centuries using tried and tested methods, above all the system of 'coppice-with-standards’ that provided a sustained supply of ’underwood' for firewood, charcoal, fencing, and minor building purposes, as well as timber from large trees, that could be used in the construction of buildings and ships.760 And, though there was an antipathy on the part of some of the ’agricultural improvers’ of the eighteenth century to leaving land under trees and scrub that might otherwise have been used to grow crops76‘, from the beginning of the seventeenth century, trees and woodland had been increasingly and consciously taking on an aesthetic role in the landscape, especially on the large aristocratic estates, in which already existing woods were being incorporated into the landscape designs of the great landowners, while at the same time new areas were being planted with trees and groves in order to enhance the aesthetic appearance of their demesnes.762

Therefore, emigrants sailing to Prince Edward Island, whether from the Highlands of Scotland, the SOuth—west of England or the midlands of Ireland (to give but examples) were transferring their abode from a land in which woodlands, on account of their scarcity, and because of the useful products they produced, as well as their aesthetic contribution to the landscape, had a high value placed upon them. At the same time, belonging, as they did, to specific families and individuals, they were subject to close control and management by their owners. After a lengthy Atlantic crossing these emigrants arrived on a continent and an island where, in contrast to their homeland, there was a super—abundance of trees and forest, to the point where they presented a great obstacle to settlement. In fact, before any

76° See Rackham (2003) for a detailed study of the history of

English woodlands, and especially Chapter 10 for the history of their management. ‘Coppicing' is a method of woodland management where the ‘underwood' trees and shrubs are cut to ground level every 4 to 30 years so as to encourage their re-growth from the cut stump or ‘stool'. ‘Standard‘ trees were those, usually oak, that were allowed to develop into fully mature trees before they were harvested. Coppice-with-standards is also attested in Ireland as early as the Early Christian period (Kelly, 2000, p. 390; Tomlinson 1997, p. 123).

75‘ See Thomas (1983) (pp. 195-97) for examples of this antipathy towards woodland in England on the part of ‘agricultural improvers'

and others.

762 See: Hoskins 1955, pp. 130-39; Thomas 1983, pp. 206-211. It is an interesting historical fact that the survival of woodland to the present throughout Great Britain and Ireland has in general been associated with direct royal or aristocratic ownership and control of the land on which it occurs.

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settlement could take place at all, this woodland had to be destroyed. At the same time, it is paradoxical that when settlement began on Prince Edward Island in the 1770s, all of these ’wilderness' forests were held by about one hundred landowners in a sort of quasi-aristocratic ownership not dissimilar to that of the Old Country. However, there were two significant differences from the private ownership of the woodlands of Great Britain and Ireland: in the early period virtually all of the landowners were absentees residing in the British Isles, and so they were not present to oversee their woodlands, or even to know what was going on within them; and in many of the townships of the island, from the time of their arrival new settlers had the option of buying a farm property outright, and so, of acquiring for themselves the direct ownership and control over about 100 acres of ’wilderness’ forest, as also would many of those who took leases on farms provided there were no restrictions on the use of the forest in their leases.

It is also important to be aware that in the land from which they were coming there was no ’wilderness' or ’primeval forest' remaining — there was not even a folk memory of it — most of the 'wildwood’, as it was called by some, having been cleared away several millennia before by the first farmers who had arrived in the British Isles in the Neolithic, and their later descendants of the Bronze and Iron Agesm, such that by the time of the arrival of the Romans, and so the beginning of the historic period, any remnants of the wildwood had

been pushed to the fringes of the country. And, with the cutting down and taming of the wildwood, the larger predators that it had

contained, the equivalent of those the immigrants were to encounter on Prince Edward Island, had also long been exterminated75“. Thus, in terms of

763 Forest clearance by the first farmers to arrive in Great Britain

and Ireland had begun from about 3800 BC, at first with the aid of only stone axes and tools (these were the Neolithic or New Stone Age farmers), to be assisted later by axes made of bronze (from about 2100 BC), and later still of iron (from about 750 BC) (see e.g. Rackham 2003, pp. 104—05).

764

According to Rackham (2003) (p, 133), the lynx and the bear, two predators that immigrants from the British Isles were to encounter on Prince Edward Island had been extinct in England since “well before the Norman Conquest" [i.e. 1066] (as had also the beaver, an animal the settlers were not to encounter on Prince Edward Island) — the bear may even have become extinct during the Roman period (55-410 AD) (Rackham 1986, p. 34). However, the wolf, which the first British immigrants to the island were too late by fifty years to encounter on Prince Edward Island, had a much longer persistence: though wolves in England were exterminated during the late Middle Ages, in Scotland and in