The mournful peasant leads his humble
band,
And while he sinks, without one arm to save,
The country blooms – a
garden and a grave.
Where then, ah! where, shall poverty reside,
To
’scape the pressure of contiguous pride?
If to some common’s
fenceless limits stray’d,
He drives his flock to pick the scanty
blade,
Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide,
And ev’n the
bare-worn common is denied.
Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74), ‘The Deserted Village’
In May 1939, on the eve of war, H. E. Bates wrote, ‘Most of the English countryside as we see it today is manmade … the part most completely shaped by man is this plain, fundamental chequerwork of flat field and hedgerow.’
Chequerwork is perhaps the wrong word; it implies too much order, too many right angles. Fly over the Midwestern states of America – as I did recently, over Iowa – and you will see one huge green chequerboard: flat, mile-square field after flat, mile-square field.
These geometrical field shapes grow out of a vast, featureless landscape, acquired in one go by a single landowner, or parcelled out in even chunks by government – like the forty acres and a mule granted by the American Union general, William Sherman, to freed slaves as he occupied Confederate territory in 1865. Forty acres, or one sixteenth of a square mile, is a commonly used land measure.
English fields rarely look as symmetrical as that, but some fields are more symmetrical than others.
The single most powerful factor in producing a measure of symmetry was enclosure. Under this system, common land – heathland, woodland and rough grazing – and open fields, once cultivated in unfenced strips, were fenced in, and divided by hedges into single fields. The system also brought an end to common rights – where commoners could graze their animals or collect hay, even though they didn’t own the land. Instead, the uses of the land were granted entirely to its private owner.
The enclosure of much of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the biggest ever single factor in changing the national landscape.
Most of England is now enclosed, but the date when enclosure took place makes all the difference to the way it looks today. Much of our ancient countryside – the West Country, the Welsh and Scottish borders, Essex and Kent – was divided in this way in the Middle Ages.
In these areas – often wilder and more remote – there had never been much of a fashion for open-field farming. Instead, when the fields were first claimed from heath and forest in the Middle Ages, or even earlier, they were immediately confined in small, sheltered fields.
Meanwhile, the broad plains of the Midlands lent themselves that much better to open-field farming; so they were divided much later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as private landowners cottoned on to the greater profits that came with enclosure.
Over the centuries, those ancient landscapes, enclosed at an earlier stage, built up a thick web of woods, ponds and pollarded trees; their roads, footpaths and ancient, mixed hedges are alluringly crooked, their fields more likely to be irregular. The people in this ancient countryside tend to live in isolated farms, small towns and hamlets.
That said, some ancient civilizations were keener on symmetry than others. In southern Dartmoor, the moors are still divided into neat parallel lines by low stone banks, or Bronze Age ‘reaves’ – barriers used on arable and pasture land. They wander out of true every now and then, but their overwhelming force is towards order – their lines often leap over a sunken river and continue their straight course on the other side of the valley.
A similar pattern of hedges, on roughly parallel axes, can be seen near Bungay, Suffolk. The Dengie peninsula, in south-east Essex, was divided up by the Romans – or possibly as early as the Iron Age – into a grid of differently sized rectangles. There’s a similar Roman grid at Holme-next-the-Sea, Norfolk; and another Bronze or Iron Age grid in Tadlow, Cambridgeshire.1
But symmetrical ancient features are the exception. Most prehistoric fields – and most of the ones that predate the Middle Ages – are irregularly shaped. They often vary in size to meet the differing needs of their farms. On the Lizard Peninsula, in Cornwall, the smallest, most intensively cultivated fields are wrapped closely around the farmyard, with the larger fields further away, ranged around the smaller fields in a roughly circular pattern.
Great age is also apparent in the depth of country roads, particularly in Devon’s ancient sunken lanes, flanked by banks topped with thick, brambly hedgerows. These are often formed by two-fold ditches – where the spoil from the excavated road was piled up on either side to create the semi-tunnel effect.
Age can be diagnosed, too, in the profile and density of those hedges. In Devon and Cornwall in particular, the ash, elm, oak and sycamore hedges can be extremely old. Some of those at Land’s End are Bronze Age, their thick, humped masses blasted into shape by salty Atlantic winds for more than 2,600 years.
England’s earliest hedges were planted in the neolithic period, in around 4000–2500 BC. But extensive enclosure was first carried out in earnest by the Romans, who came up with the simplest way to grow a hedge: smear plant seed all over a piece of old rope, and bury it in a shallow trench.
The Anglo-Saxons accelerated the practice of enclosure; the word ‘hedge’ comes from Old English haga, meaning an enclosure, itself derived from the Saxon word for the hawthorn fruit. The first mention of a hedge being planted was at Kington Langley, Wiltshire, in AD 940: ‘the hedgerow that Aelfric made’.2
If not planted by man, hedges have grown naturally along the line of fences, off which birds drop plant seeds; occasionally they are thought to be ghosts of ancient woodland, like a hallowed stretch of lime hedge in Shelley, Suffolk.
Hedge-laying continued through the Middle Ages. Richard I, a keen hunter, insisted that his tenants keep their hedges at four foot six or lower, the height a deer could comfortably clear. In the fourteenth century, increasing numbers of open fields were enclosed. More arable land became pasture, as cattle and sheep grazing was extended – animals need more fencing in than crops. Woodland, scrub and common land were increasingly cultivated, too.
After the Black Death, in 1348–50, farmworkers were in a more powerful position, because of the sheer shortage of labour. More of them were given their own plot to plough. Fields were often divided up into areas that were a furlong – an eighth of a mile – in length, the accepted distance that could be ploughed in a single day.
By 1700, about half of the arable land in Britain – around 4.5 million acres – had been enclosed. The rest was open field – hedgeless fields, divided into narrow, long strips in the same way they had been since the Anglo-Saxons.
Celtic fields that predated the Anglo-Saxons were smaller and squarer, partly because the Celtic plough was so simple that the fields had to be double-ploughed – horizontally and vertically, in a grid-like pattern. The more sophisticated Anglo-Saxon plough allowed a field to be ploughed in one long, straight line.
All that open field has been enclosed since, with the rare exception of a few acres here and there, notably at Laxton in Nottinghamshire, Braunton in north Devon and in the fields around Eton, Berkshire.
In a few places, you can still see signs of pre-enclosure ridge and furrow farming, and the old custom of ploughing in strips. A 1591 estate map for All Souls College, Oxford, shows ridge-and-furrow strips marked with the names of the tenant farmers; it tallies accurately with a 1950s aerial photograph of the land.
The ridges and furrows, running downhill, to help drainage, were made by a plough drawn by eight oxen, going up and down the traditional half-acre strip, or ‘selion’, from the French for a furrow. As the oxen reached the end of their run, they would prepare to turn around in a swerving line, lending a curving, reversed S-shape to the selion.
Not everywhere was enclosed. Today, there are still great tracts of uncultivated land in England – around 5 million acres of common, waste and wild land survive, of the 32.7 million acres that make up England. The 914,307 acres of common land in England are controlled by ancient common rights, usually owned by villagers, or a lord of the manor. That lord may be the local authority: Newcastle City Council owns the Town Moor in the city, where the June Fair, the Hoppings, takes place.
Common land includes the ‘Strays’ in York, road verges in Herefordshire and chunks of mountaintop in the Lake District. Surrey – with its once remote heaths – has more common land than any other county. There are fewer commons in the Midlands, so comprehensively enclosed after 1750. Epping Forest and Hampstead Heath are both commons, owned by the Corporation of London.
The English countryside before enclosure – Laxton, Nottinghamshire, in 1635. The first picture shows the irregularly shaped, open fields. The second shows the hedgeless strips cultivated by different farmers in South Field. The black strips are those worked by a single farmer, William Woolfit. A furlong is the name of a single block of land cleared for cultivation. The grey areas are sykes – grazing places for tethered cattle and horses.
Not that common status necessarily means preservation. Greenham Common, owned by the Borough of Newbury, was converted into an airfield in 1941, before being lent to the American air force. With their cruise missiles, they in turn lured the Greenham Common protesters to the site. In 2002, the Greenham and Crookham Commons Act returned the common from the hawk to the barn owl, as it became wild common land once more.
Ancient hedges, planted in the pre-modern age, tend to be rambling things that just about agree to make up a four-sided field, and only very rarely one with approximately right-angled corners. They follow the wandering natural boundaries of the country: old roads and hollow ways, woods, the crests and troughs of hills and valleys, with little sign of those dead straight lines that come of centrally planned subdivision.
In Ireland, the roads, and roadside hedges, are that much straighter: the Grand Jury, the local county government body, built the Jury Roads – straight as a die until they reach the demesne of the local manor house, where they swing round the estate wall.
Older English hedges often follow the line of ancient tracks, which in turn originally followed the route of cows and sheep across fields – and they don’t walk in straight lines. Humans are different from cows: their footpaths cut straight across irregular ancient fields. Well, English footpaths do; in France, the footpaths carefully and politely go round the field’s perimeter. On most of the Continent, public access stops as soon as you hit private land.3
Private property rights are robustly protected in England – witness the effect they had on stopping Christopher Wren’s grand scheme for the City of London (see Chapter 5) – but so are easements and public rights of way.
There is a thick, bristling selection of species in an old hedge: among them blackberry, elder, dwarf oak, maple, honeysuckle, wild clematis, hazel, wild rose, sallow, blackthorn and hawthorn. Their make-up varies from county to county. Holly is popular in the Pennines; alder and willow are prominent in Sussex’s wet river valleys; gorse is used in the New Forest, and Scots Pine in East Anglia; there are cider apple trees in Herefordshire hedges, cherry trees in Norfolk’s.
Soil makes a difference: in the Vale of the White Horse, Oxfordshire, the hedges, planted on clay covered with sands and gravels, are unusually tall. Buckthorn grows on the chalk of Essex and Hertfordshire.
Age is the defining factor in producing a range of species in a single hedge. Six hundred plant species, 65 bird species, 40 butterfly species and 20 types of mammal have been found in British hedges. To work out the age of a hedge, use Hooper’s Rule, named after its inventor, Dr Max Hooper.4 Because hedges accumulate more species over time, and earlier hedges were planted with more species, the rule goes like this: count the number of different species in a thirty-yard stretch of hedge, not including common plants like blackberries and ivy, multiply the figure by 110 and you’ll calculate its age. Ancient hedges show the work of generations of woodsmen, too, thick as they are with pollarded trees and coppice stools.
The hedge is particularly well designed for wildlife. A useful covered highway for birds, it’s also a refuge from the pesticides and the plough of the neighbouring field. It creates sheltering planes at different angles, providing moisture and shade.
A hedge’s raised banks also place some flowers directly in the sun. In County Durham one spring, bicycling west out of Chester-le-Street, I noticed the sunny side of the road was thick with primroses at the foot of a south-facing hedge; on the other side of the road, below the north-facing hedge, there was a single primrose in a quarter-mile stretch. In spring, bluebells, white anemones, violets, campion and lady smocks often join the primroses around the foot of the hedges. In summer come meadow-sweet, foxglove, wild roses and bay willow-herb.
Most hedge styles depend on cutting back stems three quarters of the way through, and laying them flat, overlapping with each other. Hedges are laid in different ways, to cater for different animals. In the Midlands plashing style, the hedge is cut back, and the branches wrapped around ash stakes, producing a hedge strong enough to support a leaning bullock; in the south-west, sheep are kept back by lower, denser hedges; the beef cattle of Leicestershire are restrained by thick, tall, bullfinch hedges.5
While many hedge styles are in decline, as they are grubbed up to make bigger fields, there is one increasingly popular roadside style – called ‘Motorway’ – where branches are laid in parallel with the flow of traffic, to limit damage from, and to, passing cars. In the early 1960s, gorse, which likes poor, acidic soil, was also planted alongside the first motorways; it is still prominent alongside the M3.
England’s enclosure was largely completed by a series of parliamentary Acts from the eighteenth century onwards, as strip-farmed open fields were replaced by larger, more regular, if not completely symmetrical, ones.
You can divide England up between that ancient countryside (in the West Country, the Welsh and Scottish borders, Essex and Kent) and this newer, centrally planned countryside, divided up under the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enclosure Acts.6
That planned countryside runs down a central strip of England: through the landscapes of the Midlands, stretching up into Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and down into Dorset. Almost 2,000 Enclosure Acts were passed between 1760 and 1815, largely in those areas, with each parish requiring its own Act.7
Under the acts, those old open fields, bordered by low earth banks, with grass paths and narrow cultivated strips, were gradually turned into what you see today in those landscapes that were enclosed later: a quilt of roughly square, small fields enclosed by hedgerows and ditches, divided by straightish roads. The resulting landscape, as designed by enclosure commissioners, was not only more regular but also barer, with few woods or footpaths, fewer, straighter roads and plainer hawthorn hedges, planted in straight rows.8
Where pre-enclosure farmhouses were usually found in the village, new ones were now needed in the middle of the freshly enclosed land. And so they were called things like New Ground Farm or Newlands Farm; or given names that chimed with eighteenth-century events contemporary with the Enclosure Acts, such as Hanover Farm, Bunkers Hill or Quebec Farm.9
When local landowners took over this land and enclosed it, the landlords’ fortunes improved enormously. They could grow what they wanted, and graze their cattle away from possibly diseased neighbouring livestock.
But not everyone loved the hedge. The new hedges were loathed by smallholders who’d reaped a comfortable if basic living from pre-enclosure common land. And enclosure had a disastrous effect on the landless. The landlords only took on a relatively small number of employed farmhands. Thousands of other farmworkers were made destitute; poorhouses spread across the country in the eighteenth century.
John Clare (1793–1864), the poet and labourer from Helpston, Northamptonshire, wrote bitterly about enclosure: the uprooting of trees and hedges, the draining of the fens and the ploughing of the pastures. Driven to distraction by enclosure – and not helped by an extremely sensitive disposition – Clare descended into mania and spent the last twenty-three years of his life in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum. The English countryside we get so lyrical about these days had some agonizing birth pangs.
When Clare was fourteen, in 1807, his home village was enclosed by Act of Parliament. In order to increase yields, commons and waste ground, where labourers like Clare previously got their firewood and grazed their animals, were turned into large, privately owned fields. Where fields once stretched outwards from the village, like spokes from a hub, they were now divided into those rough rectangles, with no direct connection to the village.
Enclosure effectively privatized the country. Within the newly defined boundaries, it allowed the development of private aristocratic pursuits, chiefly the intensive rearing of the pheasant. The most common gamebird in the English countryside, the pheasant isn’t in fact native; neither is the rabbit, introduced in the early Middle Ages. The pheasant, of south-west Asian origins, is thought to have been introduced by the Normans.10
The bird flourished in the copses, game crops and woods which, under enclosure, were either preserved or freshly planted to keep up fresh supplies of game. By the late eighteenth century, pheasant-rearing was a significant part of the English country life. Hunting, too, had its own effect on the landscape in good fox country. In 1770s Leicestershire, fox coverts – spinneys with thick undergrowth, each of around 1–8 hectares – were created in abundance.
But all this was at the expense of the old rural smallholder and labourer; like John Clare, who wrote ‘Helpston Green’ in response to the vagaries of enclosure.
Ye injur’d fields ere while so gay,
When nature’s hand display’d
Long waving rows of willows grey
And clumps of hawthorn shade.
But now, alas, your hawthorn bowers
All desolate we see
The tyrant’s hand their shade devours
And cuts down every tree.
Not trees alone have felt their force,
Whole woods beneath them bow’d;
They stopt the winding runlet’s course,
And flowry pastures plough’d;
To shrub nor tree throughout thy fields
They no compassion show;
The uplifted axe no mercy yields,
But strikes a fatal blow.
In this brutal way, around 4.5 million acres of open field – a seventh of England – were enclosed along these lines, with around 200,000 miles of hedges planted between 1750 and 1850, as much as in the previous half a millennium. Most of the new, post-1700 hedges were straight – a bending stretch in the middle of a straight hedge is often a lonely section of ancient hedge that was absorbed into the new order.11
England is now left, then, with four main types of fields. The first are the ancient, smaller fields, often preserving the double-curve ‘selion’ shape. The second kind were created by medieval or Tudor enclosures: on a larger scale, with boundaries a furlong in length, marked out with winding, mixed hedges. Those fields enclosed under the later parliamentary Acts have near-straight, thin hawthorn hedges, obliterating the curving, small-scale lines of the old open-field strips. And modern fields – the fourth sort, planned long after the Enclosure Acts – are, if anything, even more symmetrical.
The Enclosure Acts were also behind the large-scale creation of allotments. Allotments first appeared in the late sixteenth century: as common land was gradually gobbled up, commoners were allotted land next to their tenanted cottages as part of their wages. The 1806 Enclosure Act, enclosing Great Somerford, in Wiltshire, was the first legislation specifically setting aside land for the labouring poor. The 1845 General Enclosure Act further declared that ‘field gardens’ must be set aside whenever land was enclosed. Under the 1887 Allotment Act, local authorities had to set aside such land if it was in demand.
Railways increased demand for allotments. The first railway companies rented land to their workers on excess land either side of the tracks – that’s why you still see so many of them from train windows. The demands of the Second World War meant allotments hit a new peak, with 1.5 million plots under cultivation, and 6,000 allotments in London’s parks alone. There are now 297,000 allotments in England.
These different histories mean allotments vary in size, although the classic simple dimensions were thirty strides by ten and the average plot now measures 250 square metres. There are varieties in produce, too – with leeks popular in the damp north-east, chrysanthemums in Yorkshire and roses in Nottinghamshire.
The strong identities, and administrative structures, of different English counties led not only to different allotment shapes, enclosure practices and field shapes, but also to different types of gates. Sweet chestnut gates are popular in Kent; oak gates are common in Sussex, where oaks were once so thick on the ground that the tree was called the ‘Sussex weed’. Most gates have five bars, but you can find six in Cornwall and Devon. Different counties use different combinations of vertical, horizontal and diagonal bars.12
County varieties of field gates, from top, left to right: Warwickshire; Weald, Sussex; Devon; Cumbria; Essex; Northumberland; Gloucestershire; Buckinghamshire.
Barns, too, vary from county to county. Staffordshire barns have chequered patterns, produced by absent bricks, to ventilate the hay, straw or grain; square holes in the barns of the Yorkshire Dales let owls in to catch rats; Cotswold-stone barns favour triangular holes. There are, though, shared features across counties: double doors on barns are usually positioned to allow carts in on the windward side, to blow away the chaff and dust when the winnowing and threshing are done.13
The grandest medieval barns were extremely elaborate structures. It’s not surprising, considering that farming was the backbone of the English economy before the Industrial Revolution; and the barn was essentially the farm’s treasury building. John Betjeman called Manor Farm Barn in Harmondsworth ‘the Cathedral of Middlesex’, and the romantic old poet wasn’t using poetic licence.
Harmondsworth Barn was built in 1426 to store the grain that paid for the upkeep of Winchester College. At almost 200 feet long, the barn could hold an awful lot of grain. With all that money at risk, it then had to be built to the highest standards – cathedral standards, in fact.
Betjeman was architecturally correct in his praise. The barn was constructed by cathedral joiners, using the same principles that lay behind Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral. Like our Gothic cathedrals, Harmondsworth has aisles running along either side of a nave-like, central passage, all supported by a dense web of pointed arches.
A northern twist on the barn was the bastle – popular along a twenty-mile stretch of the English border with Scotland. Thought to derive from bastille, these are defensible farmhouses, with doors on the ground and first floors. Animals and stores were kept on the lower floor; the farmer used an outside ladder to get to the first floor, which he could whip away if under attack. The style continued, with more first-floor windows and thinner walls, even after the threat from Scotland receded.14
As fields were gradually enclosed, the way cities developed depended largely on who owned the fields on the edge of town. The shape of those fields often dictated the shape of the resulting developments: you can still make out the borders of the five fields around Brighton, covered with Regency terraces in the early nineteenth century, at the height of the city’s fashionability.
Nottingham, full of slums in the nineteenth century, has plenty of high-density, multiple-ownership housing with not much green space. That’s because the 1,100 acres of open fields on its fringes were under rights of common pasture through the early nineteenth century, and so couldn’t be developed. With no breathing space for the town to expand, its centre was intensively developed. Every garden and orchard was taken over for housing. By 1845, those neighbouring open fields were finally enclosed but it was too late – Nottingham’s slums had appeared.15
In Leicester, by contrast, where the three big open fields outside the town were first enclosed, and then given over to urban development, there was more breathing space. Today, the city still feels more prosperous than Nottingham. It has larger gardens and wider streets, lined with bigger houses, often with four large bedrooms. With more land available, each house took up a bigger footprint, and had fewer storeys.16
Stamford, Lincolnshire, is the picture postcard town where Middlemarch was filmed in 1994. The only reason it is so picturesque – and costume drama producers love it so much as a film set – is because of the pattern of development; or lack of it. In the nineteenth century, the open fields surrounding the town were owned by the Marquess of Exeter, who lived in Burghley House, the sixteenth-century palace on the edge of Stamford. The marquess refused permission for those fields to be enclosed or developed. At the same time, he insisted that the new railway stopped at Peterborough, fourteen miles away, and not at Stamford.
As a result, the marquess killed off any burgeoning commerce in the town. Grass was said to grow in Stamford’s High Street in the late nineteenth century. But he also made Stamford the frozen idyll it remains; while Peterborough was cruelly overdeveloped, its fine medieval cathedral wrapped in a hideous ring road, lined with grim shopping centres.17
Enclosures didn’t necessarily mean hedges. The fenlands are bordered by narrow, straight drainage ditches (an eighth of England is still drained through the Fens) rather than hedges.18 And drystone walls take the place of hedges wherever there is good building stone beneath the turf – particularly along the ribbon of limestone running north-east to south-west across England, from Yorkshire down to Dorset.
More than half of the 70,000 miles of drystone walls in the country are in Yorkshire, Cornwall, Derbyshire and Cumbria. The drystone walls of the Pennines were largely built after enclosures from the sixteenth century until the turn of the nineteenth century, by landowners keen to maximize income from their sheep. A parliamentary Act of 1801 produced most of the drystone walls in the Yorkshire Dales. The drystone walls of the Cotswolds were principally built under enclosures between 1760 and 1825.
Drystone walls are really two walls joined together by regular ‘through-slabs’, with an infill of small stones. If properly built, they can last a century or more. And they’re still being built, at a cost of around £25 per yard. Drystone walls on both sides of the track between Blea Moor Tunnel and Ribblehead Viaduct, north Yorkshire, have recently been rebuilt.
It’s not just in the country that the hedge controls the lie of the land. In towns and cities, older garden walls still run along the hedge line of the old fields. That’s why the biggest, oldest trees in your garden tend to run along your back wall. If you look at a pre-urban map of a city, the old hedge line will often shadow the modern shared wall running between the back gardens of parallel terraces.
More recently, hedges have become the dividing lines of the suburbs. When Dame Henrietta Barnett set up Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London in 1907, she stipulated that building plots should be divided by hedges, trellis or wire fences, but never by walls.
Suburbia fell deeply for the hedge, as an echo of rural England. Privet is the classic suburban hedge, singled out by fashionable critics for withering criticism. In an unusually snobbish attack on suburbia, George Orwell took against ‘the same long, long rows of semi-detached houses, the stucco front, the creosoted gate, the privet hedge, the green front door. The Laurels, the Myrtles, the Hawthorns, Mon Abri, Mon Repos, Belle Vue.’19
Urban hedges in fact vary considerably: with holly in Osmaston, Derbyshire, rhododendron and laurel in Bournemouth and fuchsia hedges in Cornwall. Guinea Gardens in Birmingham has unusually high hedges; in parts of Nottingham, detached gardens, with front doors set into the hedges, are now Grade II listed.
A similar snobbish attitude has grown over time towards the Leylandii tree; a tree that appeared as the suburbs were developing. It was first propagated in 1881 by Sir John Naylor in Leighton, Powys; his son, Christopher, developed the tree further (and changed his surname to Leyland in order to bag an inheritance – thus the name).
Hedges still divide much of England then: in ancient, crooked countryside, in the more symmetrical fields enclosed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in semi-manicured rural suburbia on the fringes of our towns and cities. Even the suburban hedge fits squarely into the peculiar English affection for the countryside; a natural – if neatened and straightened – device for connecting the country to the fringes of town.
The hedge, particularly the crooked hedge, remains idiosyncratically English. Elsewhere across the world, smaller estates and a peasant farming tradition meant farmland was sliced and re-sliced into rectangular strips.
In France, the Napoleonic Code absorbed Roman law and ended primogeniture. The Code declared that inherited property must be divided into thirds. One third went to the wife, another was split between the children equally, and the last third was disposed of as the deceased wished. This led to constant sub-division of estates between heirs, and the repeated imposition of new, straight boundaries. An increased hunger for land meant hedges often weren’t used much, if at all. They took up too much valuable space; wire and timber fences were much less land-hungry.
The collectivization of many French farms after the war added another layer of dirigiste organization – and more right angles and straight lines. Still, pockets of France retained their hedges, notably Normandy, where Allied troops had to fight their way through the thick, tangled undergrowth of the bocage. American GIs even referred to the bocage as hedgerows. The Normandy landscape is not unlike Devon’s, with mixed pasture and woodland, and deep-burrowed lanes.
That apparently unplanned look of ancient English countryside at its best shares much of the same organic, free spirit behind the asymmetrical, unplanned street pattern of English cities. And often for the same reasons: rich landowners and commercial farmers privately developing their land, free from overarching, central planning. Whenever control did became more centrally planned, as it did in those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enclosure Acts, then England looks less and less like England.
Where the countryside still looks quintessentially English, it’s often because of the country’s class structure.
When the Government performed its U-turn over the sell-off of Forestry Commission land in February 2011, it cast a revealing light on the changing relationship between class and land ownership. The Forestry Commission, founded in 1919, is the biggest landowner in the country, with 2,571,270 acres – and 1.4 billion trees. Progressive land sales to companies, charities and government agencies like the Commission, as opposed to private individuals, mark the biggest change in British land ownership over the last 150 years.
In 1872, twelve out of the top thirteen landowners in the country were aristocrats; the other one was the biggest landowner of all, the Church of England, with 2,130,000 acres (the Church now owns 210,000 acres). Today, the top five landowners are: the Forestry Commission; the National Trust, with 630,000 acres; the Ministry of Defence (592,800 acres); company pension funds (550,000 acres); and utility companies (500,000 acres). Aristocrats have largely been replaced by public bodies at the top of the tree.
That’s not to say that the aristocracy and the monarchy don’t still own an awful lot of land. The Crown Estate controls 358,000 acres; that figure would be over 23 million acres if you added in the foreshore and the seabed, out to the twelve nautical miles limit – all officially owned by the Queen.
‘Officially’ because, although the Crown Estate is strictly owned by the Queen, it is not her private property to play around with. Income from the Crown Estate goes to the Treasury. In return, the Queen receives her Civil List payment, or she will until 2013, when the Coalition Government has arranged for her to be paid directly from Crown Estate coffers.
The 36,000 members of the CLA (Country Land and Business Association), 0.6 per cent of the population, own half the rural land in the country. A third of British land is still owned by aristocrats and rural gentry. The Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry remains the eighth-biggest landowner in the country, with 240,000 acres in Dumfriesshire, Selkirkshire, Northamptonshire and the outskirts of Edinburgh. The top ten British landowners own a million acres between them, in a country of 60 million acres altogether.
Still, even that is an improvement on 1873, when a sort of second Domesday Book, The Return of Owners of Land, was published: then, 7,000 men owned 80 per cent of England. After the First World War, with the loss of so many heirs to great estates on the battlefield, and the increase in taxes, a quarter of British land changed hands in four years;20 the biggest change in land ownership since the dissolution of the monasteries.
The First World War, income taxes and death duties were supposed to have done for the aristocracy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Those death duties did in fact wipe out a lot of estates and great houses, particularly in the First World War and its immediate aftermath. But those estates that survived the crash, and further dips in land values after the Second World War, are now sitting pretty.
In a land-starved, people-packed country, landowners can sell off tiny twenty-acre portions of their estates to a supermarket, raise millions and keep their hands on those hundreds of thousands of acres they’ve clung on to. Sir Reggie Sheffield, Bt, David Cameron’s father-in-law, who owns 3,000 acres of Lincolnshire and two stately homes, says he survives on a small private income ‘garnished with a few planning permissions’.21
Continued domination of the landowning tables by the English upper classes is reflected in the landscape. Even the vast acreage of land sold by the aristocracy over the last century and a half is still shaped by their previous ownership of it.
And the biggest class influence on the English landscape derived from primogeniture. In 1856, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American writer, said of English country houses, ‘Primogeniture built these sumptuous piles … Primogeniture is a cardinal rule of English property and institutions. Laws, customs, manners, the very persons and faces, affirm it.’22
Primogeniture also means English country houses have retained their contents, too. On the Continent, the great palaces and country houses have been ransacked, not just by revolution, but by partible inheritance: with every new generation, there’s another division of the spoils.
Emerson was talking about country houses, but he might just as well have been talking about the land around those houses. Still today, big parts of the English countryside are undeveloped because they are owned in great blocks by individual landowners – who, if they can get planning permission, will tend to develop on the edge of their estates, leaving the core of their landholdings unchanged since they were enclosed and landscaped three or four centuries ago.
Primogeniture, and the practice of titles usually passing through a single male heir, means the British aristocracy has remained relatively small. In the late eighteenth century, there were 365,000 nobles in France, 479,000 in Spain and 580,000 in Russia. There were fewer than 10,000 in England.23
That meant there was more land to go round for a tiny club of grand landowners. Estates have for the most part remained large in England, with little of the land-grabbing division and sub-division of other countries. This is true of some counties in particular. Of Norfolk’s 1,324,160 acres, eight estates have over 10,000 acres; fifty-six have more than 1,000 acres.
These large landholdings mean villages are often small, as development has been limited, first by the landowner and now by planning restrictions. The churches, often built by that rich landowner, are disproportionately big. In Norfolk, some villages amount to little more than a large medieval church with a farmhouse next door.
There hasn’t always been primogeniture in England. King Alfred (849–99) became king, despite the legitimate claim of his eldest brother’s oldest son. By the time William the Conqueror invaded, primogeniture was still only an expectation, not a legal requirement. Even William the Conqueror passed over his own oldest son, Robert Curthose, in favour of a younger son, William Rufus. By the thirteenth century, primogeniture had become established English law, although the British throne has only followed strict primogeniture lines since George I’s accession in 1714.
Not everything was subject to primogeniture in England; by tradition one of the few things that doesn’t go to the oldest son is jewellery – usually passed down the female line in families, unlike in most Continental countries. And certain families have always been able to inherit titles and estates through the female line. When Lord Mountbatten was killed in 1979, his daughter, Lady Patricia, inherited the title by special remainder, because he had no sons.
Parts of England weren’t subject to primogeniture, either, even into the modern age. The Anglo-Saxon gavelkind system, whereby property was distributed between all sons, including illegitimate ones, survived in Kent from the eleventh century until 1925, when it was legally abolished in Britain. The 1925 Administration of Estates Act also removed the primogeniture law that had lasted in much of the rest of England for more than half a millennium.
‘Gavelkind’ is a Kent dialect word, derived from Old English. It literally means a form of land tenure held by ‘gavel’ – that is, rent or fixed services other than military service. But it soon came to mean a type of inheritance split between sons. The word was adopted in Wales and Ireland, too, where gavelkind survived English occupation.
William the Conqueror supposedly let gavelkind survive as a concession to the men of Kent, while primogeniture became standard elsewhere throughout his kingdom. With its similarities to German Salic Law, gavelkind was probably introduced by German immigrants to Kent in the fifth century. Those Germans settled as freeholders, as was the German custom, not as feudal tenants.
The gavelkind legacy led to smaller fields and smaller estates in Kent. That’s why Kent remains largely a place of farmhouses and hamlets rather than estate villages. There are still relatively few big estates, country houses, parks or grand landowning families in the county.24 Land was enclosed earlier, too, in Kent, with little of the open-field farming which remained popular in the Midlands long after Kent had given up the practice.
Centuries of gavelkind left a legacy that survives today: in Wales, the division of property between sons led to smaller fields and farmhouses than in England. It also led to bigger rows, as Welsh brothers engaged in bloody battles over their shared inheritance.25 Only to the immediate west of the Welsh border, where primogeniture was introduced earlier, and some of the Marcher lordships built up significant landholdings, are there larger estates on the English model.
Scotland, too, tends to have smaller fields – based on the crofting system, introduced to the country in the eighteenth century. Each tenant farmed his own smallholding of around five acres, as well as sharing rights of common grazing with neighbouring crofters.
You can also see more close-knit field patterns in much of Ireland. Under the Penal Laws of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, when an Irish Catholic landowner died, his property was forcibly split between his children. Shared inheritance between large Catholic families led to fields being divided and sub-divided into smaller plots than in England.
Fields are smaller in Ulster as well. The Scottish settlers, who came over in the early seventeenth century, were given mammoth estates. One family, the Montgomerys, had 100,000 acres in County Down when they arrived at the beginning of the seventeenth century. But they also brought 8,000 tenant farmers with them – so each farm, and its attendant fields, ended up being pretty small.
Because of the big landed inheritances that come with primogeniture, English landowners can afford to be liberal with their hedges, allowing a generous amount of land either side of them – the traditional three- to four-yard strip between crop and hedge, used for turning machinery.
Or at least they used to be more generous. Since 1945, 250,000 miles of hedgerow – more than half of all English hedges – have been grubbed up, particularly in the prairies of East Anglia, where vast combine harvesters find three-point turns tricky. A lot of thickly hedged England was also opened up with the change from pasture to arable land during the First and Second World Wars. In the 1930s, only 1 per cent of Leicestershire farmland was arable; by 1982, that figure had climbed to 51.85 per cent.
After the last war, even more hedges were grubbed up, woods were cut down, farmhouses removed, marshes drained, grassland ploughed, and fertilizers and pesticide used intensively on bigger, more open fields.
Still, the stripping of the hedges is slowing: in recent years, many hedges have been replanted. Since the 1997 Hedgerow Regulations, you have to get planning permission to rip up a hedge. Even with all that grubbing up, hedges remain a defining feature – perhaps the defining feature – of the English landscape.