Domesday Book there were some 25 Forests, including the New Forest, Dean and Sherwood. William’s successors multiplied Forests, especially after the introduction of fallow deer, until King John went too far and was arraigned by his nobles for (among other things) declaring too many new Forests.
Forests were not linked to woodland as were parks. Most were large commons. There were wooded Forests (like Epping Forest), moorland Forests (like Dartmoor) and heathland Forests (like most of Sherwood). Forests were sited near royal palaces or estates; on some the king owned the land and on others it belonged to someone else. The king could dispose of the land but keep the Forestal rights, as with Hatfield Forest in 1238.
Beasts of the Forest were overwhelmingly fallow deer, but also red deer (especially in moorland), and rarely roe deer. Wild swine were included in the two Forests where they survived, Dean and Pickering (Yorkshire). In the Forest attached to the royal manor of Somerton, which was entirely farmland, the hare was a Forest beast, and when one was found dead, 12 jurymen would sit on the body and hold an inquest, as if it were a deer or a man.
The legal limits of a Forest were established by a perambulation, going from point to point as in an Anglo-Saxon charter. This defined where people could be prosecuted for snaring deer or otherwise breaching Forest Law. It was not the extent of the physical Forest, the tract of wood-pasture, moorland, heath etc. where the deer lived. Usually the legal Forest was several times the extent of the physical Forest. Confusion between legal and physical Forests, combined with confusion between Forests and woodland, is partly responsible for the belief that medieval England was very wooded. The legal bounds could be extended or reduced by a stroke of the pen without any noticeable effect on the ground.
Forests were established in a poorly documented age. No record survives of setting one up (unless the early perambulation of Blackmoor Forest was part of the original proclamation). It would have involved proclaiming the boundaries (much as with a modern National Park), appointing officials, and often introducing some deer (especially if these were fallow).
Forests were not ‘set apart for the king’s hunting’. His deer were added to the pre-existing activities. Cultivation, pasturage and woodcutting went on much as outside Forests. Assarting was illegal under Forest Law, but was usually condoned for a modest fine.
The parties in a Forest were:
A Forest, the royal status symbol, was aspired to by those demonstrating that they were nearly as good as the king. Already by 1086 the Earl of Chester had declared a few Forests. In England most Forests were always royal; the others belonged to high nobility, down to the level of the greatest bishops (Durham, Winchester, Ely). It is unlikely that all private Forests (often, but inconsistently, called chases) had the trappings of courts and officers, as Cranborne Chase (Wiltshire and Dorset) did.14
In Scotland, whose kings were weaker, Forests were more numerous than in England; only a minority were royal, and the link with woodland was even more tenuous. The system went on much longer than in England – in the Highlands well into the nineteenth century.15 In South Wales every petty marcher lord, seeking to be as good as the English king, declared the local mountain to be a Forest: there were more Forests than in all England, but hardly any were royal. North Wales, however, which remained independent until after the Forest system in England had passed its peak, had very few: Welsh princes were known to be as good as the English king and had no need of the trappings of Saxon royalty.
What did the king get from 90 Forests? Venison: entertainment was an essential part of the prestige by which he reigned, and he needed to produce hundreds of noble beasts and birds at Christmas and other feasts. He gave deer to favoured subjects, as carcasses, permissions to hunt, or live to start parks. Where he owned the trees, he used timber and underwood to build castles and palaces, for equipment when fighting in France, as gifts to friends and relations or to religious orders, or to sell to pay his debts. Some Forests (especially Dean) were the source of especially large trees, sent hundreds of miles for cathedral roofs and other special uses. Twelfth-century kings got a large income from Forest fines; later this seems to have been reduced, perhaps because much of the proceeds disappeared in the bureaucracy. An important function of the Forests was as an honours system. Chaucer, for meritorious services as diplomat and Customs officer (and, maybe, as poet laureate), was awarded the honorific sinecure of under-Forester of the Forest of North Petherton, Somerset.
Wooded Forests (that is, Forests containing more woodland or wood-pasture than the surrounding landscape) comprised about half of English Forests. They were shaped like commons, with horns and boundary-houses (Fig. 183); they operated much like any other wood-pasture common. The king’s deer were usually a minor addition to the pre-existing land uses. In a Forest with many landownerships, like Epping, the Forest courts might take on the regulation of common-rights. Felling timber and wood, though breaches of Forest Law, were seldom prosecuted unless excessive or unusual.
About half the wooded Forests were compartmental (Fig. 184). In Hatfield Forest there were 17 coppices, which in theory were felled on an 18-year cycle; for six years after felling all the livestock were fenced out, and for three years after that only deer were let in. The remaining one-third of the Forest was plains, grassland with pollard trees, in other Forests called lawns. Similar arrangements operated in Wychwood (Oxfordshire), Cranborne Chase, Rockingham Forest (Northants), Writtle Forest (Essex) and Blackmoor Forest (see Chapter 20). Non-compartmental wooded Forests included the New Forest (for most of its history), Epping and Hainault Forests (Essex), Savernake (Wiltshire), and the Forest of Dean.
After their thirteenth-century heyday, Forests gradually fade from the record. As Graham Jones points out, few were formally dissolved, and some were very much alive in the sixteenth century.16 Possibly private Forests, though less well recorded, lasted longer than royal: Cranborne Chase was formally (and disastrously) abolished in 1828. Even if the legal status fell into abeyance, the physical fabric often survived.
Wooded Forests where the Crown still owned the land fell on evil days in the nineteenth century. Some, such as Alice-Holt (Hampshire), Salcey (Northants) and Dean, were converted into plantations that never fulfilled their purpose. Others were privatised: the destruction of Hainault Forest in the 1850s was a landmark in the histories of the bulldozer and of the modern conservation movement.
Forests existed in different forms in other countries. In Hungary they played a very large part in the medieval landscape.17
The Forest of Galtres and the Archbishop of York’s woods: For medieval kings, York was the northern capital of England, where they liked to keep Christmas. Like Norwich (but unlike London or Canterbury) it was under-provided with woodland; it was chronically short of wood, but well placed to import timber.
The Vale of York (Fig. 183b) was ill-drained and infertile. To the modern visitor it seems a flat, low-lying, dull region of ordinary farmland; its few ancient woods were ferociously replanted in the Locust Years; only place-names like Sutton-on-the-Forest hint at a more distinguished history. That history, however, has been ably investigated by the Woodland History Group of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society. For much of what follows I am indebted to the account by Jane Kaner.18
The later Norman kings surrounded York with a ring of Forests: Galtres to the north, Ouse & Derwent to the east, Ainsty to the southwest. The chief recorded product of the latter two was money from fines for infringing Forest Law. Ainsty, where the king owned little or no land, was perhaps the first Forest to be abolished: in 1190 its inhabitants paid Richard I the rather small lump sum of £31 to buy themselves out. Ouse & Derwent was likewise ransomed by Fountains Abbey and others in 1234.fn2
This left Galtres as the most significant wooded Forest in northern England. Its topography is rather shadowy, for it was never properly mapped. The legal Forest stretched 12 miles (20 kilometres) north-northwest from York city. Unlike Sherwood, one cannot find an uninhabited gap in which to place the physical Forest. The area is dotted with ancient settlements, between which the physical Forest probably reticulated itself like a Norfolk or Dorset common.
Galtres was a huge source of deer for the king’s feasts: the biggest producer of fallow deer in England and the second biggest of red and roe. It was not very wooded, even in Domesday Book. Surviving records indicate more heath and fen than woodland. However, it had timber trees and pollards: the part which the king owned was a source of great (though perhaps not outsize) timber trees, which supplied royal building works in York down to the mid-fourteenth century, after which there seem to have been no more. Despite the large numbers of deer, there seems to have been no attempt to compartmentalise the Forest.
Islanded within the Forest were monastic and private coppices and parks. The Abbot of St Mary’s, York, sweetened King John with 40 marks and a palfrey to be allowed to make the Abbey’s wood into a park – which was compartmentalised and seems to survive, badly damaged, as Overton Wood. St Leonard’s Hospital in York also made its private wood in Beningbrough into a park, whence timber was rafted down the Ouse to York in 1409; part of the park bank survives.
Galtres survived into the reign of James I, at which time there were still pollard oaks. In the 1610s and 1620s the Forest was abolished, privatised and very thoroughly destroyed. The Woodland History Group found one mighty pollard oak big enough be a survivor of the Forest.
York Minster, with its huge width, called for many exceptionally long, as well as ordinary, oaks. As far as is known, the Minster got timber from private woods, including Stillington in the legal Forest, none of which survives. The king was not in the habit of granting timber to York Minster from Galtres Forest, nor from Sherwood as he did to Lincoln Minster.
The biggest wood near York, then as now, was Bishop’s Wood. It was apparently, in all but name, a small Forest belonging to the Archbishop and containing his deer; it was compartmented, with several named woods or ‘haggs’, and ‘outwoods’ corresponding to plains in other Forests. In the fifteenth century the Archbishop provided oak timber from here for the Minster, including boards for the nave ceiling, which were sawn on the spot instead of coming as usual from the Baltic. By the eighteenth century the wood was a huge but conventional coppice, providing thousands of tons of timber as well as underwood. There have been several phases of planting – conifer symbols appear as early as the Ordnance Survey of 1845–8 – but enough yet remains to identify it as an ash–hazel wood.
Medieval timber buildings in York ought to be a rich source of information on the ecology of growing trees (Chapter 11). York Minster, alas, has attracted several fires and the wrath of restorers, so that little ancient timber remains, except the thirteenth-century Baltic pine doors of the chapterhouse. The countryside, though not prolific in such buildings, has the early Norman door at Stillingfleet – made of crooked, fast-grown ‘local’ oak, presumably before the Baltic trade – and the ancient doors of Cawood Palace. I remember, at Selby, the last timber bridge to take a main road over a tidal river.
OPERATION OF WOOD-PASTURE
Ground vegetation
The essential difference between woodland (or forest with a small f) and wood-pasture (or savanna) is the ground vegetation. In woodland the ground vegetation consists of plants that tolerate or evade shade (Table 2). Wood-pasture has grassland or some other plant community that calls for unshaded conditions.
Ground vegetation under savanna trees may not be quite the same as that between them. In southern Portugal and Spain, as T. Marañon has shown, there are two types of grassland, one beneath the evergreen oaks, the other between them.19 In the arid Davis Mountains, west Texas, I find that every tree of juniper has a circle of the grass Stipa tenuissima exactly beneath it, in contrast to the mixture of grasses constituting the general prairie (Fig. 38). A similar difference should be looked for in the few English wood-pastures that still retain their ground vegetation. Is it due to:
Pollards and veteran trees
Wood-pasture trees tend to live longer than upstanding trees in woods. This is partly because the lack of neighbouring trees allows them space to go through phases of retrenchment and regrowth. Also, as timber trees, oaks would be difficult to replace, so landowners would allow them to grow to unusual sizes, worth more per cubic foot than ordinary oaks. However, most trees in uncompartmented wood-pasture were pollarded, going on to become veteran trees.
In other countries’ wood-pastures the trees, as well as the grassland, often feed the livestock. Leaf-fodder is a tradition of Norway, the Alps and Balkans, and through Turkey on into Central Asia and the Himalayas.20 There are many styles of pollarding or sometimes shredding – cropping the side branches leaving a tuft at the top. Leaves are often dried like hay and stored to feed animals in the winter (Fig. 39). This was less important in Britain, where animals could feed out of doors in winter. However, there is evidence for it from the Somerset Levels. Pollard hawthorns in Hatfield and Savernake Forests may have provided iron rations for the deer to gnaw in hard winters.
Not all wood-pastures have ancient trees: most Spanish and Portuguese savannas (with a notable exception near Trujillo) have trees no more than 130 years old, the result of an expansion in the recent past.21 Greece and especially Crete, however, are (with England and southeast Sweden) the great stronghold of ancient trees in Europe.
Infilling
In the last 150 years, besides widespread destruction of the world’s forests and savannas, those that remain have changed. Many forests have got denser and savannas have turned into forest. The student should be alert to discrepancies between old trees and their surroundings: to the process of infilling, where big spreading old trees, which grew up with room to expand, have tall young trees crowded between them (Fig. 37).
Infill trees may be of the same or different species. In Savernake Forest (Wiltshire) the great spreading oaks of the seventeenth century (and a few medieval pollards), which grew up scattered on heathland, now stand in woodland with twentieth-century oaks crowded between them. In Epping Forest, young hollies infill between the pollard oaks, hornbeams and beeches.
I have seen infilling in many European countries, in Turkey, North America and Australia (Fig. 40), have heard of it in Africa, and would expect it in South America. In Japan sacred groves around temples and shrines are not untouched wildwood. Many consist of great evergreen trees of kusonoki (Cinnamomum camphora, camphorwood), tabu (Machilus thunbergi, a laurel-like tree), or a dozen other species – sometimes pollarded – with younger trees such as the giant conifer sugi (Cryptomeria japonica) crowded between them. A century ago management evidently changed. Pollarding was abandoned, and a new generation of trees was either planted by the faithful or allowed to grow up, creating the dark and numinous shades which so impress the pilgrim today.
In West Africa much of what was thought of as ‘virgin forest’ is really a legacy of the slave trade. Previously it had been a cultural savanna. In the eighteenth century slavers murdered or carried off the people; their pastures and fields turned into forest, in which huge savanna trees and the remains of villages and termite mounds are still embedded.22
Hollins, holly-hags, hursts and hats
Holly and ivy are the only British evergreens that are both edible and (in moderate quantity) non-poisonous to livestock. (Pine is rather unpalatable; yew is palatable but poisonous.) Holly was iron rations for sheep in snowy winters. It has an Atlantic distribution, easily set back by drought, dying at the top as hedgerow hollies in Norfolk often do. Nevertheless, it is now on the increase.23
Holly grows easily from seed. Although browsed by most herbivorous mammals, it is not killed; repeated browsing turns it into a spiny topiary-like bush, recalling the bitten-down prickly oak bushes on many a Greek hillside. If browsing stops for a few years it is well placed to grow into a tree. It thus prospers under intermittent browsing, especially in the twentieth century. It acts as an infill in wood-pasture; notably in Epping Forest, where prohibition of pollarding and decline of browsing after 1878 resulted in holly bushes growing into great trees. I suspect that the story of Sutton Coldfield has an element of browsing, turning coppices into wood-pasture, followed by lack of browsing allowing holly to take over.
Mayhew, chronicler of the Dickensian lower classes in London, mentions the trade of ‘Christmasing’, stealing holly by moonlight for sale.24 A happily forgotten use of holly bark was to make bird-lime, instant glue for sticking small edible birds to twigs: Waterton, the eccentric Yorkshire naturalist, complained in the 1850s that his hollies were being damaged by bark-gatherers.25
Hollins – wood-pastures of holly-trees – are a feature of mountain regions. Near Sheffield in 1442 there was a sale of holly in winter. Later, in 1725, the Earl of Oxford found, also in the Sheffield area:
… the greatest number of wild stunted holly trees that I ever saw together. … This tract of ground they grow upon is called the Burley Hollins … their branches lopped off every winter for the support of the sheep which browse upon them, and at the same time are sheltered by the stunted part that is left standing.26
This was evidently a tract of pollard hollies, like the famous hollins still extant on the Stiperstones in Shropshire. Hollins should be looked for in other moorland countries; I have seen great pollard hollies above the Killarney woods in southwest Ireland.
Holly occurred in woodland also, and sometimes formed the underwood of coppices called ‘holly-hags’. These extended into lowland England, but were sufficiently unusual to be named after the tree. In the Middle Ages holly is occasionally heard of as timber. In 1196 there was a hulnetum, one of the rare Latin wood-names in -etum, meaning a wood composed of a particular kind of tree, in Bentley (Suffolk).27 This later became Hulney Wood, which is still there, but suffered very drastic replanting followed by very drastic windblow in 1987; I cannot say what happened to the holly.
Sutton Coldfield Park (Warwickshire) is a big medieval park with embanked woods called hursts. One of these, Holly Hurst, is a solid mass of holly with birches and standard oaks. Less of the holly is in the form of coppice stools than one would expect. However, the other hursts are also thickets of holly; Upper and Lower Nut Hurst, despite their names, are holly-woods in which I have found no hazel.
The enigmas of Staverton Park: Staverton Park (Suffolk) is an oak savanna, divided into two areas (Fig. 185). In the more open part holly trees have arisen, not in gaps between oaks as they would in a rational world, but under the oaks’ canopy (Fig. 43). The denser part, ‘The Thicks’, looks like a later stage of the same process: hollies grow in rings round the bases of living or dead oaks or the mouldering remains of oaks that have almost disappeared. Students, when asked to speculate, produce the following interpretations:
There is a similar association between oak and holly in the New Forest. Hollies, according to Colin Tubbs, colonise heathland, where they survive burning in the fire-dominated landscape. Patches of holly are invaded by rowan and yew, and give rise, Vera-style, to a central group of oaks. These ‘hats’ or ‘holms’, although ultimately impermanent, last for centuries and give rise to place-names.28 I have seen a similar association, between a different oak and a different holly, on Cumberland Island (Georgia).
The grandest of all holly infills is Staverton Thicks. The mighty hollies, up to 70 feet (20 metres) high, are said to be the biggest in the kingdom, accompanied by some of the biggest birches and biggest rowans. They have overtopped and killed many of the pollard oaks (Fig. 41). The great storm of 1990 uprooted some of the giant hollies, but they go on growing as if nothing had happened. Any gaps are filled with prickly, deer-bitten masses of young holly. What set off this change from what would previously have been a conventional pollarded wood-pasture? How can an Atlantic, drought-sensitive tree reach its greatest development in the driest part of Britain on blown sand, the least moisture-retaining of soils?
Holly is not new at Staverton: thirteenth-century estate accounts record nil entries for sales of holly. When I first knew the Thicks, in 1969, the oaks killed by holly shade were already in all states of decomposition, from those still retaining bark to those mouldered away to meagre traces. Since a dead oak takes at least a century to disappear completely, they must have died at various times from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. For the hollies to grow up and out-compete the oaks would take nearly another hundred years. The hollies, therefore, would have begun to get away in the mid-to late eighteenth century.fn4 There was evidently a temporary relaxation of grazing, which could have given rise to the last generation of pollard oaks in the rest of Staverton.
The Staverton hollies are perhaps the oldest example of holly infilling. The reason for their grandeur is probably geological. The Thicks, although on a sandy plateau, has wet seeps that persist in most summers. Under the sand is a thin bed of Chillesford Clay, absent (or patchy) in the rest of Staverton, which evidently holds up a perched water table that feeds the hollies.
Forests and deer
Popular and even learned writers reiterate the belief that Forests were ‘hunting preserves’, ‘reserved for the king’s hunting’, which has become a literary topos, a factoid not requiring illustration. In reality normal agriculture, pasturage and woodmanship went on in Forests, royal and private, much as they did in the outside world. Deer were added to these pursuits. How large a part did hunting play in the life of the average king, and in which Forests?
The most convincing account of an English king hunting is from before there were Forests, in the reign of King Edmund the Magnificent (939–46). The king rode out from Cheddar Palace in the Mendips in pursuit of red deer. He singled out a hart and went after it through a ‘wood’ (silua); it cannot have been much of a wood, for he rode through it at speed, without looking where he was going; the hart plunged into Cheddar Gorge and was ‘ground into little pieces’, and the hounds ditto; the king was enabled to pull up his horse on the last tussock (in ultimo … cespite) by the miraculous intervention of St Dunstan, whom he then promoted to be Archbishop of Canterbury. This was a real adventure, written down shortly afterwards, and repeated by similar accidents in 1240 and to the Wells Harriers in 1895.29
The early Norman kings hunted. William the Conqueror introduced the Forest system, as his obituary in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records to his discredit. William II met his death in the New Forest in a hunting accident (or was it an accident?); so did his nephew, who got spiked in the throat by a branch, as could happen to anyone, and his brother, who rode into a cloud of poison gas.30
Tudor and Stuart kings and queens hunted in person. Henry VIII, halfway through his reign, became ‘passionately fond of the chase’, and developed a mania for parks, to which the English landscape is permanently indebted. Elizabeth liked to be thought of as ‘a weak and feeble woman’ who could not keep up with her father’s manly activities, but in practice seems to have outdone him as the greatest sporting sovereign before George V. Charles I and Queen Anne were mighty hunters, and even Oliver Cromwell took a passing interest.31
It is easy for historians to project Tudor royal hunts back into the Middle Ages and to transfer them from parks to Forests. For the four centuries after 1100 there is no lack of writing about European kings hunting. In Spain, Alfonso XI (1312–50) wrote a Book of Hunting, dealing with the strategy and tactics of the chase, veterinary medicine and field surgery, and hundreds of localities from Santander to Algeciras. Alfonso’s hunts were real adventures: disdaining pitiful deer, he stuck mighty sows and lanced raging bears.32 French kings hunted in person, and at least one was a martyr to the chase. (For the Hunt of the Emperor Maximilian (1493–1519).)
All this, however, is Continental. English nobles liked to translate books on hunting, and there is some English material on the management of parks. There are ‘legends’, such as the story of Henry III sparing the White Hart of Blackmoor Forest in Dorset and punishing Thomas de la Lynde who slew it. Henry’s relatives, Richard and Edmund of Cornwall, were keen sportsmen and volunteered to catch deer for the royal table. This apart, historians of hunting and biographers of kings are short of particulars of hunts giving names, dates and places. There is little to justify modern scholars’ obsession with hunting as the raison d’être of English Forests. In contemporary records, deer appear far more often at feasts than in hunts. The ordinary medieval king apparently had little time or inclination for Forest hunting; his dinner was caught for him by professional hunters. Hunting was a courtly science, its etiquette to be learnt from books, not field trips. A royal hunt was full of symbolic meaning, like a coronation, and almost as rare. It has been claimed that Henry VIII was the first to develop the knack of delegating his workload to administrators, giving himself leisure for a life of ‘aristocratic ease … hunting and obesity’.33
What kept down the numbers of deer? Writers insist that in Forests the king’s deer were protected by ‘savage laws and cruel penalties’. They have in mind the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s statement that King William ‘… set up great protection for deer, and legislated to that intent, that whosoever should slay hart or hind should be blinded …’ (1087 AD). The Conqueror, it seems, objected to the death penalty. But were such Byzantine punishments ever inflicted? I have challenged the academic world for examples of the confiscation of eyes (or even testicles) for Forest offences – names? places? dates? – but no reply has come.
To keep the numbers of deer constant one normally needs to kill about one-quarter of the stock each year. According to his correspondence, Henry III in an average year ordered some 600 fallow deer, of which 530 came from Forests; this includes those which he ate himself, or gave live or dead to his friends. He consumed 160 red and 45 roe deer a year. These are absurdly small numbers. The fallow, even if we double the figure to allow generously for unrecorded orders, would be in equilibrium with at most 5,000 fallow deer in all the royal Forests in England. From Hatfield Forest he took a dozen deer a year, about one-fifth of those that now need to be killed there to keep the numbers constant.
There are now thought to be at least 100,000 fallow, 100,000 red and 200,000 roe deer free-ranging in England; motorists kill tens of thousands annually.34 If the twentieth century could not hold down the numbers of deer using cars and guns, how could the thirteenth with nets and arrows? And yet in the Middle Ages there were complaints of not enough deer: in 1257, gifts were suspended in some twenty Forests for that reason.35 During the Middle Ages red and fallow deer remained constant or declined; roe became almost extinct. Something does not add up.
Records of poaching offences in Forest courts are remarkable in three ways:
The courts, it seems, were concerned mainly with raising revenue from fines; probably most of the money had been collected long before at lower courts whose archives do not survive.
What could have kept down the numbers of deer, other than a great deal of unprosecuted and unrecorded poaching? The king oppressed the nobility – that was his job – but had no interest in antagonising the middle and lower classes. There was normally no point in prosecuting the ordinary individual snaring a deer for the pot.
The motts of the Wild West
I have written about savannas based on single trees scattered among pasturage. In Texas, however, several savanna trees are clonal, growing from suckers, especially inland live-oak (Quercus fusiformis) and cedar-elm (Ulmus crassifolia). The prairies are thus dotted with patches of these trees, called motts (Fig. 32). Usually all the stems in each mott share a clonal peculiarity of habit or branching, but occasionally one can detect two clones in a mott, or even a mixed oak–elm mott.
Motts tend to be based on patches of thin soil or rocky ground amid the clayey prairie. Each mott is a wood, with a shrub layer (elbow-bush Forestiera angustifolia), woody climbers (cat-brier Smilax rotundifolia and the local species of grape) and herbaceous plants. In the nineteenth century the landscape was privatised and divided up by fences, which run in straight lines through prairie and mott alike; many of these, over the years, have turned into mixed hedges.
Although superficially motts look like Vera’s wildwood groves in action, this is a cultural landscape. It is now grazed by declining herds of cattle, sheep and goats and increasing hordes of deer and feral hogs. Without enough grazing the prairie rapidly infills, especially with the local juniper, Juniperus ashei, formerly confined to canyons, but now forming dense ‘cedar-brakes’ between and around the motts.
In pre-settlement times this was fire-dominated: travellers such as the Santa Fé Expedition of 1841 often mention fires. Fires in the flammable grassland would limit the spread of the fire-sensitive juniper. They would less often have spread into the motts, but a fierce fire would have killed the trees to the ground, leaving the suckers to sprout. Burning continued for some time after privatisation: hidden in the hedges are the pioneers’ long-lasting juniper fence stakes, charred by prairie fires.
Mexican land perambulations of the 1830s, written in a pidgin of Spanish and English, show that the infrastructure already existed. Woodland, savanna and prairie were located generally where they still are; even the tree species are often the same, although few of the individual trees are still alive.
How old are the motts? The stems on each mott are usually about 80 years old, probably arising after the last fierce fire or after settlers had felled the motts for fuel. A few much bigger live-oaks have stories associated with them, for example those, now 2–3 feet (60–90 centimetres) in diameter, supposed to have been already there when the city of Waco was started c.1842 and thus now about 200 years old. The motts, however, must be much older than the stems.
On 2 November 1831 there was a desperate gunfight between a war-party of Tehuacana and Waco and their foes, a gang of adventurers including James Bowie (toting his Bowie knife) looking for silver. The scene was:
… a cluster of live oak trees, some thirty or forty in number, and about the size of a man’s body. To the north of them there was a thicket of live oak bushes about ten feet high, forty yards in length and twenty in breadth … The surrounding country was an open prairie, interspersed with a few trees, rocks and broken land.
J.W. WILBARGER, INDIAN DEPREDATIONS IN TEXAS, AUSTIN 1889
I have been there and find it still a land of prairies and motts with even-aged stems.
The savanna infrastructure has passed through at least four human cultures. The barbed-wire fences and hedges are a legacy of settlement and of a short lived attempt to cultivate the prairie. This was preceded by the cowboy culture of the Chisholm Trail, which itself lasted only about 30 years. Before these, in the eighteenth century, were the Plains Indians, horsemen ranging over hundreds of miles, and hybrid cultures like the Waco who, though nomadic, had permanent bases and grew crops. But these too had predecessors, before the coming of Europeans and horses, known to archaeologists as the Woodland Culture; there can be little doubt that the motts and prairies originated under their influence.
STATE OF THE WORLD’S WOOD-PASTURES
In Britain, the wood and pasture components seldom both survive. Many wood-pastures have infilled into woodland, losing the pasture altogether. Parks tend to belong to people who can afford to ‘improve’ the grassland, keeping the ancient trees, but reducing the ground vegetation to ryegrass. Even in Hatfield Forest the National Trust was persuaded into a brief but disastrous phase of improvement in the 1950s; 50 years on, the old grassland has still only partly recovered.
In other countries the original pasture has been replaced by invasive exotics. In Californian savannas one is depressed to find the indigenous evergreen oaks remaining, but the grassland replaced by familiar European annuals such as Bromus species, clovers, and southern European plants such as Kohlrauschia prolifera and Parentucellia viscosa, with hardly a native herb in sight. This is a new plant community: the species come from different habitats and do not form such grasslands in the Mediterranean. The traffic has been one way; Spanish dehesas, in a similar climate, are not overrun with Californian plants.
In Australian savannas, likewise, kangaroos and emus now feed on European herbs or, further north, universal tropical grasses that have displaced much of the native ground vegetation. This in turn affects the fire regime, for the invaders often burn hotter than the original grasses.
Pollarding was an aspect of European culture that was rarely transferred to North America, and only sporadically to Australia, but it exists in Tasmania. The great savanna eucalypts there, now in farmland, are relicts of an Aboriginal cultural landscape. Many are pollarded: was it black or white people who did this, and why did they undertake the immense labour of pollarding these iron-hard trees? The present Tasmanians, whose magnificent landscapes are among the island’s few remaining assets, are distressed to find these trees gradually dying. No human ingenuity, it seems, can persuade new eucalypts to arise in farmland, either because the soils are altered or because of lack of fire.
Footnotes
fn1 A doctrine that has had more influence than it deserves; it was invented by Garret Hardin, an American with no experience of how commons actually worked. See Grove & Rackham (2002) p. 88.
fn2 The king still kept some deer for ready use at Langwith Hay, 4 miles (6.5 kilometres) from York. This, rather than Langthwaite in Swaledale, appears to have been the ‘Forest of Langwast’ from which he placed a last-minute order for roe deer for his famous Christmas dinner in 1251 (Rackham (1986a) p. 119).
fn3 John White proposes another explanation in the form of ‘bundle-planting’; but apart from the lack of evidence of any planting in Staverton, the oaks and hollies are usually too far apart to have originated in one hole.
fn4 Holly produces indistinct and unhelpful annual rings.