the enclosure awards following the drainage of Hatfield Chase. © Nottingham University
However, long before these disastrous developments, Vermuyden was wiping the mud of Hatfield off his boots and casting around for greener pastures. From 1629 to 1632 he held leases in Malvern Chase, which included Longdon Marsh, and in 1632 he bought part of Charles I’s share of King’s Sedgemoor in Somerset. But Vermuyden never achieved effective drainage in the West. In 1636 he was accused by the king’s agent for Somerset of fraud and duplicity, charges which were revived when he made another attempt to tackle the Somerset Levels in 1655. The Somerset commoners succeeded in fighting off most attempts at drainage where their contemporaries in the eastern counties had failed. After 1638 nearly two-thirds of the Somerset Levels were still unreclaimed, and even as late as 1769, the local drainage agent, Richard Locke, was stoned, and his effigy was burned ‘by the owners of geese’.21 Old habits die hard in the wetlands. In 1983 the descendants of these owners of geese were to burn the local conservationists in effigy.
The finest prize for the reclaimers remained the Great Level. In 1630 Francis Russell, earl of Bedford, agreed to undertake the drainage of the fens in Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, and parts of Norfolk and Lincolnshire. In 1631 thirteen other business adventurers joined the earl, forming the Bedford Level Corporation and employing the services of Cornelius Vermuyden. Thus was inaugurated a period of extensive engineering works, culminating in the construction of the Old Bedford river in 1637. The adventurers then proceeded to bid for their profit. There was a general outcry. Many complained that the flooding was as bad as ever; others that Bedford had cheated them of their land. In 1638 Charles I intervened, and, re-engaging Vermuyden, declared himself undertaker. The king’s ambitions were characteristically grandiose. Not only did he require a grant of 57,000 acres of the drained land, but, according to Dugdale, he intended to transform the village of Manea into a town to be called Charlemont, which would command the new river system. One can imagine the cloud-capped towers of Inigo Jones’s elegant Baroque soaring above the Fens. As it is, Manea (pronounced Mainy) remains a tiny hamlet in the Ouse washes, haunted by the ghost of what might have been.
Events were moving fast to overtake all such enterprises. From his first arrival in the Fens, Vermuyden had been faced with the now familiar rioting. A drinking song called ‘Powtes Complaint’ – ‘powte’ being a lamprey – circulated in the taverns:
Come, Brethren of the water, and let us all assemble,
To treat upon this matter, which makes us quake and tremble;
For we shall rue it, if’t be true, that Fens be undertaken,
And where we feed in Fen and Reed, they’ll feed both Beef and Bacon.
They’ll sow both beans and oats, where never man yet thought it,
Where men did row in boats, ere undertakers bought it:
But, Ceres, thou, behold us now, let wild oats be their venture,
Oh let the frogs and miry bogs destroy where they do enter.
The beauty of many rivers lies in their long history of human management. Water crowfoot can be an indicator of ancient fords (top). The millrace is one of the human contributions to the landscape quality of the river (bottom).
In the early eighteenth century windmills were adopted throughout the Fens for pumping water
The main drains on the Southern Fenland, including approximate dates of construction.
LEADING FIGURES IN THE BATTLE TO DRAIN THE FENS
A Dutch engineer, believed to be Cornelius Vermuyden. © London Borough of Barking and Dagenham
Charles I. © National Portrait Gallery
Oliver Cromwell, painted in the year of the execution of Charles I. © National Portrait Gallery
The contemporary chronicler and advocate of seventeenth-century drainage, Sir William Dugdale.
Away with boats and rudder, farewell both boots and skatches,
No need of one nor th’other, men now make better matches;
Stilt-makers all and tanners, shall complain of this disaster,
For they will make each muddy lake for Essex calves a pasture.
The feather’d fowls have wings, to fly to other nations;
But we have no such things, to help our transportations;
We must give place (oh grievous case) to horned beasts and cattle,
Except that we can all agree to drive them out by battle.22
Battle was what they settled for. The dwellers of the Lincolnshire fens ‘fell upon the Adventurers, broke the sluices, laid waste their lands, threw down their fences … and forcibly retained possession of the land.23 The northern fens were to remain the preserve of fishers and fowlers for another 150 years. In Cambridgeshire, Sir Miles Sandys, an adventurer whose capital had been sorely overstretched by the drainage projects, wrote to his son that if ‘order not be taken, it will turn out to be a general rebellion in all the Fen towns’.24
General rebellion, indeed, but not only in the Fens. In 1638 the commoners found a champion of their causes in a local farmer whose career was ultimately to lead him far beyond the battles of the wetlands. In that year it was ‘commonly reported by the commoners … that Mr Cromwell of Ely had undertaken, they paying him a groat for every cow they had upon the common, to hold the drainers in suit for five years’.25 They appointed Cromwell their advocate at the commission of sewers in Huntingdon, and he ensured that a clause concerning the commandeering of common land was included in the catalogue of complaints known as the Grand Remonstrance presented to the king in 1641. The following year Civil War was declared, and drainage works fell into abeyance. In 1649 the war was over and the king executed, but that summer a surprising turn of events took place in the Fens. In May, Oliver Cromwell, erstwhile champion of the commoners, was named as one of the commissioners, together with the earl of Bedford, under a new Act for the Draining of the Great Level. He was to send a major of his own regiment to suppress the commoners’ riots; and in 1654 he issued an ordinance to protect Bedford and his works, himself receiving 200 acres of the drained land as a reward. After intensive wrangling over terms and money, during which the adventurers declared that it was ‘not fitt to depend upon Sir Cornelius Vermuyden any longer’, the
