John Aubrey’s Natural History, Part 7: Upon Disafforestation
Perhaps above all things in the Natural History of Wiltshire, John Aubrey bore witness to change. Within the text he looked backwards into deep time and shed light on the primitive world evidenced by fossils and earthquakes — and forward to his own time to survey the world around him, a landscape being unmade before his eyes. His chapter on beasts expresses this perfectly and in so doing it is also an extraordinarily early document in the history of what we might call conservation thinking. Aubrey did not use that phrase — it did not then exist — but the instinct is unmistakably there, expressed with care and sadness. It is an aspect of Aubrey’s work that I find endlessly fascinating and decidedly modern, Aubrey understood that man and the natural world were inextricably linked, and that environmental change had complicated repercussions.
Wiltshire and its neighbouring counties had been heavily forested, and in the opening to his chapter on beasts, Aubrey described a corridor of continuous woodland stretching from Braydon Forest in the north to the New Forest in the south — through Pewsham, Blackmore, Gillingham, Cranborne Chase, and Holt Forest — with intervals between them of only three or four miles. 'A stagge,’ he wrote, 'might have raunged from Braydon Forest to the New Forest, scilicet from forest to forest, and not above 3 or 4 or 5 miles intervall.' It is a line that functions as a description and elegy, because by the time Aubrey wrote it, most of that corridor had gone.
The mechanism of destruction was disafforestation — the legal process by which James I, and later Charles I, stripped areas of their forest status, extinguished the common rights of those who had depended on them, and handed them, in Aubrey’s telling, to favoured courtiers. Braydon Forest went in 1635, given to the Duke of Buckingham. Gillingham Forest in Dorset went to the Earl of Elgin. Pewsham Forest, that had once surrounded Chippenham on its eastern side, was given first to the Duke of Buckingham and then, Aubrey thought, to his brother, the Earl of Anglesey. Groveley Forest, the great hunting ground of the Earls of Pembroke running along the ridge above the Wylye valley, was disafforested as late as 1684 — within Aubrey's own experience — persuaded by the Attorney General Sir Robert Sawyer against the better judgement of almost everyone else. With forest law gone, the trees themselves soon followed.
The poor of Chippenham marked the passing of Pewsham Forest with a verse:
When Chipnam stood
in Pewsham’s Wood
Before it was destroy’d
A cow might have gonn for a groat a yeare
but now it is denayd
'The metre is lamentable,' Aubrey remarked, 'but the cry of the poor was more lamentable.' He had known several people who remembered how a poor family with access to forest common could graze a cow for almost nothing — providing milk, butter, and cheese — and fatten pigs for free. These were not marginal to a family's economy. The forest commons were, in effect, a collectively managed resource that supplemented what the poorest could produce on their own inadequate plots and made the difference between bare subsistence and destitution. Now, he wrote, 'the highwayes are entombed with cottages, and the travellers with the beggars that dwell in them.' It is one of his sharpest pieces of social observation — the dispossessed poor of the forest economy reduced to roadside poverty in a single generation. Characteristically he reached for classical authority, in this case Ovid and Virgil, to give the dispossession of the poor the weight of ancient precedent, even adjusting quotes to sharpen his social critique.
But the human cost was not the only one. There was a cost to mammals too, to the red squirrel, fallow deer, pine marten and more. The pine marten is today one of Britain's rarest mammals, slowly recovering in Scotland and Wales after it was all but wiped out across England. Aubrey knew it well. 'It is a pretty little beast,' he wrote, 'and one of a deep chesnut colour, a kind of polcat, lesse than a fox, and the furre is much esteemed, not much inferior to sables.' He added that Martes Scythicus — the Scythian marten — was what we called a sable, connecting the familiar Wiltshire creature to its costly Siberian cousin. His description is precise, affectionate, and exact: the colour, the size relative to a fox and a polecat, the quality of the fur. He had clearly seen one. He knew what he was losing. And he knew precisely when the losing had happened. 'Upon these disafforestations,' he wrote, 'the martens were utterly destroyed in north Wilts.' The connection was explicit and causal: the forests went, and the martens went with them. His grandfather, Isaac Lyte of Easton Piercy, was a young man around 1595, when martens were still present in the park at Stanton St Quintin in Malmesbury hundred. By the time Aubrey was writing in the mid-1680s, the species was entirely gone from north Wiltshire.
What Aubrey was doing in this chapter, amid the deer weights and the dog breeds and the classical quotations, was making a record before the memory failed. The old keepers who could tell the weight of the Groveley Forest deer; his grandfather's memory of martens at Stanton St Quintin in 1595; the people he had known who remembered fourpence for a cow's grazing. These were the last witnesses to a world that was ending. The Natural History, as I said at the beginning, bore witness to change. The pretty little chestnut-coloured marten was gone from north Wiltshire in a generation. The squirrel of his boyhood was almost vanished. Aubrey noticed. He wrote it down. He understood that the natural world mattered. Something I think we should all learn from.