Economic resources of the Fens – pasture, wildfowl, and domestic geese – are here illustrated on the village sign of Cowbit in Lincolnshire.
William Cobbett declared that the marshes of South Holderness in the East Riding, together with the Fens, were the richest land in England.24 What cheeses must such land have produced! A cheese resembling Camembert was the glory of Cottenham in Cambridgeshire, where records for cheese-making go back to as early as 1280; and production ceased only in the mid-nineteenth century with the enclosure of the common fen.25 Domestic geese, herded on the Fens and the marshes, kept the rest of the country supplied with quill-pens. On the wetland commons of western France, geese are still kept, and furnish a nice line in duvets.
In the wettest and wildest parts of the marshes, fishing and fowling replaced more organized farming. The terse Latin of a Cambridgeshire assize role records how, in the fourteenth century, a boy went out on stilts after birds’ eggs and was drowned in the heart of the fen.26 With the passage of time, such perilous subsistence gave way to more profitable wildfowling. Birds were netted and exported to London. A check-list that would make a modern bird-watcher salivate was served up on the Elizabethan menu: ‘the food of heroes, fit for the palates of the great’, as Camden describes pewits, godwits, knot, and dotterel.27 Fish were also exported. Daniel Defoe saw fish transported live from the Fenland to London ‘in great butts fill’d with water in waggons as the carriers draw other goods’. Islip eels from Otmoor supplied the Ship Inn at Greenwich. Eels, speared through their gills on an eel stick, had long been standard rent in the Fens and Somerset Levels. ‘Ely’ itself means the district of eels. The method of catching eels with a glaive or trident lasted just long enough in the Fens to be recorded on an early documentary film.
Many wild plants of the wetlands were also harvested. Until the mid-nineteenth century, basket-makers were actively cutting willow at Beckley on Otmoor, a place which also sent water lilies to Covent Garden. Purple moor grass, which forms the pale-fawn undercarpet of the scattered birch woodlands of such wetlands as the Lancashire mosses and Hatfield Chase, was popular for cattle bedding. From Burwell Fen, sedge was sent out by boat for the purpose of drying malt, and Cambridge imported fen sedge as kindling. Bedmakers in Cambridge colleges were issued with stout gloves to protect their hands from the sharp sedge as they lit the fires in undergraduates’ rooms. Clogs were made from alder, and reed was used for thatch.
Eel and eel glaive.
Oak for building the ships of the British navy has always been famous as a resource essential for our national survival. A commonly grown crop of the wetlands was almost as important. Hemp, from which the word ‘hempenspun’, or ‘homespun’, originates, is a fibre crop still grown in Russia and the developing world. In England it provided sails and cables for the fleet; and for this reason, legislation going back to the reign of Henry VIII required that a small proportion of land be set aside for its production. This is a far cry from the laws which now pertain to this crop, more familiar today under its Latin name of Cannabis sativa. It flourishes best in deep moist ground, and Michael Drayton described south Lincolnshire as ‘hemp-bearing Holland’s Fen’.28 On the Isle of Axholme, where little wool was produced, hemp was the basis for a spinning and weaving industry, which provided a useful sideline for the average peasant, and a basic livelihood for the poor.
Peat was always a major wetland commodity. Rights of turf cutting, known as ‘turbary’, existed in Somerset and the Fens in the Middle Ages. Peat cutting became a major industry in the Lancashire mosses in the nineteenth century. On maps of Wicken Fen and Hatfield Chase, you will find ‘Poor Piece’, which was where the local cottagers could cut peat for themselves, subject to regulations prescribing a limited season for peat cutting and insisting that cottagers may extract as much peat as possible without outside assistance. Unlimited plundering of timber was similarly controlled. In 1337 a certain Robert Gyan was submitted to a brutal penance by the dean of Wells for carrying away ‘a great number of alder’ from Stan Moor in the Somerset Levels.29 Thereafter he was allowed only six boatloads of brushwood a year, to be taken out under view of the bailiff. Such rulings are a key to our understanding of the old wetland economy. Long before our modern preoccupations with sustainability, the people of the wetlands harvested the wealth of their so-called wilderness with a sophisticated understanding of the need not to over-exploit its resources.
Because of the hostile elements facing farmers in the wetlands, mutual co-operation was essential, both in sharing the upkeep of flood-banks and drains and in administering a system of checks and balances to ensure that each person got a fair deal out of the common pasture. If overstocking took place, then everyone was the loser. In 1242 Geoffrey de Langelegh was summoned by the abbot of Glastonbury to explain why he now had ‘one hundred and fifty goats and twenty oxen and cows beyond the number which he and his ancestors were wont always to have, to wit, sixteen oxen only’.30 Annual ‘drifts’ were held, when cattle were rounded up, and excessive numbers were impounded and released only on payment of a fine. By Tudor times the Fen commons were subject to sophisticated management, controlled by the parish order-makers, who in turn appointed field reeves and fen reeves. These kept a close check on the taking in and pasturing of cattle by outsiders through a system of branding and regular drifts. During the reign of Edward VI, a code of fen law was drawn up, which remained fully operative in the Lincolnshire fens until the eighteenth century. Penalties were levied for putting diseased or unbranded cattle on to the fen, leaving animals unburied for more than three days, and allowing dogs to harass cattle on the moor. No reed was to be mown for thatch before it had two years’ growth. No swans’, cranes’, or bitterns’ eggs could be taken from the fen.31 In the sixteenth century, Otmoor was similarly controlled by a moor court, upon which the local villages were represented by two ‘moor men’.
The fixing of dates was critical in preventing over-exploitation. As early as 1534, a closed season for wildfowling, between May and August, was instigated in the Cambridgeshire fens. All inhabitants of the manor of Epworth on the Isle of Axholme had the right to set bush nets and catch white fish on Wednesdays and Fridays. Stocking on some fen commons took place no earlier than old May Day, to ensure against overgrazing. Lammas land was pasture open to commoners from Lammas, or Loaf Mass, 1 August. Lammas meadows still exist, as at Twyning near Bredon in Worcestershire and, more famously, North Meadow beside the Thames at Cricklade.
Such co-operative management existed even on some wetlands that were not commons. On the Derwent Ings in Yorkshire, the subdivision of the land into small hay plots and the subsequent pasturing were administered by a Court Leet, which annually appointed ‘Ings Masters’, who managed the pastures at East Cottingwith and Newton. In the Wheldrake Ings account book for 1868–1934, it is specified that the meadows be mown on the dates appointed by the Ings masters, and that, thereafter, a carefully controlled number of cattle, branded with a W, may be pastured until the autumn, when they are taken off on ‘Ings Breaking Day’.
The water, flooding over the pastures in winter and oozing up through the summer marshes, held the key to these balanced systems. The black waters of the fen halted the plough, thereby limiting the expansion of economic growth which a fen parish could sustain. Organized common grazing on wetland pastures blunted incentives to enlarge adjacent farms, and also prevented the selective breeding of livestock. But technologies of drainage, refined with each succeeding century and reaching a climax in our own day, removed the subtle checks and limitations of the old wetland systems. As the water ebbed away, so the spell was broken.
It is a mistake to be too naïve about the old wetland commons. They were open to abuse, and their system of controls did not always work. Overstocking took place on the Somerset Levels in the Middle Ages, aggravated by the rights of some commoners to take in cattle from outside the Levels for a fee. The Wallingfen court in the Vale of York set an upper limit for animals on the common in 1636 which was way above the actual carrying capacity of the land.32 In the eighteenth
