English Countryside and Population in the Eighteenth Century

TFN MANY parts of England and Wales there would be nothing to _ _ surprise man who had lived in them in the late seventeenth century and returned to see them today, except astonishingly solid roads and occasional railroads. He would also, of course, now find modern buildings, villas or bungalows here and there, but if he had revisited his native heaths in the late eighteenth century, they would have appeared to him just the same as when he lived and tried to flourish on them. Near to London the difference would have been the greater, although not very much change had taken place in the heath lands of the southern counties and the forests and marshes of Essex, butfurther away from the metropolis the change was less. wastes of Dartmoor and Exmoor, the wild hills of Cornwall, the mountains and heaths of the northern counties and Wales, although some attempts to reclaim them had been made, remained very much as they were at the opening of the century. Natives of other parts would have found vast difference when the hundred years from 1700 to 1800 had passed. Much of the wolds of Lincoln and the East Riding had come under cultivation, some of the sheep walks in Norfolk and Suffolk also, and downland elsewhere had been broken up, while efforts at reclamation by drainage had brought good deal of fen and marsh permanently into the grazing area if not into tillage. Macaulay in his picturesque language describes Enfield Chase in 1685, and goes on to estimate the total change wrought by the effort of the eighteenth century as the enclosure of an area of 10,000 square miles; a fourth part of England has been, in the course of little more than century, turned from wild into garden. In repeating this statement Earl Cathcart adds, The roads, such as they were in those days, traversed thousands of square miles of moors, or furze-breaks, or fens, are now in our day smiling cornfields. Yet another modern vignette is of more glowing character, Vast tracts of country, says Mr. R. E. Prothero (now Lord Ernle), which are now cultivated, then lay waste and uninclosed, Hainault and Epping Forest occupied great part of the county of Essex; Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common were, as late as 1793, described as wastes fit only for Cherokees and savages; two years earlier the Weald of Surrey still bore evidence of its total desolation in the posts, stood across it as 'guides to the letter carriers.' If such was the condition of the neighborhood of London at the close of the eighteenth century, it may be supposed that, hundred years earlier, less civilized districts were yet more barren and uncultivated. Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire were still undrained. Robin Hood would have found his forest of Sherwood still covering the greater part of Nottinghamshire. Derbyshire was black region of ling, and from the northern part of the county to the extremity of Northumberland-a distance of 150 milesthe traveller would, like Jeanie Deans, encounter nothing but wastes. In 1734 the forest of Knaresborough was so thick with wood that he was thought

Geography · Political science · Population · Rural area · Rural population · Sociology · Demography · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Rural development and sustainability

• The Changing Agricultural Geography of England

  D B Grigg•Transactions of the Institute of…•1967

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