Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
the late middle ages, besides wooded commons, there were around 3200 private parks in
England, whose purpose was not so much hunting as the 'prosaic supply of venison, other
meat, wood and timber', and which bequeathed us the breed of White Park cattle. In the
180 or so wooded forests which technically belonged to the crown, such as the New Forest,
'it was the commoners and landowners who did most of the grazing and woodcutting'.
As populations grew, and an expanding market offered better opportunities to exploit the
commons for profit, pressure upon them increased; in some commons, but by no means all,
regulations were undermined or ignored and the quality of the pasture and the woodland de-
teriorated. This deterioration supplied arguments for those who advocated enclosure of the
commons, but combating overgrazing was not their only priority. Vera's evidence shows
that another of their aims was to move to what they regarded as more efficient monocul-
ture.
The first assault on the English commons, in the 14th-17th centuries, came from mono-
cultural sheep farmers, who could derive more profit by fencing land and putting it over
to the production of wool than they could from mixed farming. Later enclosure in England
involved the draining of highly biodiverse fenland for arable production, and finally the
enclosure of common fields and waste for improved arable farming. But the evidence from
the continent supplied by Vera suggests that much of the pressure for enclosure in the 19th
century came from the forestry industry.
'Agriculture has existed for 10,000 years,' says Vera, 'forestry for only 200 years', which
is another way of saying that until two centuries ago agriculture and forestry were the same
activity. The move towards forestry as a separate, monocultural activity occurred as a result
of the industrial revolution. The arrival of coal, steam power and steel resulted in a radical
change in the kind of timber the market required.
When Europe was reliant upon handtools, timber of relatively small girth was more eco-
nomical for many purposes, because of the effort of chopping or sawing it up. Faggots
of small branches were more convenient for cooking wood; roundwood and split coppice
wood was more convenient for fencing; tool handles were cut straight from the hedgerow.
Before coal, brushwood such as thorn and gorse was required for flash firing (bringing
ovens and furnaces quickly to a high temperature) and coppice wood was more practical for
making charcoal. Cruck architecture relied on curved oak trunks for the frame of a house,
while wattle and daub walls and thatched roofs could be laid on wiggly coppicewood rails.
Shipbuilding required a large number of curved oakwood members to provide bows, struts
and bracing. By a happy coincidence, the broad, spreading oak trees of the open forest,
ideal for cruck frames and shipbuilding, were also the oak trees which produced the most
abundant mast for pigs.
With the advent of mechanization the market required completely different products. The
arrival of sawmills meant that timber trunks had to be straight to pass through the mill.
Factory-made roofing tiles and stud walls required straight sawn members. Teak and steel
