Rethinking Ancient Woodland: The Archaeology and History of Woods in Norfolk

by Gerry Barnes, Tom Williamson

Overview

'Ancient woodland' is a term widely used in England for long-established semi-natural woods, shaped by centuries of traditional management. Such woods are often assumed to provide a direct link with the natural vegetation of England, as this existed before the virgin forests were fragmented by the arrival of farming. This groundbreaking study questions many of these assumptions. Drawing on more than a decade of research in Norfolk, the authors emphasize the essentially unnatural character of ancient woods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909291584
Publisher:	University of Hertfordshire Press
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Series:	Studies in Regional and Local History Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.75(w) x 9.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gerry Barnes, MBE, served as Head of Environment at Norfolk County Council, and is now a researcher at the University of East Anglia, studying the history of trees and woodlands in eastern England. Tom Williamson is Professor of Landscape History at the University of East Anglia.

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Rethinking Ancient Woodland

The Archaeology and History of Woods in Norfolk

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By Gerry Barnes, Tom Williamson

University of Hertfordshire Press

Copyright © 2015 Gerry Barnes and Tom Williamson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-909291-60-7

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CHAPTER 1

Studying ancient woodland

This volume is the result of several years of research into the history and archaeology of long-established, semi-natural woodland – 'ancient woodland', as it is often called – in one English county, Norfolk. There have been a number of important studies of woodland over the last few decades, and readers may be wondering why we need another, and especially one which is focused on one particular area of the country. Our answer is that most of those studies, although differing in many of their details, share a broadly similar perspective, mostly emphasising the essentially 'natural' character of 'ancient woodland', or at least its antiquity and stability in the landscape. Many, moreover, are written by individuals with a background that is primarily in ecology or one of the other natural sciences. This book approaches the subject, mainly although not exclusively, from the perspective of the landscape historian and archaeologist, and considers woodland and its development as part of the wider history of the landscape. It re-examines the character of 'ancient woodland', casting some doubt on its long-term stability and antiquity and the extent of its continuity with the natural vegetation. Indeed, it effectively questions the very usefulness of the term itself, while at the same time recognising, and celebrating, the immense importance of old woods in terms of both the natural and the historical environment.

The historiography of ancient woodland

By the middle decades of the nineteenth century it was already widely recognised that there were significant differences in the ecological character of recently planted woodland and older, semi-natural woods, and that some of the latter represented the remains, modified by human exploitation, of the natural forests that had originally covered England (Watkins 1988, 238). By the end of the century botanists such as Clement Reid, and the contributors to the various Victoria County Histories, were suggesting that the particular kinds of plant species found in many woods represented survivors from these primaeval, natural woodlands (Reid 1899; Watkins 1988, 240), and in 1910 Moss, Rankin and Tansley were able to argue that most British woods represented the direct 'lineal descendants of primaeval forests' (Moss et al. 1910). But it was only in the middle decades of the twentieth century, most notably with the writings of men such as A.G. Tansley and H.L. Edlin, that serious attempts were made to understand how these 'forests' had developed, and how they had then been transformed into the small pockets of woodland surviving in the modern landscape.

As a result, in large measure, of the development in the early twentieth century of palynology – the analysis of ancient pollen preserved in bogs, lake sediments or other anaerobic conditions – it became apparent that, following the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 BC, England had gradually been colonised by plants and animals as the climate warmed and as a continued connection with Continental Europe (the English Channel and the southern North Sea were flooded only in the seventh millennium BC) allowed different species to move northwards with relative ease, beginning with pine and birch. The natural vegetation thus developed through a process that ecologists call 'succession'. As the climate warmed up, plants colonised in a more or less predictable sequence, each creating conditions which allowed successors to establish and flourish, leading in time to the development of a climax vegetation of closed-canopy forest which survived intact until the arrival of farming soon after 4000 BC. Following this, most of England was gradually cleared of trees, but if land is abandoned for any length of time succession begins once again, and within a short period grasses and herbs will give way to scrub, and scrub to woodland, as experiments carried out at Rothampsted in Hertfordshire from the 1880s – involving the deliberate abandonment of two small plots of land – demonstrated (Lawes 1895; Brenchley and Adam 1915).

The larger of the abandoned plots at Rothampstead, in Geesecroft Field, came in time to be occupied by mature woodland dominated by oak and ash; and the fact that oak (Quercus sp.) was the most common timber tree found in old English woodlands, as well as more widely in the countryside, led to the understandable belief that this had been the most important species in the natural woodlands of the pre-Neolithic period. Tansley concluded in the 1930s that 'native oak forest ... covered very extensive areas' even into the historic period, with pedunculate oak dominant on deeper, damper, heavier soils, and sessile or durmast oak on lighter, drier, more acid formations (Tansley 1949, 246–7). In Edlin's words: 'The two oaks, sessile and pedunculate, are the trees that figure largest in these natural woodlands, and may safely be taken as having formed the largest element in forests of late prehistoric and subsequent historic times' (Edlin 1956, 73). 'Oakwoods of one kind or another are so ubiquitous over Britain, that one can advance, fairly safely, the working hypothesis that mixed oakwood is, or has once been, the normal forest cover on most areas that can carry woodland at all' (Edlin 1956, 74).

Researchers in the mid-twentieth century, it should be noted, also acknowledged that other species had dominated the natural vegetation in particular districts. But, again, this belief was to a large extent based, not unreasonably, on the character of what were perceived to be the surviving, modified 'fragments' of the natural vegetation. Edlin thus suggested that the beechwoods found in the Chiltern Hills and in south-east and south-central England were of 'natural origin'; Tansley argued that their distribution may once have been more widespread, the present occurrence of beech- dominated woodland being the consequence of climatic change and human interference (Tansley 1949, 248–9). Ash, both men thought, and for similar reasons, may also have been locally dominant in the natural forests. But it was only in the north of Britain, in the 'highland zone', that the dominance of oak was thought to have been seriously challenged by other species, especially birch and pine, in the untouched forests of remote prehistory. It must be emphasised that Edlin in particular – a forester by training – was fully aware that the present appearance and vegetational structure of old woodland also owed much to human management over the centuries. But edaphic factors, and the survival of characteristics inherited from the natural woodlands, were given priority in early interpretations.

The belief that oak forest had been the predominant British forest community on most soils, before the first clearances by prehistoric and later farmers gradually fragmented the primaeval woods, was initially supported by the evidence of preserved prehistoric pollen sequences. But as more pollen evidence became available through the middle and later decades of the twentieth century, and better methods for analysing it developed, this perception began to change. It became evident that small-leaved lime (Tilia cordata), rather than oak, had been the most important component of the post-glacial vegetation across much of lowland England, accompanied by varying mixtures of oak, hazel, ash and elm, and with pine and birch locally significant. In the north and west lime was less frequent and pollen cores suggested instead the presence of woodlands comprising diverse mixtures of oak, hazel, birch, pine and elm (Bennett 1988, 251; Rackham 2006, 82–90). The dominance of oak as a timber tree in most English woods could now be seen as a consequence of economic rather than natural factors: it made the best timber for the construction of houses and ships, being relatively easy to work when green, but becoming as hard as iron once seasoned. The loss of lime from the landscape, and its absence from no more than a small percentage of English woods, likewise demonstrated the extent to which the latter were not simply the tattered remnants of the original vegetation, but had been quite extensively modified by many centuries of management. It was this subject – how woods had been exploited in the medieval and early post-medieval periods – which became in the last decades of the twentieth century one of the principal concerns of woodland historians, and especially of the most important student of ancient woodland, the individual who brought to currency the term 'ancient woodland' itself, Oliver Rackham.

Rackham was an ecologist by training but was also an effective historian, able to read Latin and deal with medieval palaeography, as well as being an able field archaeologist. His approach to woodland was articulated in a number of erudite, influential and engagingly written publications, most notably Trees and woodland in the British landscape (1976), Ancient woodland (1980), The history of the countryside (1986a) and Woodlands (2006). In this series of volumes Rackham discussed in far more detail than his predecessors had done the way in which, from the early Middle Ages, portions of the surviving 'wildwood' – his term for the natural vegetation, unaffected by human settlement and agriculture – had gradually come to be enclosed and managed more intensively by manorial lords as 'coppice with standards'. In this form of management the majority of trees and bushes were cut down to at or near ground level on a rotation of between seven and fifteen years in order to provide a regular crop of 'poles' – that is, straight and relatively narrow pieces of wood suitable for tools, minor parts of buildings and vehicles, fencing and fuel – the plants regenerating vigorously from the stump or 'stool', or suckering from the rootstock. There were relatively few 'standard' trees – ones allowed to grow naturally and harvested for timber – for if these had been numerous their canopy shade would have suppressed the growth of the underwood beneath: woods, that is, were about producing wood more than about producing timber (Rackham 1986a, 65–8). Most standards were felled when relatively young, at 80 to 100 years of age. Coppices were vulnerable to grazing livestock – at least in the early stages of the rotation – and it was primarily for this reason that woods needed to be securely enclosed, with banks, ditches and hedges. Intensive management had become necessary because, as population rose during the early Middle Ages, and the area used for growing crops and grazing livestock increased, the amount of wood and timber that could be derived from less intensively managed woodlands was insufficient for the needs of society: prices rose, and what we now describe as 'traditional' forms of management thus became economic. Not all woods managed as coppice-with-standards, however, were the direct descendants of the wildwood. Rackham emphasised, to an extent that his predecessors had not, that a significant number of semi- natural woods were 'secondary' in character – that is, they had spontaneously grown up (or had otherwise become established) on land which had been cleared and farmed for a period in the distant past, but which had then been abandoned (Rackham 1976, 18–19). This had sometimes happened in prehistoric or Roman times, sometimes in the later medieval or early post-medieval periods. Rackham researched, and explained, many aspects of woodland ecology and discussed – in a chapter in his 1976 book which has yet to be bettered – the methods of fieldwork, including archaeological fieldwork, which need to be employed in the study of ancient woods (Rackham 1976, 114–42).

Rackham charted, with erudition and clarity, not only the rise of traditional woodmanship but also its decline in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as coal replaced wood as a fuel, as items manufactured from iron replaced those formerly fashioned from wood and as new ideas of forestry – involving the establishment of non-renewable plantations, lacking a coppice understorey and with trees treated as a crop, planted, thinned and then felled – rose to dominance. Traditional forms of management finally came to an end in the course of the twentieth century, when many woods were grubbed out for agriculture or replanted as plantations, often with exotic conifers. Only where woods were managed primarily for the purpose of nature conservation were ancient practices maintained or reinstated.

Rackham's work has been immensely influential among landscape historians and others, and until his recent death he was unquestionably the best-known writer on ancient woodland in Britain. Others, however, have also made important contributions to the subject which – while perhaps less well known outside the natural sciences – have arguably been as important. In particular, George Peterken, during a long career with the Nature Conservancy and subsequently as an independent consultant, published a number of key articles and two major books on woodland: Woodland conservation and management (1981) and Natural woodland: ecology and conservation in northern temperate regions (1996). In these he discussed the dynamics of woodland ecology in Britain and beyond and also – like Rackham – categorised the various types of semi-natural woodland found in this country, defining a range of distinctive 'stand types' – combinations of particular shrubs and trees – which made up different kinds of woodland and placing them within a wider European context (1981, 118–73). Perhaps his greatest contribution to the study and conservation of woodland was, however, through his involvement in the compilation of the Ancient Woodland Inventory, initiated in 1981 by the Nature Conservancy Council (Nature Conservancy Council 1981; Spencer and Kirby 1992, 78). Peterken, while fully acknowledging the role of management in the development of woodland vegetation ('few if any stands qualify as being strictly virgin' (Peterken 1981, 44)), also emphasised the influence of soils and climate in generating the 'forest types of Europe' from which British woodlands had ultimately developed (Peterken 1981, 34–7). He also usefully discussed the complexities inherent in the term 'natural woodland' (Peterken 1996). He emphasised how the pre-Neolithic vegetation of England – in its condition of 'original-naturalness', 'before people became a significant ecological factor' – was different from what it would be in a state of 'present-naturalness', defined as the 'state that would prevail now if people had not become a significant ecological factor', simply because of climatic changes and of other entirely natural influences and process which have operated over the intervening millennia. But more radically different still would be 'future-natural' woodlands, which Peterken defined as those 'which would eventually develop if people's influence were completely and permanently removed'. This is because so many new species have been introduced into the country since prehistoric times, while others have become extinct (Peterken 1996, 13). The 'future-natural' forest that would emerge if nature was somehow to be left to its own devices would thus probably contain a large proportion of sycamore trees.

Ecologists are now, for the most part, fully aware that surviving areas of old-growth forest throughout the world have been radically altered by human exploitation. Little if any 'wildwood', to use Rackham's term for truly virgin forest, survives: 'the very concept of wildwood has shrunk in the face of archaeological and historical discoveries ... Anyone who restricts the term "natural woodland" to woods with no human influence risks creating an empty category' (Rackham 2006, 103). Nevertheless, the idea persists that ancient woods represent, at least in the case of those that are 'primary', a direct link with the natural vegetation, and that variations in composition thus reflect – in part – variations in that of the 'wildwood' itself. The extent to which coppiced woodland represents a 'natural' habitat lies at the heart of this book; but perhaps equally important is the related issue of its antiquity and its stability in the landscape, to which we shall also return repeatedly in the chapters that follow.

Ancient woods are valued by botanists and ecologists because, as has long been recognised, they contain a number of distinctive plants – around 250 species of flowers, sedges and grasses occur mainly or exclusively within them (Colebourn 1989) – that in turn provide food for a range of important, and often rare or infrequent, invertebrates (Figure 1). But such plants flourish best where woods are subject to regular coppicing. Larger woods were usually felled section by section, in rotation, creating a mosaic of blocks of coppice in different stages of regrowth. Coppicing opens up the floor of the wood to light, yet at the same time leaves the ground flora undisturbed: the resulting growth of woodland herbs is ideal for sustaining a wide range of insects, especially butterflies such as the pearl-bordered fritillary, the high brown fritillary and the Duke of Burgundy. Indeed, the decline of coppicing over the last century or so has been a major factor in the fall in butterfly numbers in England (Warren 1989, 185–96). The abundant supplies of food afforded by such diverse and continually changing environments also attract a wide range of birds and mammals, although the former in particular were also directly encouraged by the structural diversity afforded by traditional management. Bird species display much variation in terms of their preferences for different stages of coppice regrowth, and thus the mosaic of fells serves to increase the scale of diversity (Carter 1990; Fuller and Green 1998).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgements ix

Abbreviations x

General Editor's preface xi

1 Studying ancient woodland 1

The historiography of ancient woodland 1

Defining ancient woodland: the Ancient Woodland inventory 6

The implications of ancient woodland 9

The challenge to stability: dynamic models 12

Conclusion 16

2 The contexts of ancient woodland 17

Soils and climate 17

The human landscape: settlement and farming 22

Ancient woodland in Norfolk 30

Examining ancient woods 34

3 The origins of coppiced woodland 38

The evidence of location and distribution 38

Manorial sites and ancient woods 46

Ancient woodland, Roman settlement and post-Roman regeneration 48

Woods as pastures: early pastoral exploitation of woodland 55

The enclosure of the wastes 59

Ecological impacts of enclosure 61

Conclusion 63

4 The character of coppiced woodland 64

Management 64

The features of the wood: boundaries, ponds and settlements 69

The stability of woodland 76

Management, use and species composition 80

Conclusion 85

5 Wood-pastures 87

Introduction 87

Wood-pasture heaths 88

Sustaining planting on commons 95

Private wood-pastures 97

Conclusion 106

6 Ancient woodland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 107

The background 107

The 'Great Replanting' 111

Managing ancient woodland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 112

New uses for old woods 117

'Pseudo-ancient woodland' 122

Conclusion 133

7 The recent history of ancient woodland 134

Depression and the great estates 134

The impact of the Forestry Commission 136

Woodland in wartime 139

The effects of dereliction 144

Post-War attrition, destruction and survival 146

Conclusion 148

8 Conclusion: the nature of woodland 150

Appendix: sites discussed in the text 160

Bibliography 253

Index 265