At Home - Bill Bryson [107]
When you consider how quickly the American colonists scythed their way through the towering forests that greeted them upon arrival, it is hardly surprising that a shortage of timber was a chronic and worrisome problem in the much more confined and crowded landscape of England. Legend and fairy tales may have left us with an ineradicable popular image of medieval England being a land of dark and brooding forests, but in fact there weren’t many trees for the likes of Robin Hood and his merry men to hide behind. As long ago as 1086, at the time of the Domesday Book, just 15 percent of the English countryside was wooded.
Throughout history Britons have used and needed a lot of wood. A typical farmhouse of the fifteenth century contained the wood of 330 oak trees. Ships used even more. Nelson’s flagship, Victory, consumed probably three thousand mature oaks—the equivalent of a good-sized woodland. Oak was also used in large quantities in industrial processes. Oak bark, mixed with dog feces, was used in the tanning of leather. Ink was made from oak galls, a kind of flesh wound in trees created by a parasitic wasp. But the real consumer of wood was the charcoal industry. By the time of Henry VIII, producing sufficient charcoal for the iron industry required nearly 200 square miles of forest annually, and by the late eighteenth century that figure had grown to 540 square miles a year, or about one-seventh of the total woodland in the country.
Most woodlands were managed through coppicing—cutting them back, then letting them grow out again—so it wasn’t as if great swaths were being clear-felled every year. In fact, the charcoal industry, far from being a culprit, was responsible for a great deal of woodland maintenance—though what it preserved, it must be said, tended to be characterless, small-rise woods rather than mighty sun-pierced stands of forest primeval. Even with careful management, the demand for wood was so relentlessly upward that by the 1500s Britain was using timber faster than it could replenish it, and by 1600 wood for building was in desperately short supply. The half-timbered houses that we associate with this period in England are a reflection not of an abundance of timber, but a paucity of it. They were the owners’ way of showing that they could afford a scarce resource.
Only necessity finally made people turn to stone. England had the most wonderful building stone in the world, but the English took forever to discover it. For nearly a thousand years, from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the age of Chaucer, wood was the almost invariable building material of England. Only the most important buildings—cathedrals, palaces, castles, churches—were accorded stone. When the Normans came to England, there wasn’t a single stone house in the country. This was slightly remarkable, because just underneath nearly everyone’s feet was sublime building stone thanks to the existence of a great belt of hard-wearing oolitic limestones (that is, ones containing lots of spherical ooliths, or grains), running in a broad arc across the body of the country, from Dorset on the south coast to the Cleveland Hills of Yorkshire in the north. This is known as the Jurassic belt, and all the most famous building stones of England, from Purbeck marble and the white stone of Portland to the honeyed blocks of Bath and the Cotswolds, are found within its sweep. These immensely ancient stones, squeezed out of prehistoric seas, are what give so much of the British landscape its soft and timeless feel. In fact, timelessness with respect to English buildings is a distinct illusion.
The reason stone wasn’t used more was that it was expensive—expensive to extract because of the labor