dog-toothed vault of Crowland Abbey arches like the jawbone of a mighty whale above the Fens, which the Abbey’s founder St Guthlac believed to be the haunt of demons.
In a few cases the wetlands proved too much for them. The abbey of Otley on Otmoor was abandoned after three years, in 1141, as ‘fitter for an ark than a monastery’.8 But in general, the abbeys and their abbots fattened up together. Tithes of reed were reserved for the local priest on the Somerset Levels, and Chaucer’s monk cast an entirely practical eye on the local birdlife: ‘he liked a swan best, and roasted whole.’ The holy men, whose heirs, such as the Carmelites on the Derwent Ings, now venerate God’s wilderness which washes up to their walls, began to compete with each other as to who could plunder it the most. In 1305 the abbot of Thorney in the Fens complained that the abbot of Peterborough ‘lately by night raised a dyke across the high road’, and so cut off the former’s access to corn and pasture.9 On the Somerset Levels, intermittent war was waged throughout the Middle Ages between successive abbots of Glastonbury and bishops of Wells. They were forever breaking up each other’s fish-weirs and quarrelling over competing interests in pasture and peat cutting. In 1278 the abbot’s men destroyed a piggery belonging to the bishop in Godney Moor, and again in 1315. In 1326 someone set fire to the peat moor in the Brue valley, with the idea of burning Glastonbury Abbey. The bishop followed up this preliminary scorching with a promise of eternal fire for the abbot of Glastonbury, upon whom he pronounced sentence of excommunication for the sin of damaging his property.10
THE COURTS OF SEWERS
Such piecemeal, not to mention conflicting, management of the marshes was no way to organize and control the ever-threatening flood-waters; and from the mid-thirteenth century, the responsibility for land drainage and reclamation from the sea began to devolve upon successive ‘commissions of sewers’, which were answerable to central government. A ‘sewer’ was a straight cut, the kind of geometrical channel beloved by modern engineers, and did not have the connotation of foul water which it has today. The first commission of sewers was set up in Lincolnshire by Henry de Bathe in 1258. Like fenland engineers 400 years later, de Bathe went for advice on procedure and administration to the heartland of organized land drainage, Romney Marsh. The subsequent courts of sewers were steadily reinforced by successive legislation, culminating in 1532 in Henry VIII’s Statute of Sewers, just at the moment when the power of the monastic lords of the levels was broken by the Reformation. These courts were to survive, incredibly, until 1930.
With the growth of commissions of sewers in the Middle Ages, the role of professional laypeople in such matters began to increase. In 1390 a commission was appointed to inspect and repair flood-banks and dykes on the Thames marshes between Greenwich and Woolwich. It included among its number the king’s clerk of works, no less than Geoffrey Chaucer.11 The last major drainage operation in the medieval period, however, was instigated by a churchman. John Morton, later to become Henry VII’s lord chancellor, familiar to every schoolchild for his tax levies of ‘Morton’s Fork’, organized the construction of the channel still known as Morton’s Leam, when he was bishop of Ely between 1478 and 1486. This ambitious piece of engineering, extending for 12 miles between Peterborough and Wisbech, survives today, although the tower Morton built from which to watch over his work-force crumbled away in the early nineteenth century.
By the end of the Middle Ages, the marshes in Kent and Sussex had been sufficiently reclaimed to reveal an abiding characteristic of such operations: that in certain circumstances land drainage contains the seeds of its own destruction. In the mid-fifteenth century, floods and silting doomed the old port of Pevensey; and further along the coast, on Romney Marsh, a series of catastrophic storms culminating in 1287 obliterated the towns of Old Winchelsea and Broomhill. Although climatic deterioration in the later Middle Ages certainly worsened the situation, these disasters were not simply the haphazard expression of hostile Nature. They were made inevitable by human meddling. At Pevensey, reclamation of the adjacent estuary reduced tidal scouring, which had previously kept the river mouth open. In consequence, the water, unable to escape through the blocked outfall, flooded the land, and navigation up the river was also prevented. Successive new channels cut in 1402 and 1455 failed to remedy the problem, and Pevensey Castle, which still rises dramatically above the marshes whose creation ensured its demise, was abandoned.12 On Romney Marsh, silting of river mouths was worsened by the problem of peat shrinkage. By the twelfth century, increasingly elaborate drainage schemes had led to contraction of the peat, thereby causing the land to drop ever lower in relation to the menacing waters of the English Channel. When the banks finally broke, the sea captured both arms of the river Rother, and created the present estuary south of Rye. This cat-and-mouse game between engineers and the elements was to become a major theme in the next great age of wetland reclamation, which began under the Tudors and reached its climax in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, the flood-waters began to rise again, since there were no monks to operate the sluices and dig the drains. At least, this was the opinion of Dugdale, writing a hundred years later; but it should be remembered that he was one of a long line of propagandists for land drainage, and that, while localized deterioration must have taken place, there is also ample evidence of the activities of the courts of sewers and of individual enterprise by secular landlords. In 1539 the gentry around Newhaven diverted the Sussex Ouse to improve the drainage of the estuarine marshland and to capture navigation and trade from their neighbours at Seaford. During the reign of Elizabeth, the Wealdmoors in Shropshire were a battleground between rival landlords intent on drainage and enclosure. In 1576 Thomas Cherrington complained in the Queen’s Council of the Marches, that Thurston Woodcock, lord of Meason, had assembled a gang armed with long staffs and billhooks, and had forcibly ploughed and then enclosed a piece of his waste ground with a ditch. Clearly Cherrington was not above such tactics either, for he seems to have destroyed the ditch. In 1583 the Woodcocks were back ‘with divers … desperate and lewde persons’ who ‘in riotous manner dug … one myghty diche more like in truthe a defence to have kepte owte some forren enemyes than an inclosure to keepe in cattell’.13
Romney Marsh.
THE BATTLE FOR THE FENS
Towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, covetous eyes began to be cast on far grander prizes. The new card in the pack was foreign technology. In the reign of Henry VIII, Italian engineers had recovered Combe Marsh near Greenwich; and under Elizabeth, Plumstead and Erith marshes by the Thames were drained with the help of Dutch engineers and workmen.14 In 1575 a certain Peter Morris of Dutch extraction obtained a licence from the queen to employ engines, or mills, for draining; and in 1589 Humphrey Bradley, who, despite his name, came from Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands, presented a treatise to Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley. It proposed nothing less than the reclamation for her kingdom of an area 70 miles long and 30 broad, equivalent to a whole new county, the ‘Great Level’ of the Fens. Shrewdly, in view of the trouble such ambitions were to cause her successors, the queen turned Bradley down. He went off to France, where, as Master of the Dykes for Henry IV, he supervised the draining of the great Poitevin marshes north of La Rochelle. But before she died, Elizabeth I signed an Act of Parliament in 1600 ‘for the recovering of many hundred thousand Acres of marshes’. The battle for the Fens was on.
The Stuart kings were forever short of money. The career of James I was marked by ingenious methods of raising cash, by fair means or foul; and similar expropriation was to lead his heir, Charles I, to his downfall. In such circumstances, the new engineering, which could apparently transform wetland wastes into sources of valuable crops to be sold to a growing population, must have seemed like something for nothing, and therefore irresistible. Francis Bacon advised King James to hold on to his royal wastes and hunting forests for exactly this potential; and, as if to confirm the good sense of such drainage enterprises,
