Two questions are uppermost in the mind are how old are the hedges on the estate and is there any evidence of Medieval ridge & furrow?
I personally have no knowledge of the age of the hedgerows in & around the Dedisham estate, nor apparently does Peter Challis of the Sussex Hedgerow Inventory Project when I asked him. He tells me, they have no data at the Biodiversity Record Centre from hedgerow surveys in either Rudgwick or Slinfold at all.
So, over the next few years, the team will make a close study of the hedgerows in this area, and attempt to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
I personally have no knowledge of the age of the hedgerows in & around the Dedisham estate, nor apparently does Peter Challis of the Sussex Hedgerow Inventory Project when I asked him. He tells me, they have no data at the Biodiversity Record Centre from hedgerow surveys in either Rudgwick or Slinfold at all.
So, over the next few years, the team will make a close study of the hedgerows in this area, and attempt to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.
How does one go about this? What do we know as a starting-point?
Hedgerow dating (Hooper - Hedges - 1974) is an imprecise science. It is based on the concept of one new woody species being recruited to a 30 yard length of hedgerow per 100 years. This is ok for dating a parliamentary enclosure type of hedgerow, which is likely to have been planted with one or perhaps two species - usually hawthorn and possibly blackthorn. However, parliamentary enclosure was rare in Sussex and the field shape and size in the area around Slinfold does not appear consistent with the rectangular fields of parliamentary enclosure. Earlier, piecemeal enclosure would be more likely in the coastal plain rather than in the Low Weald but would probably be indicated by a long hedgerow in the shape of a flattened, inverted 'S'. To the best of Peter’s knowledge, there is no evidence of centuriation in or around Slinfold.
The area under research appears to be most consistent with assarting of ancient woodland. As such, the hedgerows are likely to be ancient, species-rich containing species such as hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, field maple, holly, hornbeam, rose with pedunculate oak and ash as standards. If the hedgerows are assarted from ancient woodland they are likely to have been species-rich from the start, making hedgerow dating less applicable. It is also the case that there is a limit to the number of species that can exist in a thirty yard/metre length of hedgerow.
In an area of the Low Weald on Wealden clay and with small irregular-shaped fields, the likelihood is that the hedgerows were boundaries of assarted ancient woodland. The likelihood would be re-inforced if the hedgerows contained six or more native species including some of those mentioned above.
As can be seen, fields can take many forms, and the story of fields is largely the story of hedges between them; in Welsh, the word cae does duty for both hedge and field. Hedges have many uses. They contain livestock, so someone does not have to be with them all the time; They are landmarks to define property boundaries and right-of-way; they are a source of wood and sometimes timber; They are a shelter, an addition to the grazing-land, and a source of herbs and fruit. (Oliver Rackham, History of the Countryside).
Fields are subject to fashion. Each successive age has updated some of its predecessors fields, has left others as it found them, and has made new fields where there were not fields before. As with our houses, so there are examples in use of nearly all field-systems since the bronze age. As aerial photographs demonstrate, prehistoric fields that still form part of the above-ground landscape are only a small fraction of those that have existed.
Some hedgerows are deliberately planted but others can arise naturally through someone not grubbing out the tree saplings that spring up at the base of a fence or wall and eventually replace it, a feature of the Middle Ages. As it develops, it takes on a life of its own and is colonised by trees, shrubs, and herbs which were not there originally. They also arise as the ghosts of woods that have been grubbed out leaving their edges as field boundaries. The marginal trees, often already forming a hedge to protect the wood’s interior, may be left as a hedge. These kinds of hedges may be identified from other kinds in having woodland plants such as small-leaved lime and wood anemone as well as hedgerow species.
How may we distinguish fields and hedges from differing periods of history? Perhaps this is a good place to briefly describe the key points.
Prehistoric
Prehistoric fields express a curious geometrical pattern. There is an unmistakably planned pattern of parallel, but not straight, main axes running across country for miles, intersected by cross walls at irregular intervals. Oliver Rackham tells us that the most famous examples are the Dartmoor Reaves, low stony banks which represent Bronze Age field boundaries, and also the Saints in NE Suffolk, where about 25 square miles are divided into little fields by cross-hedges between bundles of parallel, not quite straight, main axes.
“Reaves tell a story of country planning on a gigantic scale – of an organisation able to parcel out tens of square miles as it pleased, whose writ ran in the heights of Dartmoor, and which sets its rules of geometry above the practicalities of dealing with gorges and bogs.”
This mysterious philosophy of field-layout had a life of some 3000 years.
Throughout the long history of reaves, “Celtic Fields” were also being made. This is the traditional name for the small, squarish, irregular or semi-irregular fields whose remains, until recently, covered thousands of square miles on chalk downland and other terrain that escaped medieval cultivation. They may be surrounded by great banks, the product of immense labour. They can be of any date from Neolithic to Iron Age. The square shape expresses the custom of ploughling in two directions at right-angles.
On slopes, the action of the plough moves earth downhill, and piles it against the lower field boundary to form a terrace called a lynchet. The steeper Celtic Fields tend to be narrow, following the contours to form the flights of terraces marked as “Strip Lynchets” on maps. Lynchets, positive or negative, can occur against any ancient cross-slope ploughing boundary, including roads and woodbanks; they are not necessarily prehistoric.
Roman
The Romans indulged in Centuriation, the planning of land in exact squares of 775 modern yards, oriented exactly north and south (or at 45 degrees to a north-south line), marching on and on, heedless of cliffs, rivers, or fens. A good example of this lies in the woods around Canterbury. Centuriation usually went with founding a colony on vacant land. Where this did not happen, country planning seems to have continued the regular, but not rigid, field grids of the Iron Age.
Archaeologists can recognise field-walls or ditches, but cannot normally tell whether hedges existed. However, Roman writers knew of several types of hedge, and described sophisticated methods of making one. Julius Caesar encountered a “plashed” hedge, which he regarded as a deliberately constructed military obstacle, in what is now Belgium.
It is interesting to note that the earliest physical remains of a hedge in Britain were found buried beneath the Roman fort at Bar Hill, near Glasgow.
Anglo Saxon & Medieval
Old English charters have much to say about hedges. The numerous words for a hedge include compounds like “hazel-row” and “thorn-row”, which make it clear that a hedge, not a fence, is meant.
The charters give the impression of a land already fully hedged, but closer inspection shows that hedges are much more often mentioned in the wooded areas of the Weald than in the unwooded areas of the Chalk. Hedges were not a substitute for woodland. The distribution of hedged and hedgeless areas corresponds roughly to the distinction between Ancient and Planned Countryside today. It would appear that open-field strip-cultivation had already been introduced into some of the areas where it was prevalent in the Middle Ages.
Quite different from all that had gone before was this practice of open-field or strip cultivation. Old English charters imply its existence or use its technical terms – headland, gore, baulk, etc. This evidence is not from all over England, but is concentrated in areas with few hedges, which later were strongholds of strip-cultivation. There is also archaeological testimony; for example where ridge-and-furrow is intersected by twelfth-century coal-mines or thirteenth-century moats.
On present evidence, open-field cultivation was invented by the Anglo Saxons in about the eighth century in Berkshire or Wiltshire, and spread outwards all over the British Isles, and into the Anglo-Saxon homeland in Germany, and from thence all over Europe.
It was once thought to be a primitive method of subdividing land, superseded by hedged fields. However, this is not so, for it has never been found anywhere in the Roman Empire or before.
This method of cultivation took on a rococo of complexity. The land was divided into selions, each nominally half an acre in extent and measuring one furlong by two perches (220 yards long by 11 yards wide). In late-medieval Cambridge, for example, selions were grouped into 68 furlongs and these into 4 vast fields which extended away to the town boundary, where they adjoined similar fields. Landowners had lands scattered in strips, consisting of one selion, or two or three, or occasionally a block of up to 40 selions.
One tenth of the crop was due as tithe to the Manorial-lord or ecclesiastical tithe-owner of each particular selion. Few owners tilled their strips themselves, for between land-owners and land there existed a largely unrecorded world of agents, tenants and subtenants, freemen, villains, and serfs, which made up the Medieval feudal system.
Open-field cultivation has left a mark on the landscape in the form of ridge-and-furrow; wave-like undulations, typically every 11 yards, in what is now pasture but was once ploughland.
Ridge-and-furrow comes naturally from the mechanics of driving an asymmetrical mouldboard plough, drawn by eight oxen, within the narrow limits of a half-acre strip. This tends to accumulate soil in the middle of each selion, and also to nudge it towards the ends of the selions, building up a ridge at right-angles on the headland. With such awkward equipment it is difficult to plough in straight lines, so it is better to begin the turn well before reaching the headland. Hence the double curve (“reversed-S”) typical of medieval ploughland, familiar in ridge-and-furrow and early maps.
The introduction of this kind of agricultural practice was one of the most drastic reorganisations that this country has seen, but it developed over a long period of time for documents record open-field not yet fully-developed right down to the 13th century. In its heyday, c1350, open-field cultivation covered nearly one-third of England. From then on, people began to aggregate strips into single ownerships and to privatise them. By 1720 about half the area so cultivated was gone, and by 1860, through a series of Enclosure Acts, completely abolished.
This type of cultivation came about when small farmers combined to contribute oxen to a communal plough-team and to share the fruits of their labours, and this was further reinforced by the partitioning of such land among children & grandchildren. Alternatively, peasants ploughed up common pasture and shared it in proportion to the labour invested or grazing-rights lost.
Care in identification must be taken here as ridge-and-furrow is not confined to the Middle Ages. For centuries afterwards it was the practice to divide private fields into strips called stretches, and to form ridge-and-furrow on them. This later form is typically narrower (5 yards or less), longer, set out in straight lines, and weak or inconspicuous. This does not usually occur in the main arable areas but often in parks, so caution is advisable if ridge & furrow is identified on the Dedisham estate. Much of it is traditionally ascribed to the great ploughing-up of the Napoleonic Wars, although some can be earlier. Ridge-and-furrow can also be produced by cart-ruts, irrigation, peat-digging, and coprolite digging.
Medieval Hedges
Medieval England was a land of hedges. There was a very obvious difference between Ancient Countryside, with more hedges than ever before, and the less-hedged open-field areas, but even the latter had some hedges. Almost every township had hedges around the paddocks and closes attached to the village. Between the pasture and the precious meadow, along the parish boundary, and often bits of hedge among the open field-strips.
Most records are of living hedges in the modern sense, but there were also “dead hedges” for temporary fencing, either stakes interwoven with ethers (long flexible rods) or constructed of cut thorns called trouse, also used to mend gaps in live hedges. Hedge-mending and cutting of trouse (often in a special thorn wood called a spinney) were supervised by an official called a Hayward.
There are so many literary references in Medieval documents to demonstrate that hedges were part of English culture, and the source of words like hedge-sparrow, hedgehog, and hawthorn (hedge-thorn). Medieval rustics thought of “The Man in the Moon” as a stupid hedger, as in the 13th century poem of the same name, or like Shakespeare’s Moonshine, “with lanthorn, dog, and brush of thorn.”
Post Medieval Fields and Hedges
The planting of hedges gained momentum from the fifteenth century onwards, especially in open-field areas being enclosed. Sometimes it was done with plants dug-up in the local woods, sometimes with “quickset” thorns, bought from nurseryman.
Early post-enclosure fields often preserve the shape of the furlongs that preceded them. Occasionally, a whole landscape of strips may be fossilized.
From the 16th century onwards many maps and landscape paintings depict hedges, fences and walls – and also rows of trees remaining when hedges had been grubbed out.
Writers drew attention to the difference between fully-hedged counties (“several” or “woodland”) and those still relatively unhedged. Among the many disadvantages of living in champion country was the lack of firewood and the trouble, or “suit” of fetching fuel from a distance. The term “Woodland” was used not for woodland in the normal sense, but for land possessing hedgerows which produced wood. The Little Ice Age was drawing on, and hedges were much in demand for fuel. Stealing wood out of hedges was an offence meriting all Sunday in the stocks and a whipping until the offender “bleed well”.
The Great Enclosures, though not a universal transformation, were a time of more new hedging than ever before or since. The hedges planted between 1750 and 1850 – probably about 200,000 miles – were at least equal to all those planted in the previous 500 years.
As time went on, hedging became perfunctory. Strong hedges with plenty of trees, with straight drawing-board lines, cutting across ridge-and-furrow, cannot be confused with medieval hedges. These, mainly Georgian, enclosures contrast also with the Victorian enclosures with their flimsy single rows of hawthorn only.
Even in Ancient Countryside, the pattern of hedges in 1900 was not exactly the same as in 1500. The study of early maps reveals many piecemeal additions and subtractions to the hedge network. Big fields were subdivided, and small fields laid together. Hedges added in early alterations were usually the first to be removed in later alterations. The network remained mainly medieval, but contained many single hedges of all subsequent periods.
From 1870 to 1945 there was very little change in hedges. Air photographs of 1946 still show an almost complete network of hedges, even in arable areas. Loss of hedges is the almost familiar aspect of the destruction of the English countryside between 1950 and 1975. It has affected mainly the eastern counties, where some areas have become as featureless as any desert. But Slinfold did not entirely escape as comparison of the 1843 Tithe map with modern maps attest.
Bibliography:
Full acknowledgement is made to Oliver Rackham for much of this data, which has been taken from his work “History of the Countryside” (1994).
Also references have been made to the following works:
A. L. F. Rivet: Town & Country in Roman Britain (1958)
William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1836)
R. Blaker: Sx. A.C., XLV, pp. 198-203 (1902)
E. Cecil Curwen, Antiquity I, pp. 261-89 Prehistoric Agriculture (1927)
G. A. Holleyman, Antiquity IX pp 443-54 “The Celtic field system in South Britain” based on work in Sussex.)(1935)
E. Cecil Curwen, Plough & Pasture (1946)
H. L. Gray, English Field Systems (1915)
E. Cecil Curwen, Antiquity XIII pp 45-32 The plough and the origin of Strip Lynchets (1939)
C. S. Orwin, The Open Fields (1954)
E. Kerridge, Economic History Review (2nd series) IV, pp 14-36 Ridge-and-furrow and agrarian history (1954)
S. R. Eyre, Agricultural History Review. III, pp. 80ff, The Curving plough-strip and its historical implications. (1955)
E. Cecil Curwen. Prehistory of Sussex (1954)
G. P. Burrow & G A Holleyman Proc. Prehistoric Soc., XXIII pp 167-212 Late Bronze Age settlement on Itford Hill, Sussex (1957)
H. C. Bowen, Ancient Fields (1963)
Hedgerow dating (Hooper - Hedges - 1974) is an imprecise science. It is based on the concept of one new woody species being recruited to a 30 yard length of hedgerow per 100 years. This is ok for dating a parliamentary enclosure type of hedgerow, which is likely to have been planted with one or perhaps two species - usually hawthorn and possibly blackthorn. However, parliamentary enclosure was rare in Sussex and the field shape and size in the area around Slinfold does not appear consistent with the rectangular fields of parliamentary enclosure. Earlier, piecemeal enclosure would be more likely in the coastal plain rather than in the Low Weald but would probably be indicated by a long hedgerow in the shape of a flattened, inverted 'S'. To the best of Peter’s knowledge, there is no evidence of centuriation in or around Slinfold.
The area under research appears to be most consistent with assarting of ancient woodland. As such, the hedgerows are likely to be ancient, species-rich containing species such as hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel, field maple, holly, hornbeam, rose with pedunculate oak and ash as standards. If the hedgerows are assarted from ancient woodland they are likely to have been species-rich from the start, making hedgerow dating less applicable. It is also the case that there is a limit to the number of species that can exist in a thirty yard/metre length of hedgerow.
In an area of the Low Weald on Wealden clay and with small irregular-shaped fields, the likelihood is that the hedgerows were boundaries of assarted ancient woodland. The likelihood would be re-inforced if the hedgerows contained six or more native species including some of those mentioned above.
As can be seen, fields can take many forms, and the story of fields is largely the story of hedges between them; in Welsh, the word cae does duty for both hedge and field. Hedges have many uses. They contain livestock, so someone does not have to be with them all the time; They are landmarks to define property boundaries and right-of-way; they are a source of wood and sometimes timber; They are a shelter, an addition to the grazing-land, and a source of herbs and fruit. (Oliver Rackham, History of the Countryside).
Fields are subject to fashion. Each successive age has updated some of its predecessors fields, has left others as it found them, and has made new fields where there were not fields before. As with our houses, so there are examples in use of nearly all field-systems since the bronze age. As aerial photographs demonstrate, prehistoric fields that still form part of the above-ground landscape are only a small fraction of those that have existed.
Some hedgerows are deliberately planted but others can arise naturally through someone not grubbing out the tree saplings that spring up at the base of a fence or wall and eventually replace it, a feature of the Middle Ages. As it develops, it takes on a life of its own and is colonised by trees, shrubs, and herbs which were not there originally. They also arise as the ghosts of woods that have been grubbed out leaving their edges as field boundaries. The marginal trees, often already forming a hedge to protect the wood’s interior, may be left as a hedge. These kinds of hedges may be identified from other kinds in having woodland plants such as small-leaved lime and wood anemone as well as hedgerow species.
How may we distinguish fields and hedges from differing periods of history? Perhaps this is a good place to briefly describe the key points.
Prehistoric
Prehistoric fields express a curious geometrical pattern. There is an unmistakably planned pattern of parallel, but not straight, main axes running across country for miles, intersected by cross walls at irregular intervals. Oliver Rackham tells us that the most famous examples are the Dartmoor Reaves, low stony banks which represent Bronze Age field boundaries, and also the Saints in NE Suffolk, where about 25 square miles are divided into little fields by cross-hedges between bundles of parallel, not quite straight, main axes.
“Reaves tell a story of country planning on a gigantic scale – of an organisation able to parcel out tens of square miles as it pleased, whose writ ran in the heights of Dartmoor, and which sets its rules of geometry above the practicalities of dealing with gorges and bogs.”
This mysterious philosophy of field-layout had a life of some 3000 years.
Throughout the long history of reaves, “Celtic Fields” were also being made. This is the traditional name for the small, squarish, irregular or semi-irregular fields whose remains, until recently, covered thousands of square miles on chalk downland and other terrain that escaped medieval cultivation. They may be surrounded by great banks, the product of immense labour. They can be of any date from Neolithic to Iron Age. The square shape expresses the custom of ploughling in two directions at right-angles.
On slopes, the action of the plough moves earth downhill, and piles it against the lower field boundary to form a terrace called a lynchet. The steeper Celtic Fields tend to be narrow, following the contours to form the flights of terraces marked as “Strip Lynchets” on maps. Lynchets, positive or negative, can occur against any ancient cross-slope ploughing boundary, including roads and woodbanks; they are not necessarily prehistoric.
Roman
The Romans indulged in Centuriation, the planning of land in exact squares of 775 modern yards, oriented exactly north and south (or at 45 degrees to a north-south line), marching on and on, heedless of cliffs, rivers, or fens. A good example of this lies in the woods around Canterbury. Centuriation usually went with founding a colony on vacant land. Where this did not happen, country planning seems to have continued the regular, but not rigid, field grids of the Iron Age.
Archaeologists can recognise field-walls or ditches, but cannot normally tell whether hedges existed. However, Roman writers knew of several types of hedge, and described sophisticated methods of making one. Julius Caesar encountered a “plashed” hedge, which he regarded as a deliberately constructed military obstacle, in what is now Belgium.
It is interesting to note that the earliest physical remains of a hedge in Britain were found buried beneath the Roman fort at Bar Hill, near Glasgow.
Anglo Saxon & Medieval
Old English charters have much to say about hedges. The numerous words for a hedge include compounds like “hazel-row” and “thorn-row”, which make it clear that a hedge, not a fence, is meant.
The charters give the impression of a land already fully hedged, but closer inspection shows that hedges are much more often mentioned in the wooded areas of the Weald than in the unwooded areas of the Chalk. Hedges were not a substitute for woodland. The distribution of hedged and hedgeless areas corresponds roughly to the distinction between Ancient and Planned Countryside today. It would appear that open-field strip-cultivation had already been introduced into some of the areas where it was prevalent in the Middle Ages.
Quite different from all that had gone before was this practice of open-field or strip cultivation. Old English charters imply its existence or use its technical terms – headland, gore, baulk, etc. This evidence is not from all over England, but is concentrated in areas with few hedges, which later were strongholds of strip-cultivation. There is also archaeological testimony; for example where ridge-and-furrow is intersected by twelfth-century coal-mines or thirteenth-century moats.
On present evidence, open-field cultivation was invented by the Anglo Saxons in about the eighth century in Berkshire or Wiltshire, and spread outwards all over the British Isles, and into the Anglo-Saxon homeland in Germany, and from thence all over Europe.
It was once thought to be a primitive method of subdividing land, superseded by hedged fields. However, this is not so, for it has never been found anywhere in the Roman Empire or before.
This method of cultivation took on a rococo of complexity. The land was divided into selions, each nominally half an acre in extent and measuring one furlong by two perches (220 yards long by 11 yards wide). In late-medieval Cambridge, for example, selions were grouped into 68 furlongs and these into 4 vast fields which extended away to the town boundary, where they adjoined similar fields. Landowners had lands scattered in strips, consisting of one selion, or two or three, or occasionally a block of up to 40 selions.
One tenth of the crop was due as tithe to the Manorial-lord or ecclesiastical tithe-owner of each particular selion. Few owners tilled their strips themselves, for between land-owners and land there existed a largely unrecorded world of agents, tenants and subtenants, freemen, villains, and serfs, which made up the Medieval feudal system.
Open-field cultivation has left a mark on the landscape in the form of ridge-and-furrow; wave-like undulations, typically every 11 yards, in what is now pasture but was once ploughland.
Ridge-and-furrow comes naturally from the mechanics of driving an asymmetrical mouldboard plough, drawn by eight oxen, within the narrow limits of a half-acre strip. This tends to accumulate soil in the middle of each selion, and also to nudge it towards the ends of the selions, building up a ridge at right-angles on the headland. With such awkward equipment it is difficult to plough in straight lines, so it is better to begin the turn well before reaching the headland. Hence the double curve (“reversed-S”) typical of medieval ploughland, familiar in ridge-and-furrow and early maps.
The introduction of this kind of agricultural practice was one of the most drastic reorganisations that this country has seen, but it developed over a long period of time for documents record open-field not yet fully-developed right down to the 13th century. In its heyday, c1350, open-field cultivation covered nearly one-third of England. From then on, people began to aggregate strips into single ownerships and to privatise them. By 1720 about half the area so cultivated was gone, and by 1860, through a series of Enclosure Acts, completely abolished.
This type of cultivation came about when small farmers combined to contribute oxen to a communal plough-team and to share the fruits of their labours, and this was further reinforced by the partitioning of such land among children & grandchildren. Alternatively, peasants ploughed up common pasture and shared it in proportion to the labour invested or grazing-rights lost.
Care in identification must be taken here as ridge-and-furrow is not confined to the Middle Ages. For centuries afterwards it was the practice to divide private fields into strips called stretches, and to form ridge-and-furrow on them. This later form is typically narrower (5 yards or less), longer, set out in straight lines, and weak or inconspicuous. This does not usually occur in the main arable areas but often in parks, so caution is advisable if ridge & furrow is identified on the Dedisham estate. Much of it is traditionally ascribed to the great ploughing-up of the Napoleonic Wars, although some can be earlier. Ridge-and-furrow can also be produced by cart-ruts, irrigation, peat-digging, and coprolite digging.
Medieval Hedges
Medieval England was a land of hedges. There was a very obvious difference between Ancient Countryside, with more hedges than ever before, and the less-hedged open-field areas, but even the latter had some hedges. Almost every township had hedges around the paddocks and closes attached to the village. Between the pasture and the precious meadow, along the parish boundary, and often bits of hedge among the open field-strips.
Most records are of living hedges in the modern sense, but there were also “dead hedges” for temporary fencing, either stakes interwoven with ethers (long flexible rods) or constructed of cut thorns called trouse, also used to mend gaps in live hedges. Hedge-mending and cutting of trouse (often in a special thorn wood called a spinney) were supervised by an official called a Hayward.
There are so many literary references in Medieval documents to demonstrate that hedges were part of English culture, and the source of words like hedge-sparrow, hedgehog, and hawthorn (hedge-thorn). Medieval rustics thought of “The Man in the Moon” as a stupid hedger, as in the 13th century poem of the same name, or like Shakespeare’s Moonshine, “with lanthorn, dog, and brush of thorn.”
Post Medieval Fields and Hedges
The planting of hedges gained momentum from the fifteenth century onwards, especially in open-field areas being enclosed. Sometimes it was done with plants dug-up in the local woods, sometimes with “quickset” thorns, bought from nurseryman.
Early post-enclosure fields often preserve the shape of the furlongs that preceded them. Occasionally, a whole landscape of strips may be fossilized.
From the 16th century onwards many maps and landscape paintings depict hedges, fences and walls – and also rows of trees remaining when hedges had been grubbed out.
Writers drew attention to the difference between fully-hedged counties (“several” or “woodland”) and those still relatively unhedged. Among the many disadvantages of living in champion country was the lack of firewood and the trouble, or “suit” of fetching fuel from a distance. The term “Woodland” was used not for woodland in the normal sense, but for land possessing hedgerows which produced wood. The Little Ice Age was drawing on, and hedges were much in demand for fuel. Stealing wood out of hedges was an offence meriting all Sunday in the stocks and a whipping until the offender “bleed well”.
The Great Enclosures, though not a universal transformation, were a time of more new hedging than ever before or since. The hedges planted between 1750 and 1850 – probably about 200,000 miles – were at least equal to all those planted in the previous 500 years.
As time went on, hedging became perfunctory. Strong hedges with plenty of trees, with straight drawing-board lines, cutting across ridge-and-furrow, cannot be confused with medieval hedges. These, mainly Georgian, enclosures contrast also with the Victorian enclosures with their flimsy single rows of hawthorn only.
Even in Ancient Countryside, the pattern of hedges in 1900 was not exactly the same as in 1500. The study of early maps reveals many piecemeal additions and subtractions to the hedge network. Big fields were subdivided, and small fields laid together. Hedges added in early alterations were usually the first to be removed in later alterations. The network remained mainly medieval, but contained many single hedges of all subsequent periods.
From 1870 to 1945 there was very little change in hedges. Air photographs of 1946 still show an almost complete network of hedges, even in arable areas. Loss of hedges is the almost familiar aspect of the destruction of the English countryside between 1950 and 1975. It has affected mainly the eastern counties, where some areas have become as featureless as any desert. But Slinfold did not entirely escape as comparison of the 1843 Tithe map with modern maps attest.
Bibliography:
Full acknowledgement is made to Oliver Rackham for much of this data, which has been taken from his work “History of the Countryside” (1994).
Also references have been made to the following works:
A. L. F. Rivet: Town & Country in Roman Britain (1958)
William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1836)
R. Blaker: Sx. A.C., XLV, pp. 198-203 (1902)
E. Cecil Curwen, Antiquity I, pp. 261-89 Prehistoric Agriculture (1927)
G. A. Holleyman, Antiquity IX pp 443-54 “The Celtic field system in South Britain” based on work in Sussex.)(1935)
E. Cecil Curwen, Plough & Pasture (1946)
H. L. Gray, English Field Systems (1915)
E. Cecil Curwen, Antiquity XIII pp 45-32 The plough and the origin of Strip Lynchets (1939)
C. S. Orwin, The Open Fields (1954)
E. Kerridge, Economic History Review (2nd series) IV, pp 14-36 Ridge-and-furrow and agrarian history (1954)
S. R. Eyre, Agricultural History Review. III, pp. 80ff, The Curving plough-strip and its historical implications. (1955)
E. Cecil Curwen. Prehistory of Sussex (1954)
G. P. Burrow & G A Holleyman Proc. Prehistoric Soc., XXIII pp 167-212 Late Bronze Age settlement on Itford Hill, Sussex (1957)
H. C. Bowen, Ancient Fields (1963)
