‘The Fall of Needwood’: Social Dimensions of Landscape Change in Eighteenth-Century Staffordshire

ABSTRACT The 1801 enclosure of Needwood Forest by the Duchy of Lancaster demonstrates the differences in environmental thought across different social classes in Staffordshire. By comparing correspondence and poems from belle-lettres society in Lichfield and Stafford with petitions and pamphlets produced by tenant farmers and cottagers of Needwood, two different motivations for anti-enclosure action become clear: one economic and utilitarian, the other lyrical and aesthetic. Both were rooted in the historical ecology and legal identity of the medieval forest. Analysis of the differing sets of fears and expectations of an enclosed Needwood reveals an emphasis, amongst the cottagers, on maintaining a pattern of local agriculture underpinned by medieval common rights. Despite their shared opposition, the local gentry perpetuated a hierarchical view of landscape aesthetics, in which certain areas could be enclosed to protect more ‘valuable’ ones, such as Needwood.