Woodland Management in Hampshire, 900 to 1815

Abstract

AbstractThe coppice and underwood trades in north Hampshire lasted almost unchanged for over one thousand years, yet the conspicuously wooded landscape of today is no more than three hundred years old. The landscape is an outcome of the enclosure of the common fields and replacement of their temporary dead-hedges by permanent living hedges, together with a radical reorganisation of the methods by which both wood and timber were grown, managed and marketed. These processes abolished the old extensive, open landscape, comprised of coppices, underwood, timber and rough grazing: the land-use system now termed wood pasture. It created the closed landscape of intensively managed woodland that prospered between 1750 and 1870. Evidence is drawn from the records of Crown, church, college and lay estates, besides contemporary comment, interpreted in the light of experience in restoring and managing an area of wood pasture.