Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding. Jeremy Purseglove
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Nor were the commons some kind of pastoral socialist Utopia, open to all-comers. By the Middle Ages, Otmoor was already a restricted common, jealously guarded by the inhabitants of its ‘seven towns’. Albert Pell, a fen landlord, wrote in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘The vulgar idea of the general public having rights of any kind on the waste or commonable land was never for a moment admitted.’35
Under Cromwell, the truly radical Diggers demanded that all commons and wastes should be cultivated by the poor in communal ownership. When they began to dig up waste land on St George’s Hill in Surrey, they were driven off by local farmers, who almost certainly included small peasants angered at the usurpation of their common rights.
The agricultural improvements resulting from drainage did open up the possibility of betterment for the small farmers, as well as for the great landowners. In the Middle Ages a degree of drainage, which allowed the conversion of pasture to meadow, provided livestock farmers with that most precious of commodities, winter fodder. In 1606 the lord and his tenants co-operated to reclaim part of the moor at Cossington in the Somerset Levels. In the 1830s the farmers of Burwell fen began to realize that they were missing out on the prosperity achieved through drainage by their neighbours at Swaffham. Protagonists of seventeenth-century fen drainage pointed out that a fat ox was better than a well-grown eel, and a tame sheep more use than a wild duck. Underlying local issues concerning the draining of the marshy commons was the national issue of the need for food. Bad harvests between 1593 and 1597 were the prelude to the great fen drainage projects of the seventeenth century, at a time when England’s growing population was increasingly concentrated in urban or rural industrial centres which were not self-sufficient. The farming achievements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were also motivated by the need for more food. By 1870, Europe was able to sustain a rapidly rising population, largely from its own resources: the agricultural revolution, including the critical part which drainage had played in it, had worked.
But back on the marshes and fens, who was really to profit from this continual process of ever more intensive cultivation? Thomas Fuller, writing in 1655, had the answer: ‘Grant them drained, and so continuing; as now the great fishes therein prey on the less, so the wealthy men would devour the poorer sort of people … and rich men, to make room for themselves, would jostle the poor people out of their commons.’36 For small farmers and commoners, drainage generally meant at best higher rents, at worst dispossession. Those undertaking the drainage were quick to stake their claim to the best bits of land. Thus James Bentham writes of the Fens: ‘The smallest spots, however, scattered or remote, which first showed themselves above the surrounding waters, were eagerly seized upon by these watchful discoverers, and claimed as part of their allotted reward.’37
It was a similar story in Somerset in the same period, worsened by the fact that access to the moor along the old drove-ways was severed by the new drainage ditches. An often quoted rhyme seems to sum it up:
They hang the man and flog the woman
Who steals the goose from off the Common;
But let the greater villain loose
Who steals the Common from the goose.
Not that the goose ever had much of a deal. Live plucking was normal practice by the commoners, in order to ensure quills of the best quality.
THE PEOPLE OF THE WETLANDS
Taming the flood necessitated taming the people of the flood-lands. Outsiders, who generally initiated the drainage, were as unimpressed by the people of the marshes as they were by their stagnant swamps. Camden described fenmen in 1586 as ‘rude, uncivil and envious to all others whom they call Upland Men; who stalking on high upon stilts apply their minds to grazing, fishing and fowling’.38 Lieutenant Hammond, writing in 1635, went further: ‘I think they be halfe fish, halfe flesh, for they drinke like fishes and sleep like hogges.’ The people of Ely ‘have but a turfy scent and fenny posture about them, which smell I did not relish at all with any content’.39
‘Fenmen, disgusting representations of ignorance and indecency!’ exclaimed the judge in the Littleport riots in 1816. In the same period, Arthur Young, subsidized by the big landlords to promote agricultural improvement, put his finger on what must have been a general attitude, when he described cattle-stealers in the Lincolnshire fens: ‘So wild a country nurses up a race of people as wild as the fen, and thus the morals and eternal welfare of numbers are hazarded and ruined for want of an inclosure.’40 They certainly were a rough lot. Thomas Stone in 1794 described Deeping fen as a frequent resort of cattle-thieves. Between the 1740s and the 1820s, Romney Marsh was openly terrorized by armed gangs of smugglers. Richard Gough, in his ‘History of Myddle’ in Shropshire, written in 1700, describes how resentment aroused by increased rents for peat cutting following drainage improvements bubbled over into violence. The agent of Sir Edward Kinaston approached a certain Clarke for rent, when he was ‘cutting peates on Haremeare Mosse … But one of Clarke’s sons with a turfe spade, which they call a peate iron, (a very keen thing,) struck Sir Edward’s man on the head and cloave out his brains. The bayliffe fled.’41
In the 1860s the first policeman ever sent to the fen village of Wicken was killed when he tried to break up a Saturday-night brawl. His body was wheeled off in a peat barrow and cremated in the local brick kiln.
Ever since opposition to drainage in the seventeenth century, the men of the Cambridgeshire fens were known as ‘fen tigers’. Their women folk must have been equally formidable. In 1632 ‘a crowd of women and men, armed with scythes and pitchforks, uttered threatening words’ to anyone attempting to drive their cattle off Holme fen.42 In 1539 Sir Richard Brereton decided to enclose and drain the Dogmore, a marshy common near Prees in Shropshire, which he had bought from the bishop of Lichfield. The bishop was harangued by ‘fourtie wyfes of Prees’, one of whom ‘rudeley began to take his horse by the bridell whereat the horse sprang aside and put the Bysshop in danger of a fall’. Twelve years later, Brereton again went to the Dogmore, to appease ‘great tumults of the Tennants ther gathered together’. The local justice of the peace excused himself, saying he was ‘dysseasid of styche’.43 The prospect of an armed mob, including that monstrous regiment of ‘wyfes’, must have been enough to bring on an immediate headache. A riot in 1694 at Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme is described by George Stovin, who was born the year after the events described: ‘Whilst the corn was growing, several men, women and children of Belton and among others the said Popplewell’s wife encouraged by him – in a riotous manner pulled down and burnt and laid waste the thorns and destroyed the corn.’44 The ‘thorns’ must refer to the new enclosure hedges planted on the commons.
Such tough independent people must have posed a threat to both central and local government. Just as the Biesbosch on the Rhine delta was a centre for the Dutch underground opposition to Hitler, so the English wetlands have a long history as centres of resistance. Dio Cassius describes the difficulties with which the Romans subdued the ancient Britons, who hid in the marshes ‘with their heads only out of the water!’45 Alfred the Great led the resistance against the Danes from Athelney in the Somerset Levels; and although every schoolchild knows that William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he did not succeed in subduing Ely and the surrounding fens until 1071, when Hereward the Wake submitted. Marshes have always been easy to defend. Romney Marsh was flooded as a defence against both Napoleon and Hitler, and Calais was lost in 1557 in part because the sluices were not opened in time to flood out the besiegers. The strategic importance of rivers and wetlands in medieval battles was commonplace whereby rival armies were bogged down in swamps or river crossings and