year, despite the midnight activities of ‘the meaner sort of Burwell’27 and other villages, he completed the New Bedford, or Hundred Foot, river, parallel to the Old Bedford built fourteen years before. The two massive channels run straight towards the Wash, enclosing a flood-land which still fills up in winter, as Vermuyden intended. They are his greatest monument. In 1653, after the remaining works had been completed by Dutch prisoners of war under Vermuyden’s direction, a service of thanksgiving was held in Ely Cathedral; and in the same year Vermuyden was employed by his earlier adversary, the lord protector, on diplomatic missions to the Netherlands. The fenmen and their fens were under control at last. Samuel Fortrey celebrated the achievement in verse:
I sing floods muzzled and the Ocean tam’d
Luxurious rivers govern’d and reclam’d.
. . . . . .
Streams curb’d with Dammes like Bridles, taught to obey,
And run as straight as if they saw their way.
. . . . . .
New hands shall learn to work, forget to steal
New legs shall go to church, new knees shall kneel.28
In the great struggle to extend cultivation to feed the growing cities, the peasantry had been defeated no less decisively than the Crown. From this turning point, enclosure and drainage were to shape both lives and landscape in the English countryside, up to the present day.
In 1658 Cromwell died, by appropriate irony, hastened on his way by malaria, probably contracted during his campaigns in the bogs of Ireland. About this time, Vermuyden vanished from public life, although it was not until 1677 that he died, full of years and riches, and was buried in St Margaret’s, Westminster.29 It is interesting to speculate on the possible reasons for his total obscurity during the intervening years of the Restoration. He certainly made many enemies, and not only among the commoners. In 1633 legal action was taken against him by his countrymen and co-adventurers at Hatfield Chase. His earliest ally had been Sir Robert Heath, who had promoted Vermuyden’s advancement at court, and had even managed to get him out of prison. When Heath, a staunch Royalist, fled to France under the Commonwealth, Vermuyden appears to have expropriated Heath’s share of a mine at Wirksworth, and Heath’s son was still petitioning for his rightful property in 1652. With the new regime in 1660, there must have been those who had old scores to settle. They may also have been quick to point out that Vermuyden’s ‘Great Design’ was already turning sour. He had been lampooned by contemporary dramatists. In Thomas Randolph’s play The Muse’s Looking Glass, a conversation takes place between an engineer named Banausus and a gentleman called Colax:
BANAUSUS. I have a rare device to set Dutch windmills Upon New-market Heath, and Salisbury Plaine, To draine the Fens.
COLAX. The Fens Sir are not there.
BANAUSUS. But who knowes but they may be?30
How true this still rings for modern consultants on the look-out for schemes for which no justification exists. Vermuyden had faced remarkable difficulties, not least the age-old problem of clients who want the profit at the end of the day, but who are not prepared to lay out sufficient capital to achieve it. Consequently, a linchpin of Vermuyden’s scheme, a catch-dyke skirting the eastern edge of the fens, was abandoned, to be constructed only in the 1960s.
Such inadequacies were made far worse by something which Vermuyden could not have foreseen: peat shrinkage. The people might be made to kneel, but the elements were not quite so easy to muzzle. The very efficiency of any improvement speeded up the lowering of the land as the peat dried and ‘wasted’ through the activities of bacteria and fungi. Today the surface of the peat fens lies only a few feet above or below sea level. Children playing in fen churchyards in the nineteenth century were able to reach down and touch the coffins exposed by the wasted peat.31 As the peat shrank, the critical outfall of the river Ouse into the North Sea inevitably began to silt up. By 1663 real problems were already apparent, and in 1673, four years before Vermuyden died, mighty floods inundated the Fens, forcing the inhabitants ‘to save themselves in boats’.32 By 1700 the full extent of the disaster had become clear, and in 1713, the Denver sluice, the key to the whole system, was washed out to sea. Not only in the Fens were the waters fighting back. An ambitious reclamation scheme on the south coast also came to nothing around this time. Between 1630 and 1646 Sir George Horsey had attempted to dam and drain the long tongue of water which still lies between Chesil Beach and the Dorset mainland. Winter storms swiftly obliterated his expensive engineering structures.33
Cornelius Vermuyden’s greatest monument, the two Bedford rivers, enclosing the Ouse Washes. The section below shows how the washland takes the winter flood-water. © Cambridge University Collection
NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Just when it looked as if the flood was winning again, technology came to the rescue. In 1710 complaints were made in Norfolk about the cost of the new ‘whirligigs’;34 and soon, travellers to the eastern counties were noting the number of windmills dotting the landscape. They were to become the crucial factor which saved the Fens from total inundation, and although not generally adopted in Somerset, they fast became a typical feature of such wetland landscapes as the Lancashire Fylde and the Hull valley. The story of the wetlands in the eighteenth century is one of gradual development of new technologies, culminating at the end of the century in the discovery of steam as an even more efficient pumping force than windmills. In 1692 Sir Thomas Fleetwood set out to drain Martin Mere in Lancashire, employing 2,000 men.35 In 1755 storms destroyed the floodgates he had built, and renewed efforts to conquer the mere in the 1780s were crowned with permanent success only as a result of the use of steam power in the following century.
Meanwhile, a less visible, but no less powerful, strategy for combating the waters was being devised. Every farmer knows that engineers may lower the levels of rivers for all they are worth, but that, without a follow-up operation of underdrainage in each saturated field, the real rewards for agriculture will never be harvested.36 Open ditches and such ancient techniques as ridge and furrow are of limited effect.
Upstream from Leamington Spa, the river Leam flows lazily among water-lilies and tall bulrushes. Scraps of sedge and meadow rue still cling to its margins, the last remnants of a marsh which must once have inundated the whole valley floor. It was here, in 1764, that a Warwickshire gentleman made a discovery of the greatest significance. Mr Joseph Elkington of Princethorpe was faced with a problem. His sheep were suffering from foot-rot, and however many ditches he dug, he could not get the water off his fields. He was pondering his dilemma when a servant stopped by with an iron bar for making sheep hurdles. Mr Elkington rammed it into the bottom of one of his ineffective ditches and, to his astonishment, water burst up like a geyser. He had discovered a method of intercepting springs, and, using stone to seal his drains, he and others like him set about spreading the gospel of effective underdrainage.37 Very soon farmers were using clay tiles, which, stamped with the word ‘drain’, were exempted in 1826 from the tax on other clay products. The clay tile and its descendant, the plastic pipe, were to take their place alongside the plough and the axe as among the major agents in the settlement of England.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ‘IMPROVEMENTS’
In 1795 Parliament voted that King George III award Elkington
