According to the trusty MET Office, the weather for this month was dreary, damp and unsettled. Here on The Lizard, we had many misty mornings which then developed into clear, bright sunny days with temperatures well above normal for this time of year. Sea swimming was definitely still on the agenda. Towards the end of the month the rain moved in but the trees still sported most of their leaves, the blackberries were still ripening, plumping up and good to eat but the sloes and the haws had been stripped from their branches. The birds had obviously been busy.
Blackthorn and Hawthorn have a heavy presence in the hedges around here. They have been around for centuries but there was a prolific planting frenzy in the 18th and 19th centuries to make the 200,000 miles of new hedges required by the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts. The history of the hedge in Britain has become something of an obsession since moving to Cornwall, their presence is felt on a daily basis. It reveals a lot about the rights of men and women throughout the centuries, in particular how a privileged class has used (and abused) both people and land in a profit driven agenda which still exists today. It is a brutal and unkind history but a familiar story of power and wealth making and using laws to benefit themselves and create havoc for the poor and the environment. Not content to keep these ideas at home, the British (and other European countries), then exported this abuse of labour and land to reek havoc and hell amongst indigenous tribes around the world. Furthermore, this attitude has been one of the prime drivers that has led us to the present catastrophic environmental situation.
The story of the hedge has two main strands in its history. The first is that of the tradition that reaches back into the Bronze Age, the ancient structures that were used as stock boundaries, shelter and flood defences. These hedges were not always planned or built but often the remnants from a woodland cleared to create fields. They provide a geological and biological history of the land and are rich in diversity of the wildlife and fauna that is now seen as essential to the health of our landscape and its ability to sustain life. They are not protected, developers and councils around Britain continue to rip them out, whilst maintaining that they are doing everything they can to help combat climate breakdown.
The other strand is the policies and acts of parliament initiated by royalty and governments that has dominated the treatment of the hedge. As early as the 12th century land was held by, what is laughingly described as the ‘nobility’, from the crown. (Lands given to men for acts of loyalty to some member of the royal family, often involving slaughter, rape and pillage). Enclosures had been going on since the age of the Tudors, however, ‘peasants’ still maintained the right to use certain parcels of land to grow food to survive, to graze cattle and harvest for fruit, nuts and berries. These people paid for this by the labour and food they provided to the landlords. It was a verbal agreement that had worked well enough for hundreds of years. However, landlords saw the potential for making more money from the land in both the textile industry and intensifying the production of food. In short, they wanted the land without the need to negotiate the ancient rights of the village community. Between 1750 and 1850, five thousand individual acts of parliament were put into place and nearly 7,000 million acres were put into private ownership. The enclosures broke up small traditional communities, created evictions, starvation, migration and deportation to the colonies – a ready workforce for slave labour here and abroad.
“The political dominance of large landowners determined the course of enclosure. It was their power in parliament and as local justices of the peace that enabled them to redistribute the land in their own favour”. A landlord would apply to parliament to petition for the right to own the land, “The commissioners were invariably of the same class and outlook as the landholders – it is no surprise they awarded themselves the best lands and most of it, thereby making England a classic land of well kept estates with a marginal peasantry and a large class of rural wage labourers” (The Future of Freedom Foundation; English Enclosures and Soviet Collectivization). Or, in the words of an English folk poem,
“They hang the man and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose”.
Fast forward to the end of WW2 and the government decided that hedge and tree lines must go, as they stood in the way of modernising farming practices with the use of the new, massive farm vehicles and the end of crop rotation, the capitalist mentality was now well and truly embedded into government thinking. The Agriculture Act of 1947 gave financial rewards to farmers for ripping up the hedgerows in yet another pursuit of profit. By 2007, according to the Forestry Commission, nearly 52% of our hedgerows had gone. In 1950, surplus of TNT was used to blow trees and hedges from the ground. In addition, farming practices took on the production of single species, increased the intensity of land use, extended the use of chemicals, increased arable land and the over reliance on the fossil fuel industry that continues to impact on our soil health to this day. Isabella Tree describes this process in her book on Wilding, “switching manufacture from munitions to agricultural fertilizers was obvious and easy for industrialists. Tanks converted to tractors, poison gas to pesticides and herbicides… in the USA ten large scale bomb making factories remained unscathed after the war, nitrate production rocketed…making the states the champions of artificial fertilizer”. Many scientists and farmers were against this and the worry about the loss of soil fertility was already being discussed. The government was not interested, the hedges and trees were culled and the large scale destruction of our environment began in earnest. This history is not separate from global warming. It is the very essence of a mindset that has caused it, and it continues without apology, reflection, remorse or even a shred of humanity.
It is ironic that after decades of government sanctioned destruction and woeful abuse of the landscape by developers, we are now being told that they are the magic remedy for our future sustainability and once again, hedge planting is on the increase. They are known to stabilise soil and reduce erosion, ameliorate the effects of flooding, improve air quality locally and filter pollution, provide food and shelter for birds and other woodland species, the list goes on. And yet, and yet, here in Cornwall, a land with thousands of miles of ancient hedge, developers still continue to bulldoze and flatten medieval hedges and lines of mature trees. The County Council writes that there is no need for an Environmental Impact Assessment because there is no negative affect from these actions – this is happening today in Helston with a proposed development on the edge of the town. It beggars belief.
So, where was I? Ah yes, the hawthorn and the blackthorn trees in October. To be continued.
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