by William Wallace at Sterling in 1297.fn1
It would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of wetlands in national insurrections. Nevertheless, three marshland villages in Essex led the way in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; Sedgemoor will always be associated with Monmouth’s Rebellion; and agitations against fen drainage played a small, but significant, part in both the career of Oliver Cromwell and the origins of the English Revolution.
The place that seems above all to encapsulate the spirit of the Derwent Ings is Aughton church, standing alone in the marshlands, its churchyard lapped by floods each winter and haunted by the bubbling call of the curlew in spring. On the church wall is carved the watery symbol of a newt. Small boys in Yorkshire and Worcestershire, going out with their jam jars to collect newts and tiddlers, still talk of going out after ‘asks’. The newt at Aughton is the emblem of Robert Aske, and it was from here that Aske set out in 1536 to lead the Pilgrimage of Grace against the religious reforms of Henry VIII. Aske’s main aim was a return of the smaller monasteries, but his appeal included requests to halt enclosure and drainage. He typifies the marshman’s feudal protest against central authority, together with his longing, not for a new order, but for a return of the old.
The wetlands are lost landscapes. Just as they defy access, they defy organization by outsiders. Even long-drained regions, such as Longdon Marsh in Worcestershire, are easy to pick out as ‘holes’ on the Ordnance Survey map. Cul-de-sacs skirt warily down to them and then peter out. Some, such as the Somerset Levels, Chat Moss, and Hatfield and Thorne Wastes, are visible from motorways, from which there seems to be no exit from where they can be reached. Approached more closely, they still challenge the intruder. Otmoor and Hatfield Chase are both encircled by moats of ditches, crossed in the case of Hatfield by only one bridge. If you do venture by car on to the edge of Otmoor, there is the feeling that you will be unable to turn around in the narrow space between the dykes, or may get stuck up to the axles in mud. The single rough road across Simonswood Moss near Liverpool is barred at either end by the intimidating iron gates of the Knowsley estate. Romney Marsh, which lacks a central inaccessible fastness, is crossed by a maze of switchback lanes, which seem determined to throw off even the most diligent map-reader. In Somerset, the old drove-ways still branch off the main routes into the moors, like spines on a stickleback. These are truly the landscapes of the ‘No Through Road’.
A newt, the emblem of Robert Aske, carved on the wall of Aughton church, Derwent Ings, Yorkshire.
Straddling boundaries, some wetlands still defy comprehensive administration. Romney Marsh is shared by Kent and Sussex; what is left of the great moss system of the Mersey valley is carved up between Lancashire and Cheshire and the urban authorities of Manchester, Liverpool, and Warrington. Hatfield and Thorne Wastes are bewilderingly divided among Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and South Humberside. The inhabitants would probably not admit allegiance to any of these authorities, and huge signs proclaim the Isle of Axholme – known locally as ‘The Isle’ – as if it were an independent State. If such is the character of these places now, what must they have been like when both people and livestock could only get around them by boat, and parishes such as Dogdyke in Lincolnshire had in the eighteenth century ‘not two houses communicable for whole winters round’.46
For all their imperfections, the old wetland commons had a certain self-sufficiency and self-containment providing a standard against which to judge the enthusiastic, never-satisfied ambitions of the agriculturalists and drainage engineers who set out to exploit them. Traditional management of the marshes was tuned to the finest nuances of the local water table. Each wetland evolved a landscape character as individual as the spirit of its people was independent. A few marshes in western France are still managed very strictly as commons. To visit them is to gain an insight into what many of our own wetlands must have been like. The Marais Communal of Curzon lies in the lap of low scrubby hills, like a green sea of stillness. It is quite without the trees or hedges which enclose all the country around it. Cattle, herded down to it along drove-ways used from time immemorial, slowly graze across its moist levels. From the steady centre of this tranquillity flickers the occasional silver of snipe or redshank, like fish rising from the still heart of a pool. The real beauty of such places is not their actual visual components, but the system that underlies them: the harmony between the people and the nature they represent.
Andrew Motion’s poem ‘Inland’ describes how a society, as much as an ecology, was overturned by drainage projects in the seventeenth-century fens. In this extract, a fen villager watches the arrival by boat of the men who are going to change his life:
Sun flicked round the bay,
binding the outline of farms
to their reflections in grey
bands of light. The marsh
always survives. Always.
Cattle stirred in their shed,
uncoiling sweet whisps
of breath over my head;
fresh shadows spilt down
their flanks and spread
across water to flake
into shrinking fragments
over the strangers’ wake.
Their boat put down
some men; one staked
its prow into our land,
waded towards us
over the grass, and
lifted one arm. Our world
dried on his hand.47
That world was one of many fen villagers co-operating in order to survive. In the battle to save West Sedgemoor and the Derwent Ings in the 1970s and 1980s, the large number of small landowners was to militate against the efficiency with which large-scale drainage schemes could be organized. In 1794 Billingsley described the Somerset Levels as ‘destitute of gentlemen’s houses’;48 and the 1580 muster returns for Holland in Lincolnshire lamented ‘the want of gentlemen here to inhabit’.49 Charlton-on-Otmoor means ‘town of the churls’. A ‘churl’ was a free peasant (note the slur implied by present dictionary usage), and Charlton never had a resident squire, being dismissed in eighteenth-century diocesan returns as having ‘no family of note’.50 The people of Charlton must have cherished their independence, especially when they looked at the fate of the neighbouring village of Noke, which, it was said, was lost in a game of cards by Lily, duchess of Marlborough.
Reports on current or just completed land-drainage schemes emphasize the trend whereby large farmers accrue the benefit much more commonly than small holders. The theory behind such schemes is that ambitious large farmers will set an example, which will encourage their small backward neighbours. The latter are described in all current cost-benefit reports of the Ministry of Agriculture as ‘laggards’. The assumptions behind this unfortunate word go back a long way. In 1652 Dugdale described fenmen as a ‘lazy and beggarly people’. Billingsley castigated the farmers of the Somerset Levels in the late eighteenth century thus:
The possession of a cow or two, with a hog and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant in his own conception, above his brethren in the same rank of society … In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence … and at length the sale of a half-fed
