THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN LIGHT AND SHADE - MEAT: A Benign Extravagance - page 303

for pigs; faggots of brushwood for firing bread ovens and glass furnaces; coppice wood for
fencing or charcoal; and standard trees, of which the most valued was oak, for house and
ship building.
These commons were managed according to regulations which were designed to main-
tain the desired balance of woodland and pasture (which of course might vary from one
location to another). The population of grazing animals was limited by stints - the alloca-
tion of a certain number of livestock to each commoner. Sheep in particular were restricted
in number because they are more destructive of seedlings and saplings than cattle. 35 Newly
coppiced woodland had to be fenced off from livestock until it was sufficiently high to
deter browsing. When oak trees were felled others had to planted, and it was common to
plant a thorn bush in the same hole as the oak seedling. In some areas fenced nurseries of
hawthorn and blackthorn were maintained for this purpose.
Vera's interpretation is mainly based on Northern European evidence (and hence previ-
ously unavailable in the English language), but much of his historical material matches the
history of English woodlands portrayed by Oliver Rackham. However, Rackham (writing
ten years earlier) does not share Vera's view of prehistoric tree cover : he attributes the size-
able pollen presence of hazel (bizarrely in my humble view) to its being a 'canopy tree',
rather than an understorey tree germinating and pollinating in the light at the edge of a
woodland. 36 After Vera's thesis appeared, Rackham, in his 2006 book Woodland, criticized
Vera's assessment of prehistorical pollen counts, and suggested that the Vera model, while
it may have applied in parts of Europe, was followed less closely in the wetter British Isles,
where prehistoric grazing animals died out much earlier. That view would place the British
Isles as an isolated dark damp fringe at the edge of a more mottled European patchwork.
George Peterken, another prominent expert on British woodland, is also sceptical, but pos-
tulates:
Large herbivores can generate clearings, which allow more large herbivores to
thrive, but, equally, heavy tree cover could militate against large herbivores and thus
reduce populations. These two possible feedbacks could generate two stable states,
open wooded pasture and closed high forest, the probability of which might vary by
site type. 37
But Rackham's and Vera's views converge once humans enter onto the scene. Rackham's
History of the Countryside devotes one chapter to 'Woodland' and another to 'Wood Pas-
ture - Wooded Commons, Parks and Wooded Forests'. He suggests that 'much of the
“woodland” of Norman England was really “wood pasture”' and notes that oak 'is an ideal
wood pasture tree; the oaks of old England (like the cypresses of old Crete) are in part the
result of cattle, deer and goats eating their more edible competitors'. He estimates that in