Mosslands in early modern Lancashire, carbon, community and conservation, 1500/1800

This PhD project is an exploration of the historical decline of mossland landscapes in the north-west of England between 1500 and 1800. I focus on three core themes; energy transformations and the industrial revolution, the management of peat as a fragile common-pool resource, and finally the historic characters of a changing mossland environment landscape. Collaboration with the Lancashire Wildlife Trust will enable this project to make two further contributions; engaging local communities with the history of their environment, and providing historical evidence to inform the reintroduction of locally extinct species.

Peat bogs are one of four distinct types of wetland and are characterised by an accumulation of acidic, carbon-rich peat. Peat forms when the decay of plant matter is arrested, for instance by a lack of oxygen in waterlogged soil. The stored carbon inherited from the plant matter makes peat useful as a slow-burning fuel, a feature that mossland communities have taken advantage of for thousands of years. Earlier industrial transformations in the Netherlands had been 'kick-started' by peat as a fuel source, and it is possible that peat played a significant role in the proto-industrial economy of the north-west of England. This project will explore whether such peat exploitation constituted a fossil-fuelled continuity between pre-modern rural industry and the more recognisable, coal-powered industry of the nineteenth-century.

Much of the mossland of the North West was held in common by the locals. These 'commoners' exercised limited but legally and traditionally protected rights over the unenclosed common land. This common land was protected by governing bodies, which as Tine de Moor and others have argued, worked to protect it and its dependents from the pressures of the market. Such practices have been recently characterised as 'sustainable', and this project will investigate the sustainability of common resource management on the relatively infertile mosslands of Lancashire. Furthermore, the project will explore the impact of the enclosure of the mossland on resource management, and its social and economic consequences.

The final aim of this PhD project is to contribute to the understanding of pre-modern human-caused environmental change. Although human-caused (or 'anthropogenic') environmental change is often thought of as a modern phenomenon, humans have been altering their environment for as long as there have been humans. Indeed, some wetlands may be the result of artificial clearings created by late gatherer cultures in the north of England. Writing the social and economic history of the moss will enable the Lancashire Wildlife Trust to engage the local community with stories of environmental change at a human scale. In doing so, this project will feed into conservation efforts aimed at raising awareness of the importance and value of mossland landscapes. Furthermore, International Union for Conservation of Nature guidelines require reintroduction programmes to provide evidence of the historical precedence of reintroduced species. By charting the ecology of the early modern commons, this project will inform the reintroduction of locally extinct species. Collaboration with the Trust's Chat Moss Project Officer will allow the evidence of the historical mossland to be inflected with modern understandings of mossland ecologies.