SIXTY YEARS' CHANGE IN LANDSCAPE.
IT would have been matter for deep regret had the Victorian Era witnessed a change in our rural scenery correspond- ing to that which has taken place near to the great towns. The encroaching cities swallow up village after village, and field after field; but the process has been far too slow to make any considerable impression on the total of rural England, even in sixty years. More dangerous, and more justly feared, was the creation of "industrial areas" in country districts, when factories sprung up in villages, and large tracts were disfigured by the most slovenly of all in- dustrial enterprises, the small factory, the surface colliery, and the squalid "home industries" of chain-making and the hardware trades. But sixty years have shown that the evil results even of these destructive agencies are not permanent. The coal is worked out, the scrap. iron foundries, collieries, and bottle-works are deserted, and the ground once more in pro- cess of being replanted with trees, and restocked with flowers, birds, and even game. In view of the probable recovery of districts like parts of the Black Country, and the real slow-
ness of the spread of those " wens " of bricks and mortar which Cobbett was always denouncing, the danger to our rural scenery to be apprehended from these two sources of industrial and urban expansion mast be set down as somewhat remote.
Now, as always, it is agriculture and the changes in the methods of agriculture which profoundly modify our rural landscape. It was Roman-taught agriculture which cut down the ancient forests and first turned England into a cornfield. It was the change from "common fields "and common pastures to enclosures which cut up this country into one enormous patchwork quilt of hedges and hedgerow timber,—that lovely forest "always seen in the distance, but which one never reaches ; " and it was the discovery of new crops and scientific farming which established agriculture as a paying business more than a hundred years ago, which fixed the character of our average rural scenery, and made it such as we love and desire to preserve to-day. It replaced mach that was wild, and much more that was pastoral and not cultivated, with a tamer but richer outline. It brought its compensation by the increased wealth of colour which the golden corn-crops, the rich green of fields of imported plants like turnips, man- golds, rape, and mustard, and the leguminous plants and pink clovers and sanfoins, lend to the landscape, and it created, centres of quiet beauty by multiplying farmhouses, with those quaint and picturesque accessories of buildings, which the increased prosperity and multiplied activities of the farmer required. Then the dovecote, granary, hop "oasts," cart-sheds, stack-yards, cow-byres, yards, and barns, so long the joy of landscape-painters, were set round with orchards, shaded with timber, and by them were dug the drinking pools and ponds to serve the cattle. Meantime, as agriculture prospered on the farm, and money came into the landlords' pockets, they began to plant woods, make lakes, add to parks, and contribute further to enhance the beauty of the country. From the time when Cobbett was wont to sally out on his rural rides until the establishment of the manufactures of the North and Midlands, the woods of England grew or shrank as agriculture succeeded or failed. They were the gauge of rural prosperity.
At only two periods during the Queen's reign has the general character of this established scenery been threatened. The causes were quite dissimilar ; but the result seemed likely to be the same, and to end in a great destruction of timber and woodland, as well as of hedgerows and hedgerow trees. The first was caused by the high price of corn, the last was threatened because corn could no longer be grown at a profit. Wheat at 60s. made every farmer look with grudging on each hedgerow and tree, and every plantation and coppice which occupied ground on which wheat might be grown. When wheat fell to 20a. a quarter, we were threatened with some form of small tenement or peasant proprietorship which would have been more fatal to timber than the "high farming" of the sixties. For the peasant, as France, Spain, and Italy show, is the grand enemy of trees. He never plants, and never foregoes the chance of destroying. In many counties, especially in the East of England, the land- lords were tempted by the offer of increased rents to permit their plantations and hedgerow timber to be improved away. In many farms the timber round the old house was all that remained on many hundreds of acres. It was a matter of professional pride among the farmer class to grub up all the good high hedgerows, fell the pollards and elms on the banks, and substitute low quicksets, with a drain beside them instead of a ditch. They next attacked the small plantations, a precious ornament of the tamer kinds of landscape. In these the trees were felled, the copse-wood grubbed up by the roots, and the ground cleared and planted with corn. Next the larger woods suffered. It would scarcely be credited that in Suffolk a wood of nearly one hundred and fifty acres with a history of six hundred years was cut down, grubbed up, and improved off the face of the earth in order to grow wheat on its site. Fortunately for the future of English scenery, by the time that this had become a conscience to the farming class, the price of wheat fell, and the remainder of the trees were saved. On the chalk downs, where there were no fences and fewer trees, the farmers ploughed up the primitive turf to grow poor wheat and worse turnips. In Devonshire the landlords made fresh enclosures of furze-brake, ploughed them up, and grew crops which in those days were remunerative. Everywhere one of th • hest of the " induced " features of the English landscape, /i0 frequent farmhouses, was in danger of partial disappearance, as the farms were amalgamated into large holdings, and the houses formerly belonging to them pulled down or allowed to decay. Lastly, the public belief that all land ought to be made to yield revenue became part of the creed of the Woods and Forests Office. Hence the decision to out down all the old woods of the New Forest and turn it into a timber-farm.
The public as well as the farmers were in this mood of un- compromising hostility to the old English scenery when the fall in prices of all produce of the soil gave a rude shock to their further schemes. Behind this came an awakened interest in natural beauty. But the axes already "laid to the root of the tree" would in any case have dropped from the hands of those who saw loss, not profit, in fresh agricultural enterprise. The reaction from overstimulus to despair in farming, generally caused gloomy forebodings as to the pre- servation of the amenities of our good countryside. Parks were to be cut down, farms to be cut up into allotments, and for the smiling villages and fields of country England we were to have a peasant proprietary, and the bare, "sweated," overcropped commune of rural France. None of these anticipations have been realised. On the contrary, our scenery is steadily reverting to the type of the beginning of the reign. Furze-brake which was turned into corn-land is once more furze-brake; small farmhouses falling to ruins are furbished up and once more inhabited, and the tenants are planting hedges to divide up fields thrown into blocks of unmanageable size. The ploughed-up downland has gone back from corn to weeds, from weeds to grass, and is fast becoming turf again. And, beet of all, Englishmen have not given up their liking for a country house in which to live for some part, if not all, of the year, and are not only building, but planting and improving, their new houses and demesnes, or adding woods, water, and parks to the old ones. It is not many years since there was room to doubt whether the modern Englishman of means would not desert the country, and live "the social life" as most foreigners understand it, either in towns or in country or seaside colonies consisting entirely of the homes of the well-to-do. But the experience of the last few years shows that this is not the case, though Bournemouth, Hind Head, and choice spots on the South Coast and in the Thames Valley will meet the wants of those to whom this life appeals. But rural England is at the close of the reign what it was at its beginning,—the best place in the world to own a home in. Its scenery is as varied and its charm as great as ever. Even the Americans are beginning to discover this, and its future may be foretold. It is destined to be the place of rest and retirement for all members of the Anglo-Saxon race who have fought and won in the battle of life.
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