It is often quoted that, since 1945, 50 per cent of English hedgerows have ‘disappeared’ from the landscape. Environmental campaigners correlate their thorny absence, and the habitat, food and connectivity they provided, with Britain’s decline in biodiversity. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, farmers were commanded by the Ministry of Food to maximise production. Agricultural rationalisation was deemed essential if Britain, desiccated by seven years of war, was to rid itself of rationing. The hedgerow was viewed by the technocrats as a hindrance to crop production. Any negative impact that such wholesale reductions might bring to wildlife was brutally ignored by the Labour government of Clement Attlee. Humans came first, and English humans were hungry.

Machines and munitions were repurposed. In field corners, military explosives splintered craggy elms and ancient oaks to shards. The bulldozers that had cleared barbed-wire emplacements in Normandy now eradicated English ribbons of thorn, spindle and hazel. The 1947 Agriculture Act was mercilessly effective in bringing about unprecedented agricultural efficiencies, particularly in arable production. A mere year after the Act’s passing, bread, flour and potatoes were removed from the ration book. By 1954, rationing itself became history. Yet farming’s industrialisation, so effective at ending postwar privation, was equally successful at effacing the English hedgerow.

However, the truth about hedges is not so cut and dried. Certainly, photographic evidence proves that many English hedgerows growing in 1939 were eradicated by government diktat after 1945 and into the early 1980s. Yet this most recent loss is no anomaly, and to understand the story of the humble hedgerow is to begin to understand the history of rural England.

The hedge has always been a fluctuating landscape feature, ebbing and flowing on the tide of agricultural requirements and the vagaries of the wider economy. Hedgerows are a man-made construct, an agricultural tool, utilising shrubby woodland sub-species. Such shrubs, when grown from seed, or transplanted as saplings and then planted in tight-knit staggered rows, grow into linear thorny belts. When these planted belts are subsequently laid or coppiced to increase basal density, and then the ensuing regrowth is regularly trimmed, they become the hedges so readily recognised.

British farmers have used hedges, on and off, since at least 2,500 BC as a means of retaining and providing shelter for livestock, as a wind break for crops or delineating the boundaries of land ownership. Hedgerows play a vital role in providing food and protection to a staggering variety of bird, mammal and invertebrate species. The hedge is as much a part of farming as the tractor, seed drill or plough.

The hedgerow’s ability to provide a fascinating and unexpectedly accurate guide to English socio-economic history can be told through the medium of art, particularly sporting art. John Ferneley (1782-1860) was a Leicestershire artist, beloved by the ‘Meltonians’, who made a pilgrimage to Melton Mowbray each hunting season from smart London addresses. They delighted in testing their nerves and necks, riding with hounds across the grass country of the East Midland Shires.

These men were the cream of early-Victorian society; Guy Paget notes that they were ‘rich, cultured and refined’, far removed from the hard-drinking, hard-riding local hunting squires of the preceding Georgian generation. The art these scarlet-clad effetes favoured was realistic and specific. A hefty commission was on offer for any artist who could faithfully depict a patron’s dearest horse, hound, friends, and the landscape across which they galloped.

John Ferneley was just such an artist, and his account books testify both to the aristocratic pedigrees of his client base and the money they were prepared to pay for his work. Two such pieces, ‘Hunting In Croxton Park’ (1824) and ‘Melton Mowbray’ (1820) hang side-by-side today in the delightful galleries of the British Sporting Arts Trust (BSAT) at Palace House in Newmarket. Both picture the Meltonians in their full flight and sumptuous equestrian splendour.

Yet if one looks past the thoroughbred horses, well-cut coats and toppers and into the middle ground of the paintings, it is all too easy to see that Ferneley’s countryside of the 1820s was one laid low by recession. The trees the riders pass under are pollarded, their limbs hacked off for firewood by the local tenantry and labourers. The hedges the horses scramble over or through are sparse and untended; a barn falls into ruin and a patched-up gate hangs from its hinges.

The urban and urbane Meltonians had money to burn, but the locals were impoverished, enduring one of the worst agricultural depressions in history. The end of the Napoleonic Wars saw a return of international trade: food imports were possible once more and the price of wheat plummeted. New fangled threshing machines led to farm labourers being laid off in their thousands. Ferneley’s landscape of sickly trees and hedgerows in ruin are faithfully reproduced, providing strong evidence that the contemporary rose tinted view of the countryside in the Victorian ‘good old days’ is a lie.

Compare these two paintings with a mezzotint ‘Coursing The Hare’ (1796), also housed in Palace House, etched by the caricaturist Robert Dighton (1752-1814). Two well-dressed Georgian sportsmen on foot, accompanying a brace of greyhounds pursue a hare. The farm buildings in the background are recently thatched, ricks of fine hay stand tall alongside. The hedgerows that butt up to a recently painted farm gate are thick from bottom to top. The farmland the hare escapes into is fully fecund; yet more hedges – dark and leafy – stretch into the distance. Dighton’s countryside of the 1790s was the antithesis to that of Ferneley’s in the 1820s. His was a period of agricultural revolution, increased productivity and unprecedented improvement. The Enclosure Act (1773), which involved fencing and hedging off common land and consolidating land ownership, allowed for more efficient farming practices. We can trust Dighton’s eye just as much as Ferneley’s. The landscapes he produced, complete with flourishing fields, criss-crossed by hedgerows, had no need for embellishment, he was merely reproducing the prosperous fertility he saw about him.

Work in the hedgerow is never truly permanent. The hedge in art reflects the hedge in reality, a shifting entity, a feature that is sometimes lost, sometimes refound and sometimes replaced. The dense and well-laid hedgerow of the mounted field jump in Gilbert Holiday’s ‘Full Cry’ (1930) is one that environmental campaigners now rue the loss of. Yet a Lionel Edwards watercolour of the Morpeth Hunt (1927) shows a bashed track-side line of thorn, gappy and unloved, identical to some contemporary hedges, brutalised by a tractor-mounted flail, that are so vocally decried by the campaigners of today.

The great sporting artists, in their efforts to glorify the splendour of the chase, reveal the historical and contemporary truth of the English countryside. Hedgerows and, near as damn-it, all of the English landscape is man-made and far from wild. The modern perception of the hedge, or indeed the English countryside as a whole, pre-1945, as being in an eternal state of biodiverse fecundity is a mistake. The rural landscape is impermanent, forever changing; its pastoral appearance and prosperity are wholly dependent, not on the farmer or the hedgelayer, but on the policy decisions made by those who sit on green benches in Westminster.