214 The Breckland 



The crops of the district were as characteristic as its field system and its 

 waste lands. Rye was the commonest cereal, but the yield of barley was 

 often the largest, with oats next. The wheat crop was small. Large flocks 

 of sheep were kept in every parish for fertthsing the soil while there was 

 "no where better Mutton than this barren Land affords, the Sheep being 

 not hable to the Disease called the Rot".^ Pre-enclosure travellers were 

 very impressed by the abundance of rabbits. "A large portion of this arid 

 country is full of rabbits, of which the numbers astonished me", wrote the 

 Due de la Rochefoucauld in 1784. "We saw whole troops of them in 

 broad dayhght; they were not alarmed by noise and we could almost 

 touch some of them with our whips. I enquired of this prodigious number 

 and was told that there was an immense warren which brought in 200 

 guineas a year to the owner, being let to a farmer."" The penalties for 

 poaching were severe, because the farming of rabbits formed the economic 

 mainstay of many of the landovraers. Some farmers still pay their rent 

 from what they realise by the sale of rabbits, but the number caught is 

 rapidly decreasing with the spread of afforestation, which necessitates the 

 extermination of all rabbits within its confines. 



One of the common features of Breckland in the pre-enclosure period 

 w^as the prevalence of disastrous sandstorms. A notable storm in 1668 blew 

 sand for 5 miles from Lakenheath Warren to Santon Downham, almost 

 overwhelming the village and obstructing the navigation of the Little Ouse.^ 

 John Evelyn, in 1677, also referred to "the Travelhng Sands about ten 

 mdes wide of Euston, that have so damaged the country, roUing from place 

 to place, and, like the lands in the Deserts of Lybia, quite overwhelmed 

 some gentlemen's whole estates ".* The open and unrestricted appearance 

 of this region, before enclosure and afforestation wrought such drastic 

 changes in its scenery and economy, is well described by an eighteenth- 

 century traveller, William Gilpin. Between Brandon and Mildenhall, he 

 declared that: 



Nothing was to be seen on either side but sand and scattered gravel without the 

 least vegetation ; a mere African desert. In some places this sandy waste occupied 

 the whole scope of the eye; in other places, at a distance we could see a skirting of 

 green with a few straggling bushes which, being surrounded by sand, appear'd 

 like a stretch of low land shooting into the sea. The whole country indeed had the 

 appearance of a beaten sea-coast, but without the beauties which adorn that species 



' F. Blomefield, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 



i, 553 (1739)- 



^ F. de la Rochefoucauld, A Frenchman in England, 1784 (1933), p. 212. 



3 T. Wright, "A curious and exact relation of a Sand-floud, which hath lately 

 overwhelmed a great tract of land in the County of Suffolk", Philosophical Trans- 

 actions, No. 37 (July 1668). 



■• John Evelyn, Diary, 10 Sept. 1677. 



