on such matters as making candied fruit or ‘suckets’ and the art of distilling scented water, wrote a detailed treatise in 1594 entitled Diverse new sorts of soyle not yet brought into any publique use, for manuring both of pasture and arable ground, which was the first textbook on the correct proportion of fertilisers for different soil types. The pressure to create more arable hectares led Charles I to commission Cornelius Vermuyden, the Dutch drainage engineer, to reclaim around 40,000 hectares of the Royal Forest at Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire, in 1626. This was spectacularly unpopular among the local people who stood to lose their common rights and led to vigorous opposition. Dykes were destroyed and, until troops were sent to protect them, the camps of the Dutch and Walloon workmen were attacked at night, and several workmen killed.
Much more damaging to the sinking status of the King was granting the Earl of Bedford a charter in 1632 to undertake the immensely ambitious project of draining 750,000 acres of the Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire fens, round the Ouse Wash, River Welland and River Nene. Bedford and thirteen ‘Gentlemen Adventurers’, as venture capitalists were called in those days, were promised 40,000 hectares each for funding the project, with the King taking a backhander of 5,000 hectares. Drainage was met with furious resistance from the local population, many of whom made their living from grazing the marshes or by fishing and wildfowling. ‘The Powte’s Complaint’ (a powte being a lamprey) was a popular protest song lamenting the loss of the wild marshland landscape, sung by the ‘Fen Tigers’, marsh men who sabotaged the construction work whenever they could.
Come, Brethren of the water, and let us all assemble, To treat upon this matter, which makes us quake and tremble; For we shall rue it, if it be true, that Fens be undertaken And where we feed in Fen and Reed, they’ll feed both Beef and Bacon. They’ll sow both beans and oats, where never man yet thought it, Where men did row in boats, ere undertakers brought it: But, Ceres, thou, behold us now, let wild oats be their venture, Oh let the frogs and miry bogs destroy where they do enter. Behold the great design, which they do now determine, Will make our bodie spine, a prey to crows and ver mine: For they do mean all Fens to drain, and waters overmaster, All will be dry, and we must die, cause Essex calves want pasture. Away with boats and rudder, farewell both boots and skatches, No need of one nor th’other, men now make better matches; Stilt-makers all and tanners, shall complain of this disaster, For they will make each muddy lake for Essex calves a pasture. The feather’d fowls have wings, to fly to other nations; But we have no such things, to help our transportations;
We must give place (oh grievous case) to horned beasts and cattle, Except that we can all agree to drive them out by battle. Wherefore let us entreat our ancient water nurses To show their power sogreat as t’help to drain their purses, And send us good old Captain Flood to lead us out to battle, Then Two penny Jack with skales on’s back will drive out all the cattle.
The project was seen by many people as a device for already wealthy men to benefit by dispossessing others and had much to do with hastening the Civil War. In the summer of 1637, the engineers announced that, despite all the difficulties, the work was complete. However, it proved to be a complete failure during the following winter, when the whole area flooded. Charles I went further down the route of his own destruction by stepping in to take control of a new project and appointing Vermuyden as his agent. East Anglia was a staunchly Puritan area and Cromwell was among the local farmers vociferously protesting against the drainage scheme. The King then proceeded to antagonise his own supporters by announcing to Bedford and the investors that his cut was to increase from 5,000 hectares to 20,000, effectively halving their shares.
By the time they had all stopped arguing, the Civil War had started and the project was not completed until 1653. To everyone’s astonishment, the land unexpectedly started to shrink at an alarming rate as the peat soil dried out. As the level of the land dropped, water could no longer drain into the rivers, which were by now higher than the fields. Wind pumps were introduced to pump water off the land, but their reliance on adequate wind and continued shrinkage saw the task become increasingly difficult.
BY THE TIME THEY HAD ALL STOPPED ARGUING, THE CIVIL WAR HAD STARTED AND THE PROJECT WAS NOT COMPLETED UNTIL 1653. TO EVERYONE’S ASTONISHMENT, THE LAND UNEXPECTEDLY STARTED TO SHRINK AT AN ALARMING RATE AS THE PEAT SOIL DRIED OUT.
Until steam power was introduced in the 1820s and the Fens were successfully drained (a procedure which again resulted in fierce local rioting and sabotage) the landscape was dominated by around 700 windmills, which were built in timber or brick to facilitate draining the land or milling the corn. Many have since disappeared but some still survive, including Denver Mill, near Downham Market; Haddenham, Downfield, Stevens, Wicken and Swaffham windmills south of Ely; Sibsey Trader Mill, north of Boston; and the seven-storeys-high Maud Foster Windmill in Boston itself, the tallest working windmill in Britain.
Today the fens are drained by electric pumping stations and contain over 50 per cent of the most productive land in Britain, producing vegetables, wheat, bulbs and flowers, and they are the only place where English mustard continues to be grown for Colman’s of Norwich. There are still places, out on the mud flats and saltings, where a man can look out towards the grey sea, breathe the iodine-laden air and, as he listens to the cacophony of waterfowl, imagine what once it must have been.
The Restoration of King Charles II was greeted with unbridled jubilation and hope that a new era of peace and prosperity would follow the grim years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Royalist landowners who had gone into exile with their king returned with innovative ideas for British agriculture and a determination to make farming profitable. Many of them had taken refuge in Flanders and had studied Flemish farming methods. Flanders was a densely populated country where every yard of agricultural land was utilised; the Flemish were skilled cattle and heavy horse breeders and had perfected a four-field rotation based on growing crops of wheat, turnips, barley and clover in sequence. This innovative advance on the old three-field system, where one field lay fallow and therefore unproductive for twelve months, not only meant that all the land was used throughout they ear, but also that turnips and clover provided an essential product which would revolutionise British agriculture.
Legumes such as clover have nodules on their roots which contain nitrogen-fixing bacteria which replace nitrates leached out of the ground by cereal crops. They therefore provide the role of a natural fertiliser, solving one of the great problems that had beleaguered farming in Britain. Clover was also a highly nutritious fodder crop for winter feed, and this added to turnips, which ripen in the autumn and remain fresh in the ground until the spring. This meant that farmers could keep stock all year round and fatten beasts through the winter, as an alternative to the centuries-old practice of slaughtering the majority of livestock except breeding animals in the late autumn.
In addition to improving soil fertility, greater grain output simultaneously increased livestock production. Farmers could rear greater quantities of livestock because there was more food of higher quality and the manure provided during overwintering added to the productive cycle. Britain was at the dawn of agricultural enlightenment, and although tenant farmers were suspicious of change and reluctant to implement them for fear of incurring rent increases, the agricultural revolution was on its way.
‘He that havocs may sit He that improves must flit? Philosophy of seventeenth-century tenant farmers
‘Anthropophagi,
