2.1 Change
graphic
Canalised Hundred River (Aldeburgh N. Haven)
All human groups consciously change their environments to some extent. One might even argue that this, in combination with language, is the crucial trait distinguishing people from other animals. Probably the best measure of a culture’s ecological stability is how its management of the environment maintains its ability to reproduce itself. Furthermore, it is the instability of human relations with the environment that explains both cultural and ecological transformations as part of the historical process. A cultural history begins by assuming a dynamic and changing relationship with the land. Environment may initially shape the range of choices available to a people at a given moment, but then culture reshapes the land in responding to those choices. The reshaped environment presents a new set of possibilities for cultural reproduction, thus setting up a new cycle of mutual determination. Changes in the way people create and re-create their livelihood must be analysed in terms of changes, not only in their social relations but in their ecological ones as well. Human and non- human worlds are too entangled for us to comprehend them together holistically. We can never know the entire heaven and an entire earth. We should try to locate a nature which is within rather than external to history, for only by so doing can we find human communities which are inside rather than outside nature. We may regret the passing of the hunter- gatherer in the primeval Suffolk forest, or the recent removal of a dense network of ancient hedgerows to make way for prairie grain-growing technology, but the choice is not about intrinsic values of landscapes past and present. The choice of view is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem, that requires establishing new ecological equilibria between people and their land.
Relations between people and the land are not constant, but rather historical and dialectical, and those relations are seen as being within one system. The study of such relations is usually best done at the local level, where they become most visible. However, the choice of a small area has one crucial problem: how do we locate its boundaries? In anthropology this has simply involved the area within which people conduct their subsistence activities, often described using ‘ethno ecological’ techniques which analyse the way the inhabitants themselves conceive of all aspects of their territory. A further complication is that, as time passes, it is increasingly difficult to know which ecosystem is reacting with which culture. This erasure of boundaries may itself be the most important issue of all.
In Suffolk, the first physical evidence of local territorial divisions are the coaxial networks of small fields that appear to predate Roman roads, which slice through them like a modern by pass. The first notional evidence are the descriptions of boundaries in Anglo Saxon charters that describe perambulations through the landscape, giving directions from tree to tree, river to river and hilltop to hilltop. Until the late 16th century all territorial divisions of the land were presented in this way. Cartography was a relatively late invention and presented these descriptions as zig- zag lines that for the most part (eg parish boundaries) followed the edges of fields, which in Suffolk, may have originated in the late Iron Age, but only became generally visible when the Tithe Maps were created in the 1840s.
The Hundreds represent divisions of land based on groups of people with a common identity, and may well be based on patterns of tribal settlement of Anglo Saxon immigrants. It is thought that these peoples did not have to carve out homesteads in virgin country but actually commandeered earlier field systems. The boundaries of the hundreds were first mapped in the 18th century, when they were aligned with the shared parish boundaries of villages at their edges. Originally they probably followed less precise topographic features such as watersheds and more precisely, rivers and streams that were part of collective folk memory. This is certainly true for the Blything Hundred, but the topographic analysis of the other hundred boundaries remains to be investigated. This is one aim of the present research, the other being to make a pictorial record of the differences between the Hundreds in terms of past and present land management and its connections with drainage patterns, the hilliness of the ground, the range of soils, and patterns of work and settlement