floods in living memory. In Somerset ‘the tops of trees and houses only appeared … as if, at the beginning of the world, townes had been built in the bottom of the sea’.15 In the Fens, mothers abandoned their children ‘swimming in their beds, till good people, adventuring their lives, went up to the breast in the waters to fetch them out at the windows’.16
For the flood to yield up its riches, two things were required: a competent engineer and plenty of capital. To obtain the latter, there emerged a peculiarly modern group of businessmen who called themselves ‘undertakers’ or ‘adventurers’. An undertaker was one who contracted to ‘undertake’ a drainage scheme; an ‘adventurer’ was one who ‘adventured’ his capital on such an undertaking. The security of both was the promise of a large proportion of the land after the drainage operation had been successfully completed.
‘Covetous and bloodie Popham’, an early drainer of the Fens, lies in state in Wellington church, Somerset.
In 1605 Lord Chief Justice Popham, prosecutor of Guy Fawkes, Raleigh, and the Queen of Scots, ‘undertook’ to drain the fen at Upwell. He has left behind him a flamboyant monument in Wellington church, Somerset, and the channel known as Popham’s Eau in Cambridgeshire, which was abandoned at his death in 1607. The judge’s real memorial, however, is his reputation. In 1606 James I received an anonymous letter accusing ‘covetous and bloodie Popham’ of ruining the poor people of the Fens.17 The commoners, who had everything to lose from undertakings such as his, were firing an opening shot. The wetlands and wastes of England were soon to be loud with their tumults.
In 1618 James made his first move in Somerset. He decided to drain King’s Sedgemoor, which the Crown had inherited entire at the dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey. Three years later, in 1621, the king declared that he would himself undertake the drainage of the Fens for a recompense of 120,000 acres; and in that year, there arrived in England a Dutchman who was destined to become one of the greatest architects of the English landscape. His name was Cornelius Vermuyden.
In 1625 the old king died, having achieved no effective drainage operations. Vermuyden had been occupied with rebuilding the Thames flood defences at Dagenham, which, according to an inquiry of 1623, he left ‘in a worse condition than it was before’.18 From this bad beginning, Vermuyden turned his attention to the great wetland system around Hatfield Chase, south of the Humber. It was here that he made his name, carrying out the first really ambitious operation of its kind in the country, which was to be a blueprint for his ‘Great Design’ for the Fens. It is also at Hatfield that we first get a clear glimpse of the tricky controversial personality of Cornelius Vermuyden.
The name ‘Trent’ comes from the Celtic word ‘Trisanton’ meaning ‘trespasser’, which describes the wandering nature of the river. The river Trent has always flooded, and nowhere more so than on the levels between where its own waters and those of the Yorkshire Aire flow out into the Humber. Apart from the little Isle of Axholme, this basin must all have been a flooded fen roughly 8 miles wide by 12 miles long. It remains one of the least known, and, despite much intensively farmed land, one of the wildest regions of lowland England. At its heart lie two raised mires of deep peat, wildernesses of scattered birch, where adders sun themselves among the fern, and amber dragonflies haunt the peaty pools. The larger mire, Thorne Waste, approached by surmounting the incongruous dereliction of Moor Ends Colliery, stretches out as far as the eye can see, an astonishing 6,000 acres of untamed wetland. To its south lies the smaller Hatfield Moor, still quite large enough to get lost in. Ruined cottages nestle among its birches, and miners, with guns over their shoulders, roam its maze of tracks on the look-out for duck and rabbit. At dusk the air is filled with the eerie chuckle of nightjars. In its very centre, accessible only by an earth track, is the ancient manor of Lindholme, which was, from the Middle Ages, a royal hunting-lodge. It was from here that the Stuarts sized up the potential of the area for exploitation. In 1626 Charles I signed an agreement with Vermuyden for the drainage of Hatfield Chase, for which the latter would be awarded one-third of the land drained. Work started immediately, and within three years the scheme was completed. The dykes he dug to create the farmland around Hatfield Moors can still be seen, harbouring the aquatic flora of the ancient fen: butter-yellow bladderwort and the feathery spires of mare’s-tail.
Adders still sun themselves on Hatfield Chase.
In January 1629 the king knighted Vermuyden at Whitehall, and a month later he sold him his royal manor of Hatfield for £10,000 cash down and an annual interest of £195. 3s. 5d. and a red rose. But matters had not gone as smoothly as all that. Even the knighthood was not the honour it might seem, for James I had instigated the practice of charging for knighthoods, and Charles I had compounded his profit by fining those who had the temerity to refuse. Furthermore, since the Crown had earlier inherited Hatfield subject to the maintenance of rights of common, it was not entirely the king’s to either sell or drain. This was something which the inhabitants were not going to overlook as lightly as Charles had done. A lawsuit of April 1629 between Vermuyden and the commoners attests how the people of Torksey:
came unto the workmen and beat and terrified them, threatening to kill them, if they would not leave their work, threw some of them in the river and kept them under water with long poles, and at several other times, upon the Knelling of a Bell, came to the said works in riotous and warlike manner, divided themselves into companies, to take the workmen and filled up the ditches and drains, made to carry away the water, burned up the working tools and other materials of the Relator and his workmen, and set up poles in the form of gallows, to terrifie the workmen and threatened to break their arms and legs, and beat and hurt many of them and made others flee away, whom they pursued to a town with such terror and threats, that they were forced to guard the town.19
Reports in the previous year that a local man had been killed by the Dutch workforce make it clear that the battles over the digging of the ditches were far from one-sided. Worse was to follow. The inhabitants made it clear that their commons had been reduced to between half and a third of their former size. While propagandists of drainage, such as Dugdale, admired the corn and the oil-seed rape which could now be sown on the drained land, they failed to appreciate that the people of Axholme already grew sufficient corn for their needs on the higher land. What the people wanted on the fen was what they had already: grazing. The ignorance with which the outsiders set about overturning a perfectly satisfactory agricultural economy at Axholme suggests parallels with the notorious ground-nut scheme instigated in East Africa in the late 1940s. In addition, the villagers of the north-west of the region complained, with justification, that the engineering works had simply sent the water down to flood them out. After much legal deliberation, the lord president of the Council of the North, the earl of Strafford, pronounced that Vermuyden must bear the cost of a major new channel, still called ‘Dutch River’, to rectify the situation. The project ended in financial disaster, and Vermuyden was temporarily imprisoned for not paying his debts. Catastrophic floods inundated the region in 1636 and again in 1697, exacerbated no doubt by deliberate sabotage by the commoners, but also caused by the insufficient capacity of the new channels and by peat shrinkage. The people remained as uncontrollable as the waters, burning down the Dutch settlement at Sandtoft during the Civil War and again in 1688.20 Peace did not really reign again at Hatfield Chase until well into the eighteenth century.
The drainage of Hatfield Chase.
Two commoners of Hatfield Chase greet a gentleman, perhaps one of the Dutch drainage engineers. In reality they were rather less deferential.
