Читать книгу A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside - Johnny Scott - Страница 41

Enclosing common wood pasture to create deer parks, which had been in vogue under the Normans, suffered a decline after the Black Death devastated the country in 1350. There was a revival during the reign of Henry VIII, who created at least seven parks, the largest of which, Hampton Court Chase, enclosed 4,000 hectares of land and four villages, setting a precedent among the aristocracy and prosperous landed merchants. The owners of private deer parks tended to position small woods and clumps of trees to draw the eye to the skyline or other feature, and retained large single trees for the air of antiquity they gave to the landscape. These were practices which were later followed and improved upon by the great landscape designers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The history of enclosing woodland areas begins further back with the Saxons, who went to considerable trouble to protect woodland by building massive ‘wood-banks’ round them to establish ownership and keep livestock and deer out, similar to those that survive in a number of places, such as Poundwood in Essex. Wood pastures were re-established, which combined grazing animals with widely spaced trees which had often been pollarded. (Pollarding is cutting the top out of a tree about three metres from the ground, above the height that livestock could get at the regrowth, and harvesting the rods and poles that grew from the stump in the same way as when coppicing.) There were also wooded commons or heaths, on which there were common rights for grazing cattle, sheep, goats and pigs. Pigs were an important part of the Anglo-Saxon farming system, and during the autumn and winter pigs were driven considerable distances to graze ‘pannage’, the beech mast or nuts, and acorns.