Pollarding Trees: Changing Attitudes to a Traditional Land Management Practice in Britain 1600–1900

Abstract

The pollarding and shredding of trees were widespread and common practices in Britain until the eighteenth century. Trees were an important source of fodder and their branches were regularly lopped so that sheep and cattle could eat their twigs and leaves. The branches could be used for firewood and other purposes. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the practice of pollarding was becoming increasingly rare, and it had virtually died out by the mid-twentieth century. In Europe, by contrast, pollarding remains common in several Mediterranean, Balkan and Scandinavian countries. Pollarding is still practised in many tropical areas for the production of fuel and fodder. In this paper we trace the development of ideas about pollarding in British agricultural, estate management and forestry literature c1600-1900. We examine how pollarding, which was a traditional management practice of long standing at the start of our period, was increasingly vilified so that by the end of the eighteenth century, many foresters and agriculturists saw it as a symbol of the profligate use of resources.

Pollard Forest ofFraxinus angustifoliain the Centre of Iberian Peninsula: Protection and Management

“…Unlike other European countries, such as the United Kingdom [3], where pollarding fell into decline as from the year 1900, in our study area, it became consolidated over time and is actively practiced at present.…”

“…Pruning and pollarding of tree species constitute an activity that has existed in European forests for centuries. Although pruning is still a frequent silvicultural practice, in some areas, some species are currently no longer pruned and there has been a decline in other uses that had been implemented in forests, which played a vital role in shaping their silvo-structures [1][2][3]. This pruning responded to different objectives, among these, production of wooden beams, charcoal, firewood, timber for ships, leaves for fodder, etc.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2003

“…But he simultaneously emphasizes the extent to which local historians should be sensitive to the social and ideological implications of the increasing tendency of the landed elite to find traditional landscapes aesthetically and psychologically unappealing. Changing attitudes of a similar sort are disclosed in the account by Petit and Watkins of the increasing vilification of ‘pollarding’ (the lopping of branches from trees). While early seventeenth‐century agricultural treatises emphasized the value of pollards as a productive resource of firewood and fodder, their eighteenth‐century successors were more sceptical, regarding it as backward, barbaric, and even threatening, not least because it was tainted by association with irrational common right exercised in aesthetically detestable woodland.…”

Protest practice and (tree) cultures of conflict: understanding the spaces of ‘tree maiming’ in eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century England

“…Critically, geographers have played a central role in bridging these two divergent approaches. The pioneering work of the ‘Nottingham School’ of historical geographers has highlighted the importance of trees both economically in estate management and as strategically deployed symbols (Daniels 1988 1993; Petit and Watkins 2003; Seymour 1998; Seymour et al 1998; Watkins 1998). Indeed, as Keith Thomas has suggested, by the end of the eighteenth century, whilst trees had ‘acquired a new emotional importance’ to the ‘well‐to‐do’, their primary enrolment was for the pursuit of profit (1983, 192, 200).…”