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1. Cultural landscapes
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1.3 Pastoralism
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Pastoral landscape of Inner Mongolia
The use of semi natural
vegetation as a natural renewable resource has been an
important feature of human development which started when hunting cultures, who
following the natural migration of wild herds, began to domesticate herds of goats
and sheep. Herding has left its cultural mark on vast areas of the steppes of Asia,
and has also produced the small jewel-like spots of high biodiversity of the British
commons and wood pasture |
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Map of sheepwalks and winter pastures (green) of the Mesta in Spain during the 13th
century
With the retreat of
the ice from northern Europe some 8,000 years ago, an
ameliorating climate was accompanied by the spread of woodland. Contemporary
man, represented by the Mesolithic cultures, lived in what was essentially an
afforested environment. The evidence for his impact on the woodland is at best
fragmentary and inferential. Mesolithic man was a hunter and food-gatherer, and the
only way in which the small human population would have been likely to cause
widespread modification of the environment would have been through the use of fire,
perhaps to drive game. If some deforestation took place during Mesolithic
times—and there is some suggestion of this, for example on Dartmoor—it
commenced in earnest during the succeeding Neolithic period (c 3200- 1800 bc in
Britain), which saw the advent of more or less settled forms of agriculture. By the
time of the last Neolithic cultures, agricultural systems based on cereal cultivation,
domesticated livestock, or both, were widespread throughout Europe.
During the succeeding
Bronze Age (c 1800-500 bc in Britain) and Iron Age (500 bc-
ad 43) and during the Roman occupation (ad 43-c 410), farming methods in this
country became progressively more sophisticated and the human population
increased in size. Agriculture, albeit often a shifting form of agriculture, required the
clearance of the woodland, whether for growing crops or rearing livestock. In many
cases pastoral land uses would follow naturally on arable production. Land cleared
and cropped persistently by the primitive techniques available would lose nutrient
status to the point where cultivation was no longer worthwhile. It would then be used
as grazing grounds. On much of the more base-deficient soils of northern Europe
woodland clearance, and the subsequent failure to compensate adequately the soil
for the decline in base status due to leaching and agricultural exploitation, led to the
development of heathland and moorland conditions. This is thought to be the origin
of wood pasture, where forestry and livestock grazing exist as an integrated
economy.
In Upland Britain the
clearance of the woodland appears to have been widespread in
Neolithic times. In the New Forest, in common with most other areas in Lowland
Britain where heathland developed, the first significant woodland clearances seem to
have occurred somewhat later, during the Bronze Age. There is, indeed, little
evidence to show that Neolithic man settled in the area.
Efforts to relate the
reduction in the woodland and the onset of soil deterioration with
changes in climate—and particularly with the climate deterioration which occurred
about 500 bc, when conditions became markedly cooler and wetter—are generally
unsatisfactory. It is, however, conceivable that increased rainfall accelerated leaching
in soils already cleared of their tree cover and thus contributed to their
impoverishment.
New Forest which occupies
a relatively large area of poor soils is a good model to
illustrate the outcome of wood pasture on local biodiversity. Here the progressive
reduction of the woodland area and the extension of heathland has continued into
modern times, although the process was retarded after the eleventh century, when
the area became subject to the restrictions and controls over land use which
designation as a Royal Forest implied. The later vegetation history is intimately
associated with its legal status and management as Royal Forest. This at the same
time severely limited reclamation: much more of the unenclosed commons would
undoubtedly otherwise have been enclosed for agriculture as the techniques for
reclaiming the poor soils improved in recent centuries. Today (and indeed since the
early nineteenth century), it is technically feasible to reclaim even the most
impoverished of the heathland soils.
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IT is perhaps a matter
for surprise that the New Forest, with its peculiar institutions
and agriculture, its outstanding biological interest and its ease of access, has
escaped the close attention of little more than a handful of historians and field
scientists in recent years. Despite its ready accessibility it has comparatively seldom
been used as a teaching arena. Its unenclosed woodlands and heath-lands,
however, today comprise the largest single unit of 'semi-natural' or 'unsown'
vegetation remaining in the Lowland zone of Britain, and for this reason it is unlikely
that the neglect of the past will be long perpetuated. As urban and industrial
development and agricultural reclamation continue to reduce and fragment the
ground available elsewhere for biological, archaeological and other field studies, so
attention is likely to become focused more closely on the Forest. Such a trend is
already discernible.
The origins of the
New Forest lie deep in the domains of the later Saxon kings who
claimed as part of their prerogative the right to reserve to themselves the chase, at
least of the deer, over any part of their kingdom which they might define. These Royal
hunting grounds, as well as the demesne lands of the Crown, were gradually formed
from what had formerly been the folkland, common to all. The restrictions on the use
of the Royal hunting grounds, other than by the Crown or its nominees, became
progressively more restrictive until they assumed the rigorous nature of the Norman
Forest Laws.
It has commonly been
asserted that much of the New Forest was Royal Forest
before the Conquest. Satisfactory evidence in support of this is lacking, however. All
that can be said is that the area had been afforested by 1086, the date of the
Domesday compilation, and that much, if not all of the afforestation can be attributed
to William I.
The act of afforestation
and the subsequent management of a Forest were directed
mainly towards the conservation of deer for the chase and—probably more
important—as a reservoir of meat 'on the hoof, and of hides, which could be tapped
as and when required. A Forest did not necessarily imply a tree covering, nor did it
preclude the continued holding of private lands within it, but might be best described
as an area subject to Forest Law in contradistinction to Common Law. Forest Law
provided for the regulation and control of all activities which could conceivably be
contrary to the purpose of the Forest and laid down various penalties for
infringement. It is well known that in Norman England these penalties were
extreme—a man might lose his life for the killing of a stag—but later, successive
modifications introduced a degree of leniency towards Forest offences which,
together with the various privileges which eventually became known as rights of
common, formed a considerable compensation for the restrictions on economic
expansion which Forest Law implied.
Afforestation was based
on the prerogative enjoyed by the sovereign that all wild
animals were in his possession. Forests generally —and medieval documentary
evidence shows that this was the case in the New Forest—included the lands of
subjects besides those of the Crown. Before the Charta de Foresta of 1217, such
lands could not—in theory at any rate—be enclosed, nor could timber be felled on
them, cultivation take place or game be killed: subsequently it was allowed under
licence from the Crown. Their major value, therefore, lay in their grazings. Clearly it
would have been unreasonable to prohibit fencing and at the same time to enforce
restrictions on the roaming of stock on to the Crown land, and as a matter of
practical management the right of free range of stock appears to have gained mutual
acceptance and to have been the origin of many later rights of grazing.
Although the first
consideration in the management of a Forest was the deer, it is
known that pre-existing pastoral land uses and other exploitation of the soil were
allowed to continue, but that such exploitation was subject to close control and
definition.
Before afforestation,
the common wastes would have been freely grazed. Pigs would
have been turned out on the mast in the autumn —the Domesday valuation of
woodland turns on its capacity to maintain swine—timber, turves and peat taken for
fuel, bracken cut for bedding and litter, and to some extent at least, game killed, as
necessities to the survival of the communities. Under Forest Law the exploitation of
these natural resources became controlled for the benefit of the deer and, with the
passing of time, became rights of common exercised by immemorial prescription
under privilege of the Crown, eventually in the New Forest becoming defined and
limited and recognised by statute in the late seventeenth century.
Medieval Forest Law
provided for the removal of cattle from the Forest during the
midsummer fence month (20 June-20 July), when the hinds and does were dropping
their calves and fawns respectively, and during the winter heyning (November to
May), the period of the year when keep was shortest. Together these periods
covered more than six months of the year, but there is evidence to show that in the
spacious conditions of the New Forest the winter heyning, at least, was not
customarily observed, certainly by later medieval times. The period during which pigs
might be turned out was restricted to about two months in the autumn, when the
mast fell. Flere the interests of both Crown and commoners were served: green
acorns, although perfectly good pig food, can, when eaten in excess and without a
considerable bulk of fibrous food, cause death by poisoning in both cattle and deer. It
was, therefore, in the interests of the Crown that pig should compete with deer for
the green acorns until late November.
Today, much of the
periphery of the Forest, and most pockets of enclosed
agricultural land within it, comprise small or comparatively small holdings to which
are attached the various rights which may be exercised over the unenclosed
commons. Most holdings are under about fifty acres, and the profitable management
of many rests largely on the exercise of their common rights, particularly that of
grazing. The economy of individual holdings varies greatly, but the long established
basic system has been for the meadows to be shut up for hay and the stock run on
the Forest until keep becomes short there. The holdings thus have the capacity to
reduce both overheads in purchased food-stuffs and capital outlay in land. For
several hundred years the agricultural economy has been based on the use of the
common grazings.
Together with the deer,
the exploitation of the Forest for grazing, fuel, marl and other
purposes, as integral parts of the rural economy, have been significant modifying
forces in the ecological history of the unenclosed lands. In particular, the 'grazing
force' has set limits on woodland regeneration and has been a major factor in
checking a succession to woodland on the open heaths. It is thus important to
explore the history and structure of the agricultural economy and, specifically, to try
to identify fluctuations in the number of stock turned out and the economic factors
involved.
The importance of common
rights and the extent to which they were exercised over
the New Forest before the seventeenth century can be deduced only from their
invariable inclusion in grants of land by the Crown; from presentments at the Forest
Courts as to their abuse; and from the petitions of commoners alleging unreasonable
restrictions of tbeir rights. The fragmentary evidence from these sources suggests
that in medieval times the area supported a vigorous pastoral economy, although it is
not possible to construct a sensitive picture of its changing fortunes over the
centuries. Certainly, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, cattle, ponies and
to some extent, sheep, were grazed on the Forest, often —according to
presentments to the Forest Courts—in numbers which were considered excessive.
Some of the biggest graziers were evidently the various religious houses in the
area—the Abbey at Beaulieu; the Priories at Christchurch and Braemore. At the
same time it is clear that the commons were equally important to the occupiers of
much smaller holdings, as is evidenced by the complaint of certain copyholders of
the manor of Cadnam and Winsor, adjacent to the Forest, to the Court of Chancery
in 1591. The Lord of the Manor was attempting to enclose the manorial waste. The
complainants deposed that they were, 'poore copieholders of the manor of Cadnam
and Winsor, and their whole estates and livynge' depended on the use of the
common, 'so that yf they should be abrydged of their annycent customes it would be
their utter undoing'. The common remains unenclosed to this day, despite a further
enclosure attempt during the nineteenth century—on which occasion the earlier
decision of Chancery was produced as evidence by the copyholders of the manor.
If the pre-seventeenth
century evidence is sparse, the New Forest is probably unique
for its later successive Register of Claims to common rights—the first compiled in
1635—and for the volume of nineteenth- and twentieth-century material amplifying
the importance of the rights in the local economy; little of which had previously been
studied more than cursorily until recently.
The first and second
Registers, compiled by the Regarders on the occasion of the
Justice Seats, or Forest Eyres, held in 1635 and 1670, are essentially similar, but the
latter has the advantage of a good English translation from the original Latin. The
entries are long and detailed and give a good picture of the importance attached to
rights of common and their place in the rural economy.
A total of 307 claims
were registered, appertaining to about 65,000 acres of land lying
within the limits of the Forest as they appear to have been at Domesday.
The figures given by
the Report of the New Forest Committee, 1947, show that the
total number of stock on the Forest during the period 1910-1914 averaged 3,595
head annually. In 1915 it stood at 3,200 and in 1916 at 3,130. Mounting market prices,
mainly for dairy produce, are reflected in a corresponding rise in stock
numbers—mainly cattle—to a peak of 4,550 in 1920. Thereafter there is a steady
decline, following falling prices, until at the outbreak of war in 1939 there were only
1,757 animals on the Forest, of which about 1,000 were cattle—an all-time low. A
particularly serious blow to the small commoner between the wars was the loss of
his farmhouse butter trade in the face of wholesale importation from Australia and
New Zealand, on top of which the importation of Danish bacon began to crush his pig
trade.
The national trend
to liquid milk production appears to have been followed by a large
proportion of the commoners. Kenching-ton, commenting on the effects of the inter-
war period on the smaller commoners, noted that 'Cheap corn and cake well suited
the grazier, stockman, pigman and poultryman side of the forester's agriculture. . . .'
The low overheads made possible by the use of the commons, enabled the small
commoner as a class to 'get by', the profits from the family holding, such as they
were, being supplemented by work in the growing light industry zone of Southampton.
In 1940 the stock figure
stood at 1,479—571 ponies and 908 cattle. Thereafter, with
rising market prices for heifers and dairy produce —traditionally one of the
commoners' main lines of production— and the new trade in horseflesh, the
numbers of stock on the Forest rose steadily. In 1946 it stood at 3,082 cattle and 775
ponies. In 1963 the total number of ponies on the Forest was in excess of 2,000 and
the number of cattle on the Forest in the summer was around 3,000. The upward
trend in numbers has continued since.
The period 1944-1952
saw the first deliberate efforts to improve the Forest grazings.
During the inter-war period, with only small numbers of stock on the Forest, the
grazings had suffered a deterioration to scrub and, with the drive by the War
Agricultural Executive Committee to encourage the rearing of dairy stock, it was
apparent that some reclamation was necessary. Accordingly, between 1944 and
1948 some 1,000 acres were cropped and finally seeded down, most of the sites
having remained in fairly good condition since, although a reversion to indigenous
grass species is generally apparent. Three further areas were reclaimed and re-
seeded by the Verderers in 1959 under the provisions of the New Forest Act, 1949.
Whilst the numbers
of cattle and ponies depastured on the Forest in recent years
compares favourably with those of the 1880s, the actual number of commoners
exercising their grazing rights is now considerably smaller. The cottager with his tiny
holding and a few cows and heifers on the Forest has by and large disappeared.
Many such holdings have become desirable residences for the retired and for the
commuter to nearby urban areas, whilst others have been absorbed into rather larger
units. Particularly since the 1940s, there has been a general trend towards the
aggregation of holdings into larger units. The size of most agricultural holdings in the
Forest area (excluding the inherently large farms in the area), however, remains less
than fifty acres and a large number are a good deal smaller. Many of these holdings
today have a central 'core' of meadows, with one or two other fields at a distance
from the holding proper. In the event of the death or retirement of the owner the
holding may be passed on intact, the outlying fields sold off, or the farm broken up
between a number of others. The process of aggregation is a gradual one.
The most readily discernible
factors in the depletion of the fauna and flora of the
Lowland zone of Britain since the beginning of the eighteenth century have been the
progressive reclamation of its tracts of unsown, or semi-natural, vegetation and the
intensification of agricultural use and techniques. It is tempting to return to part of the
quotation from Macaulay with which the previous chapter began: 'It seems highly
probable that a fourth part of England has been, in the course of little more than a
century, turned from a wild into a garden.' In the century since that was written
demands on the land for agriculture, silviculture and urban and industrial
development have grown apace. The wild has become yet smaller.
The heathlands which
are so essential a feature of the New Forest today, were
formerly part of a broad belt which extended across the Hampshire Basin from
Southampton Water nearby, as far west as Dorchester, broken only by the valleys of
the Avon, Stour and Frome. The heaths of Dorset and those of Hampshire west of
the Avon, Moore were reduced in area from about 75,000 acres in 1811 to about
25,000 acres in 1960, and that this reduction had been accompanied by
fragmentation into more than one hundred separate parcels.
Urban and industrial
expansion, radiating from Bournemouth— itself built on what
was formerly Poole Heath—and other towns, together with extensive conifer
afforestation and reclamation for agriculture, has left few extensive areas west of the
New Forest. Many of the fragments which remain have become subject to greatly
increased human disturbance, and in some cases to extensive scots pine
colonisation arising from the seed sources provided by the plantations. Many
hundreds of acres of heathland have disappeared since the 1960s.
These changes are fairly
typical of those proceeding elsewhere on heathlands in
Lowland Britain. Moore estimated that since the early nineteenth century the heaths
of Breckland in East Anglia had been reduced in area by upwards of seventy-five per
cent and those of North Hampshire and Surrey by between fifty and seventy-five per
cent. The trend is continuing, and it seems likely that within another decade only
numbers of isolated fragments of heath will remain in the south and west of England
outside the New Forest.
The amount of space
any individual species requires in order to survive indefinitely in
a given part of its range is in most cases uncertain, but it would be fair to say that the
smaller the individual area of habitat and thus the smaller the population, the more
vulnerable a species becomes. Moore showed that in Dorset, the smaller and more
isolated the area of heath, the smaller the number of species it carried. It is likely that
many, if not most, of the remaining fragments of heathland in southern and eastern
England outside the New Forest are too small to indefinitely support many of their
characteristic animals and plants. The situation will be further aggravated as the
reduction and fragmentation of the heaths continues. The New Forest is, therefore,
ecologically important as the one area in which the most complete spectrum of
heathland fauna stands the best chance of survival. To some extent it may also
function as a 'reservoir' from which re-colonisation of smaller, less viable sites may
periodically take place.
The unenclosed woodlands
of the Forest are of not dissimilar significance. Uneven
aged deciduous woodland working on a more or less natural rotation is now of very
limited distribution in Lowland Britain. There has been widespread conversion of
deciduous woodland to conifers in the present century, and in any case the
economic management of hardwoods does not allow for the development of a wide
range of age-classes and the retention of the mature, senile and decaying timber
which is such a feature of the Forest woods and with which is associated their
exceptionally rich invertebrate and bird fauna.
Three other factors
are of importance in considering the faunistic variety of the
Forest.
First it is a fact
that the widest range of animal species tends to occur at habitat
boundaries—the bird population at a woodland edge, for example, is larger and more
varied than in the wood itself. At the same time many species require combinations
of habitats—the curlew, for example, requires both dry heath (for nesting) and bog
(for feeding) on its breeding grounds. Great diversity of habitat over short distances is
a characteristic ecological feature of the Forest: woodland, dry heath, acid grassland,
gorse brake, wet heath and valley bog, form a complex pattern within small areas.
The result is an abundance of habitat boundaries and combinations of habitats in
close proximity which contributes significantly to the overall diversity of the Forest's
fauna.
Second, the Crown lands
have never been used for large scale game rearing and to
this negative factor can be attributed the survival of a large and varied population of
predatory birds—a feature now rare in Lowland Britain and indeed over much of the
countryside around the Forest.
The third factor is
also a negative one—the area is little affected by the use of toxic
insecticides or by stream pollution.
The hypothesis that
the New Forest offers the best chance of survival in Lowland
Britain to the most complete spectrum of heathland fauna may be examined by
taking a number of 'indicator' species and comparing their status there with that on
other remaining heathlands in the Lowland zone. In this connexion, of twelve indicator
species, between them representing a wide variety of animals from a wide range of
heathland habitats, most, if not all twelve, occur or have occurred in the past in other
habitats besides heathland, but it would be fair to say that the heaths have always
been their main stronghold in the sense that there the populations have always been
densest. This is certainly true today, and combination of mixed grazing and forestry,
which exists in the framework of the Forest as an important tourist attraction,
presents great challenges to integrated management for sustainable ecosystems. |
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The attenuated pattern of greens and commons is found over much of Britain, but is
sparticularly well developed in the claylands of Suffolk, Norfolk, Wiltshire and Hertfordshire. At
one time, before the urban expansion of the late Industrial Revolution, similar large commons
and associated sprawling settlement patterns could be found on the claylands of the Forest of
Arden and the Wood Green area of west London. Nor, indeed, are they confined to the
claylands of southern England; greens and green villages elsewhere have attracted the
attention of geographers and historians for a number of years. Writers on East Anglian
settlement have long recognized that greens and commons on the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk
clays go hand in hand with a distinctive form of dispersed settlement pattern. However, it is
necessary to make a clear distinction between this East Anglian settlement around greens and
commons and the more nucleated, regular and, in some cases, planned variety of green village
identified by geographers working in the north of England.
Many of the lowland heaths are the remnants of the old " wastes " of common
pasture on
which the mediaeval villagers had the common right of pasturing their animals. They were
unenclosed and although there is often no legal right of access to the general public, public
access has come to be regarded as a right sanctioned by custom and has been legally
established by Act of Parliament in all commons in Urban Districts (Regulated Commons for
the most part). Some of these urban commons have lost their rough vegetation and might well
be coloured as permanent pasture but for the difference in status. Every effort was made to
determine which open land was of this character and to show it in yellow-including village
greens.
Although the word " Common " in place names occasionally refers to the former
existence of
common arable fields, k usually denotes the present or former existence of common grazing
grounds. The commons of Lowland Britain are, in fact, the remnants of the old manorial wastes
on which the villagers or commoners turned out their animals to graze. Where the land is of
high quality most of the commons have, in course of time, been enclosed and what remains
frequently forms the village green. The land belongs to the Lord of the Manor but he has no right
to enclose it and commoners' grazing rights remain. Contrary to popular belief, the public has
no statutory right of access except where the Local Authority has acquired the rights of the
Lord of the Manor or where the commons lie in Urban Districts and have become " Regulated
Commons ".
In Highland Britain a considerable proportion of mountain moorland is common land.
In some
cases all farms in the manor have a theoretical right to use the moorland grazing (mainly for
sheep) although there is no fixed rule as^ to the number of animals which can be pastured
there is a general understanding (which has not always been observed and disputes have
resulted) that a farmer will not pasture more sheep on the hills than he can maintain on the
farm in winter. In other cases the moorland is " stinted "-each farm possesses a number of
"
stints " which go with the farm and each stint gives the right to pasture a certain number of
animals-for example, one ewe or four lambs per stint. A farmer can use the stints himself or he
may sublet to others at a price.
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Over the large area
of East Anglia called 'High' Suffolk, one is impressed by the
flatness of the large intensively cropped arable fields and the twistiness of its minor
roads that meander between small scattered settlements.
Occasionally the traveller
enters upon a wide expanse of open grassland or scrub
with cottages and older farmsteads set back from the road. Splendid isolated
churches are never entirely out of sight. Where they survive, open greens and
commons interconnect with one another, making it difficult to tell where one begins
and another ends. The impression is of an antique landscape, but one much
mutilated by the effects of nineteenth-century enclosure and more modern 'agri-
business'.
Geographers have speculated
about the origins of these distinctive economic
features of a settlement pattern spread over many hundreds, or indeed thousands, of
years. The reasons behind the survival of common land in north Suffolk and south
Norfolk have never been firmly established, but a groundswell of opposition by
smallholders to parliamentary enclosure, and the lack of powerful landlords at a local
level, may have been contributing factors. |
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In the Book of Genesis,
we are told of another pair of brothers, Cain and Abel. Their
story is the story of the dry belt. Of these two, "Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain
was a tiller of the ground."
In its beginning in
the neolithic Near East, agriculture was mixed farming, based on
the combined use of crops and herds. But the growth of specialized, irrigated, crop
agriculture in the hydraulic societies gradually divided people into two groups:
farmers and herders. And it tended to drive the herders out into the wilderness. In this
sense, Cain, the farmer, is accurately made the aggressor. We have seen how
intensively the peasant had to work during the whole growing period of his crops. The
passage of the seasons, however, would in theory have left him free to vary his work
and diversify his farming, by keeping sheep or cattle on his farm. But, for every hour
of his time that was not urgently required for growing the food surplus, the state
needed him on the mass labour projects. It could not permit him any other
occupations. He did indeed maintain a few beasts, oxen or buffaloes, to draw his
plough and his carts. But maintenance of a sizeable herd of cattle or sheep, for
meat, milk, hides, or wool, was out of the question. Moreover, livestock needs plenty
of room to graze, and as the population rose and farms huddled closer together and
shrank to smaller plots, there was simply no room for stock.
One immediate penalty
was the loss of animal manure that provided valuable organic
matter for the soil and food for the plant crop. The few draught animals did not
produce sufficient manure to fertilize the croplands. One answer to the problem was
the fertile silt from irrigating waters. Another was the use of green manure, that is, a
plant crop grown especially to be ploughed back into the soil as food for the main
crop. This technique, fully worked out, is described in Chinese documents from 1134
b.c. onward. In general, the hydraulic farmer could secure enough nourishment for
his crops and organic matter for his soil without the manure from a large herd.
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An important nutritional
disadvantage of total specialization on crop farming was the
disappearance of meat from the peasant diet. Human energy is supplied mainly by
the carbohydrates in food, and we have seen that the coming of agriculture meant
unprecedented supplies of carbohydrate food from the grains of cereal crops or, in
some regions, from starchy tuber crops. But man also needs proiein for growing and
maintaining the structure of his body; and for this purpose various kinds of protein,
having different combinations of component substances called amino acids, are
required in correct balance. Animal food is a good protein source, and the efficient
Mesolithic hunters were adequately supplied. The new large populations based on
Neolithic agriculture needed to make up their protein partly from their small herds of
farm animals and partly from crops. Protein makes up only 6-14 per cent of cereal
grains, and an exclusively cereal diet is liable to cause protein deficiency.
A solution to this
problem came about through growing legumes. Legume grains
(various peas and beans, groundnuts, and other crops) have a protein content of 17-
25 per cent (38 per cent in the useful soy-bean of the Far East). This high protein
content is probably related to their special capacity for obtaining nitrogen (the crucial
element in protein), which, as we have seen, comes in so useful for conserving soil
fertility, and makes them invaluable as green manures. Moreover, cereal proteins are
short of some amino acids (such as lysine) but well supplied with others (such as
methionine), while legume proteins are rich in the former and poor in the latter. When
maize (cereal) and cow-peas (legumes) in different ratios are fed to young rats, it is
found that a 50-50 combination gives the best protein balance; for man, too, the
cereal-legume combination provides a balanced protein diet without meat.
When cereal crop agriculture
began, it was accompanied in every continent by the
growing of legumes. Lentil beans were grown at Halicar in Turkey in the sixth
millennium b.c. They were especially common in ancient Egypt, where lentil soup
preparation is the subject of a fresco from the reign of Rameses III (late second
millennium b.c.). The scale of lentil production in Egypt under the Romans was
impressive. When an already ancient Egyptian granite obelisk was shipped to Rome
as a souvenir for the Emperor Caligula (early first century a.d.), tons of lentils were
used as packing. Remains of peas have been found in a Swiss Neolithic village of
the fifth millennium b.c., and broad beans in another Swiss site of the second
millennium B.C. Remains of kidney beans dating from 4000 b.c. or earlier occur in
caves in Mexico, and kidney beans, lima beans, and a jar of ground-nuts have been
found in Peruvian tombs. Manuals on how to grow soy- beans were among the
earliest Chinese books (second millennium b.c.).
In
due course, all these crops were spread far and wide, and lentils, broad beans, and kidney
beans are now almost world-wide.
It
seems to have been realized very early that legumes were a food substitute for meat. The
first recorded nutritional experiment is described, with admirable scientific precision, in the
Book of Daniel. At the end of the seventh century b.c., Nebuchadnezzar, the Chaldean king
of Iraq, sacked Jerusalem and carried off most of the Hebrew upper classes to Babylon. The
most promising children he decided to bring up in his palace, to be trained into competent
Babylonian bureaucrats. He instructed his chief eunuch, Ashpenaz, to feed them for three
years from the royal table, after which he intended to inspect their health and educational
progress. Among these young students was the prophet Daniel. He realized that the planned
diet would include meat that was not kosher (not permitted by the laws of Moses, because
not prepared in the Hebrew way); and he asked Ashpenaz, who liked him, if the Hebrew
children could be excused. The official objected that if they did not eat the fine nutritious
meats they would be less healthy-looking than the other palace children by the time of the
king's inspection: "Then shall ye make me endangermy head to the king." The intelligent young
Hebrew persuaded Melzar, a subordinate eunuch in charge of catering, to let the Hebrew children live
on beans and water for ten days, and observe the result. "And at the end of ten days, their
countenances appeared fairer and fatter in flesh than all the children which did eat the portion of
the
king's meat." So Daniel and his friends were allowed to stick to their leguminous diet.
The royal table of
Babylon was certainly supplied with plenty of meat. On account of its scarcity, what
meat there was in the hydraulic societies found its way to the larders of the king and the top officials
of
the bureaucracy. Meat became, and has remained, one of the most universal status symbols in human
civilization. In later history influenced by Europe, meat became associated with wealth in money. The
Greeks (in the fifth century b.c.) described a new-rich self-made man thus: "now he doesn't like
lentils
any more." An FAO survey made in a.d. 1964 shows that meat goes with higher incomes today, not
only as between individuals but also as between the more and less developed nations (see map). The
average New Zealander gets 2-| ounces of actual animal protein per day, the average Indian j
ounce. In
the U.S.A., animal protein makes up 70 per cent of all the protein in the nation's diet; in India it
makes
up only 12 per cent. Peasants of the dry belt, today as for so many millennia in the past, must make
up
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Being condemned to
live on cereals and beans was not altogether a disaster for the
peasants of the hydraulic societies. In the long run, a different consequence of the
absence of herds was to prove a far heavier penalty for the hydraulic societies as a
whole.
In some at least of
the hydraulic societies, the state did maintain some livestock, and
a few of the peasants were split off from the rest to keep them. At Ur, around 2000
b.c., the state was able to profit from a considerable textile industry, based on the
wool of sheep. But as the two forms of food production drew further and further
apart, separate herding societies of outcasts or adventurers began to form beyond
the borders of the hydraulic states. The peasants had taken first pick of the river
valleys, and the herders had to be content with grasslands on the outskirts of the
desert. These "pastures of the wilderness," as the prophet Joel called them, are
pastures in the wet season only. When the dry season comes, the grass is withered
by heat and drought, and there is no water for the animals to drink. So the way of life
of the herders, like that of the peasants, was forced into a special pattern by the
seasonal shortage of water. They evolved a system called trans-humance. In the wet
season, they grazed their herds on the "pastures of the wilderness"; in the dry
season, they moved into the wetter hills or the river valleys where grass still grew.
The herders of Syria to this day move their flocks in summer to the Antilebanon
mountains or to the upper valleys of the Euphrates or the Orontes. This yearly
pattern of transhumance meant that the herders could not settle in permanent
homes; their way of life diverged more and more from that of the settled peasant. But
their dry-season need for the hills and river valleys drove them into head-on collision
with the expanding hydraulic societies, which needed just these regions all year
round. The borders of the hydraulic states became the scene of repeated conflict.
The restless herders could never develop the elaborate paraphernalia of hydraulic
civilization. But their way of life, which often included some hunting and gathering to
supplement their food supplies, taught them mobility, resourcefulness, knowledge of
large tracts of country, and efficient, flexible combined action. These qualities made
them formidable in war. They became robbers and raiders. Sometimes, a herder
chief and his henchmen actually conquered a hydraulic state. Their descendants
were absorbed by the more complex society they now governed, and became typical
kings and nobles of hydraulic societies. In this curious interaction, the ruling
dynasties of the great kingdoms and empires were repeatedly supplied from the
outcast groups beyond their borders. In the second and first millennia b.c., lower Iraq
(for instance) was successively ruled by Amorite, Kassite, and Chaldean dynasties,
all typical kings of civilized states, but all originating from herding communities
outside the valley. Throughout history, the kings and nobles of civilization have
betrayed their ultimate pastoral origin in two ways. They practised hunting as a sport,
monopolizing extensive game preserves; and, as we have seen, they ate quantities
of meat. |
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It is thought that
the earliest were the people called Scythians, between the rivers
Volga and Irtysh. Horses had already been used for centuries (by the Hittites, for
instance) to draw chariots, but the great new step was to saddle and train them for
fast riding. This new technique, and the nomadic way of life, spread all over Central
Asia in the course of the first millennium b.c. Meanwhile, in the deserts of Arabia,
other herders had learned to ride camels. In about 1100 b.c., as we read in the Book
of Judges, the hosts of Midian descended on Israel, camel-mounted; and early in the
first millennium a.d. camel nomadism began to spread into North Africa.
The most striking difference
between nomad and hydraulic societies was in
numbers. The area of China within the Great Wall has been calculated as 1,532,795
square miles. The combined area of Outer Mongolia (now an independent state) and
Inner Mongolia (now part of China), dominated until recently by the pastoral way of
life, has been calculated as 914,100 square miles, or about three fifths the area of
China. Yet the population of the two Mongolias in the 1930s, not counting recent
farmer migrants from China, has been estimated as roughly 2,000,000, while that of
China itself was estimated at the same time as roughly 450,000,000. So the number
of Chinese per square mile was about 150 times the number of Mongols. The
difference had persisted throughout history.
The life of the nomads
was based entirely on their herds, which provided meat, milk
produce, and hides and fleeces for clothing, harness, and even the tents that served
them as homes. To support the large herds, they grazed them for a time on one
area, and then moved to another. Just as the forest farmers were always moving on
to fresh woods, steppe nomads were always in search of pastures new. They
needed even more land than the forest farmers, and their populations were even less
dense. On the steppe, as in the forest, numbers had to be kept low if the system was
to work.
A moderate amount of
grazing is often good for the grasses and clovers that are
most nutritious and palatable for stock. Periodic removal of their leaves stimulates
them to grow again, more vigorously than before. Grazing animals have preferred
them for millennia, so they are now best fitted to respond to the stimulus. Under
moderate grazing, they often spread at the expense of less nutritious plants. If the
number of stock on a given area is just right, the good grass on any given part of it is
stimulated and also periodically rested. But if this stocking rate rises too high, the
whole area will be continuously grazed, and good grasses will have no chance to
rest and grow lush. They will begin to die out, and be replaced by the less nutritious
plants they formerly crowded out. The land will be overgrazed.
The effects of overgrazing
have been observed in recent years in many countries of
the dry belt (such as Iraq, Israel, and the Yemen), but they have been most
thoroughly studied in the dry western states of the U.S.A., where much overgrazing
went on in the 19th and early 20th centuries a.d. The sequence of events can be
illustrated by studies of ranges in southern Idaho. If grassland is grazed at a
moderate rate, it is plentifully covered with nutritious perennial grasses that go on
growing year after year. With heavier grazing, the perennials are killed off, and
replaced by tougher but less nutritious annual grasses that die every year and grow
again from seeds. If the grazing pressure increases further, the annuals are killed
before they can set seed, and are replaced by unpalatable shrubs, notably the sage-
brushes called Artemisia, growing in scattered clumps over otherwise bare, dry,
easily eroded desert.
As less-nutritious
plants take over, the animals need a larger area to get the same
amount of nourishment. In Idaho, when perennials cover 50 per cent of a site, one
cow can be supported on 3 acres; when they cover 25 per cent, she needs 5 acres;
when they cover only 5 per cent, she needs 15 acres; and when the land turns to
desert, no cattle can be raised there at all. So overgrazing is a vicious cycle. Too
many animals overgraze the land till it supports fewer than it did to begin with, so the
overgrazing gets worse; as more land turns to desert, the rest is grazed more
heavily than ever.
As long as nomads and
their herds were few enough over a given area, they could
graze each part of it just the right amount before going on to the next. But the balance
was more precarious for them than for forest farmers because of the effects of
drought. Drought has effects rather like those of overgrazing. A few good years, and
herds began to increase. A few bad years, and the effects of overgrazing were added
to the effects of drought: the combination was deadly.
The distribution of
springs for watering the animals was another critical factor. On the
Moghan steppe in northwestern Iran, where transhumant herders today bring their
flocks down from the hills in winter, areas around springs and streams are always
overgrazed. As long as there was plenty of room, the nomads could solve their
problems by migrating long distances at times of crisis. But the nomads became so
specialized for moving over long distances that they lost many opportunities for
insurance against bad years. Their migratory way of life discouraged staying in one
spot long enough to raise a food crop for themselves or a fodder crop like hay that
could be stored for difficult periods, or even to dig a well. They became more and
more dependent on natural supplies of water and grass.
The hair-trigger balance
was easily tipped. Stock was the only wealth of the nomads.
(It is the main status symbol in many dry parts of Africa today.) So there was a
constant temptation to increase the numbers of stock beyond safe limits. We have
seen what happened to the forest farmers when they increased their numbers or
tried to produce a large surplus. When the numbers of the nomads or their herds
rose too far, the result could be more dramatic: events on the steppe always moved
fast.
A survey in 1962 of
the Karamoja district of Uganda casts some light on what must
have happened when stock became too numerous. Because of modern veterinary
control of cattle diseases in Karamoja, the population of cattle in this district had
risen steeply during the last few years. According to the report: "As pasture
deteriorates from overgrazing, tribes begin to jostle. . . . With population growth, inter-
sectional conflict has increased, because groups, deprived of their traditional
grazings, move elsewhere to survive." As a result, there had been serious
deterioration of law and order.
Karamoja is a limited
district, where a civilized modern government frowns on range
wars. In the vast open steppe, with no such restriction, disputes over pasture and
water took a different course. Tribes, jostled by neighbours, jostled others in turn, in a
chain reaction spreading across continents. If other conditions favoured it (especially
conditions on the borders of the hydraulic states), the result could be a forcible
gathering of tribes into great empires, exactly as happened between hydraulic states
disputing water rights. But the empires of the steppe formed a great deal faster. The
conquered did not have to be reorganized and integrated into an alien bureaucracy.
They just joined the horde. So a small group could grow by combining all its
neighbours into one great army, through a snowball process in which each
conquered group swelled the conquerors' numbers
The rulers of these
hordes allotted pastures, migration routes, and watering rights to
their subjects. But they also had to be expert generals. The horde needed unified
command, and nomad emperors were even more absolute than the hydraulic kings.
Just as those kings found themselves equipped with mass labour, which they turned
to any use they could, so the steppe emperors found themselves at the head of
formidable armies, spoiling for action and eager to invade the lands of the farmers,
and convert as much as possible to pasture. They descended on the hydraulic
societies like locusts, with equally destructive results. There was nothing stable
about the restless hordes, and they could build nothing permanent. They subsided
again into fragments when the force of their explosion was spent. But the explosion
itself happened again and again. Outside the great inert hydraulic empires, the
nomads were always poised like a time-bomb, waiting to go off next time they fused
into a horde. This fusion reaction supplied the final ingredient of human history in the
dry belt.
Despite their far smaller
total population, the nomads attacked the teeming millions of
civilization with devastating effect. Their terrific mobility enabled them to concentrate
hundreds of thousands of men at a single point, where they suddenly appeared in
overwhelming force. To terrified peasants and city folk, they seemed innumerable
swarms, like the Midianites, who "came up with their cattle and their tents, and they
came as grasshoppers for multitude; for both they and their camels were without
number: and they entered into the land to destroy it."
While some herders
moved in on civilized societies and became meat-eating rulers
otherwise utterly remote from their ancestors, others began to develop a new kind of
society in the open steppe or desert. Transhumance had prepared them for a
wandering life, and in due course they took the next logical step, and became true
nomads, migrating over much greater distances in search of water and grass.
Instead of just commuting between summer and winter pastures, they now roamed
over whole continents. Cut off from any close contact with civilization, other than a
mixture of trading and raiding, these wild nomads of the steppe evolved a mode of life
different in many ways from that of the hydraulic societies.
The transition to full
nomadism was made possible by taming and harnessing fast
riding animals, the horse and the camel. Between 1000 and 900 b.c., horse-riding
nomads began to appear on the steppes of Central Asia; it is |
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Flowers which grow on chalk
and limestone do so because the conditions suit them better than
those elsewhere, but the particular reasons are complicated and not yet fully understood.
Some plants seem to be restricted by the chemical characteristics of the soil in which they
grow. One example is the Privet, Ligustrum vulgare, which thrives equally on the driest of chalk
downs and in wet East Anglian fens. In spite of the great contrast in other conditions both
localities agree in being strongly basic owing to the presence of calcium carbonate. But the
more common reasons are probably due to the physical characteristics of the ground.
Limestones are dry, well aerated and warm. Plants which grow on them never have their roots
waterlogged. They are able to commence growth early in the spring and many of them flower in
May and June and remain more or less dormant during the driest summer months which follow.
Others send their roots deep down into the well aerated soil to a level where they are assured
of a more constant water supply even in times of drought: these include some of the later
flowers like Wild Thyme, Tfymus drucei, Perforate St. John's Wort, Hypericum perforation, and
Small Scabious, Scabiosa columbaria.
Some of the finest scenery
in the British Isles is to be found on chalk and limestone. The broad
outlines of the views which attract and delight visitors are directly due to the nature of the
rocks. Where these are soft, as in the chalk areas, the hills are rounded and undulating. Even
the steepest escarpments, like those of the North Downs and Ivinghoe Beacon, have all their
edges smoothed off. Cliffs are never formed naturally except by the sea, and the soft outlines of
the chalk make ideal walking country. Here the wild flowers have often been preserved from
destruction by the use of the land as sheep walks throughout the centuries. This, in turn, has
produced a short dense springy turf with orchids and other characteristic flowers.
On the harderlimestones there
are cliffs and steeper slopes. Cheddar and the Avon Gorge
(parts of the Wye Valley, and the Great Orme are examples which are particularly well known.
In such places the choicer flowers grow on ledges where difficulty of access and immunity from
any threat of cultivation has served to protect them.
The details of the scenery
are supplied by the trees and flowers, and the vegetation in turn is
dictated, like the topography, by the nature of the rocks. Visitors sometimes fail to appreciate
how much the beauty of Box Hill owes to its famous Box Trees, Buxus sempervirens, or
Selborne Hanger to its Beeches, Fagus sylvatica, or Cheddar (to its Yews, Taxus baccata, and
Whitebeams, Sorbus aria. The downland turf is made up of plants which only grow together in
this way on calcareous soils, and the association of flowers differs from those found on all other
soils. With a little practice places where chalk or limestone is near the surface can be
recognised immediately; the plants collectively give characteristic detail to the scenery.
In my travels all over the
British Isles I have been impressed with the very gradual changes in
the flora when the various chalk and limestone districts are compared. They are like a length of
cinematograph film. Each frame differs only in detail from its neighbours, just as the chalk
flowers of Reigate Hill, Box Hill and Hackhurst Downs are very similar. Pictures farther apart
show much greater differences, and if the distance is sufficiently great they may at first sight
seem to have little in common when examined as " stills." Thus the chalk flowers of the Dover
cliffs and the limestone plants of the Burren in Co. Clare may seem to be quite unconnected.
But when the cinematograph film is projected and the pictures are shown on the screen in
quick succession they are shown to form a continuous story. The links which form a series
between the scattered frames are seen in their proper place. The chapters in this book cover
habitats scattered all over the British Isles and each place described has its own
characteristics. By bringing them all together in one volume they can be compared as a series
gradually changing from east to west, and from south to north. It is the first time this has been
attempted for the calcareous soils of any country.
WILD FLOWERS OF CHALK AND LIMESTONE J E
Lousely
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