Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding

William Cobbett declared that the marshes of South Holderness in the East Riding, together with the Fens, were the richest land in England.

What cheeses must such land have produced! A cheese resembling Camembert was the glory of Cottenham in Cambridgeshire, where records for cheese-making go back to as early as 1280; and production ceased only in the mid-nineteenth century with the enclosure of the common fen.

Domestic geese, herded on the Fens and the marshes, kept the rest of the country supplied with quill-pens. On the wetland commons of western France, geese are still kept, and furnish a nice line in duvets.

In the wettest and wildest parts of the marshes, fishing and fowling replaced more organized farming. The terse Latin of a Cambridgeshire assize role records how, in the fourteenth century, a boy went out on stilts after birds’ eggs and was drowned in the heart of the fen.

With the passage of time, such perilous subsistence gave way to more profitable wildfowling. Birds were netted and exported to London. A check-list that would make a modern bird-watcher salivate was served up on the Elizabethan menu: ‘the food of heroes, fit for the palates of the great’, as Camden describes pewits, godwits, knot, and dotterel.

Fish were also exported. Daniel Defoe saw fish transported live from the Fenland to London ‘in great butts fill’d with water in waggons as the carriers draw other goods’. Islip eels from Otmoor supplied the Ship Inn at Greenwich. Eels, speared through their gills on an eel stick, had long been standard rent in the Fens and Somerset Levels. ‘Ely’ itself means the district of eels. The method of catching eels with a glaive or trident lasted just long enough in the Fens to be recorded on an early documentary film.

Many wild plants of the wetlands were also harvested. Until the mid-nineteenth century, basket-makers were actively cutting willow at Beckley on Otmoor, a place which also sent water lilies to Covent Garden. Purple moor grass, which forms the pale-fawn undercarpet of the scattered birch woodlands of such wetlands as the Lancashire mosses and Hatfield Chase, was popular for cattle bedding. From Burwell Fen, sedge was sent out by boat for the purpose of drying malt, and Cambridge imported fen sedge as kindling. Bedmakers in Cambridge colleges were issued with stout gloves to protect their hands from the sharp sedge as they lit the fires in undergraduates’ rooms. Clogs were made from alder, and reed was used for thatch.

Eel and eel glaive.

Oak for building the ships of the British navy has always been famous as a resource essential for our national survival. A commonly grown crop of the wetlands was almost as important. Hemp, from which the word ‘hempenspun’, or ‘homespun’, originates, is a fibre crop still grown in Russia and the developing world. In England it provided sails and cables for the fleet; and for this reason, legislation going back to the reign of Henry VIII required that a small proportion of land be set aside for its production. This is a far cry from the laws which now pertain to this crop, more familiar today under its Latin name of Cannabis sativa. It flourishes best in deep moist ground, and Michael Drayton described south Lincolnshire as ‘hemp-bearing Holland’s Fen’.

On the Isle of Axholme, where little wool was produced, hemp was the basis for a spinning and weaving industry, which provided a useful sideline for the average peasant, and a basic livelihood for the poor.

Peat was always a major wetland commodity. Rights of turf cutting, known as ‘turbary’, existed in Somerset and the Fens in the Middle Ages. Peat cutting became a major industry in the Lancashire mosses in the nineteenth century. On maps of Wicken Fen and Hatfield Chase, you will find ‘Poor Piece’, which was where the local cottagers could cut peat for themselves, subject to regulations prescribing a limited season for peat cutting and insisting that cottagers may extract as much peat as possible without outside assistance. Unlimited plundering of timber was similarly controlled. In 1337 a certain Robert Gyan was submitted to a brutal penance by the dean of Wells for carrying away ‘a great number of alder’ from Stan Moor in the Somerset Levels.

Thereafter he was allowed only six boatloads of brushwood a year, to be taken out under view of the bailiff. Such rulings are a key to our understanding of the old wetland economy. Long before our modern preoccupations with sustainability, the people of the wetlands harvested the wealth of their so-called wilderness with a sophisticated understanding of the need not to over-exploit its resources.

Because of the hostile elements facing farmers in the wetlands, mutual co-operation was essential, both in sharing the upkeep of flood-banks and drains and in administering a system of checks and balances to ensure that each person got a fair deal out of the common pasture. If overstocking took place, then everyone was the loser. In 1242 Geoffrey de Langelegh was summoned by the abbot of Glastonbury to explain why he now had ‘one hundred and fifty goats and twenty oxen and cows beyond the number which he and his ancestors were wont always to have, to wit, sixteen oxen only’.

Annual ‘drifts’ were held, when cattle were rounded up, and excessive numbers were impounded and released only on payment of a fine. By Tudor times the Fen commons were subject to sophisticated management, controlled by the parish order-makers, who in turn appointed field reeves and fen reeves. These kept a close check on the taking in and pasturing of cattle by outsiders through a system of branding and regular drifts. During the reign of Edward VI, a code of fen law was drawn up, which remained fully operative in the Lincolnshire fens until the eighteenth century. Penalties were levied for putting diseased or unbranded cattle on to the fen, leaving animals unburied for more than three days, and allowing dogs to harass cattle on the moor. No reed was to be mown for thatch before it had two years’ growth. No swans’, cranes’, or bitterns’ eggs could be taken from the fen.

In the sixteenth century, Otmoor was similarly controlled by a moor court, upon which the local villages were represented by two ‘moor men’.

The fixing of dates was critical in preventing over-exploitation. As early as 1534, a closed season for wildfowling, between May and August, was instigated in the Cambridgeshire fens. All inhabitants of the manor of Epworth on the Isle of Axholme had the right to set bush nets and catch white fish on Wednesdays and Fridays. Stocking on some fen commons took place no earlier than old May Day, to ensure against overgrazing. Lammas land was pasture open to commoners from Lammas, or Loaf Mass, 1 August. Lammas meadows still exist, as at Twyning near Bredon in Worcestershire and, more famously, North Meadow beside the Thames at Cricklade.

Such co-operative management existed even on some wetlands that were not commons. On the Derwent Ings in Yorkshire, the subdivision of the land into small hay plots and the subsequent pasturing were administered by a Court Leet, which annually appointed ‘Ings Masters’, who managed the pastures at East Cottingwith and Newton. In the Wheldrake Ings account book for 1868–1934, it is specified that the meadows be mown on the dates appointed by the Ings masters, and that, thereafter, a carefully controlled number of cattle, branded with a W, may be pastured until the autumn, when they are taken off on ‘Ings Breaking Day’.

The water, flooding over the pastures in winter and oozing up through the summer marshes, held the key to these balanced systems. The black waters of the fen halted the plough, thereby limiting the expansion of economic growth which a fen parish could sustain. Organized common grazing on wetland pastures blunted incentives to enlarge adjacent farms, and also prevented the selective breeding of livestock. But technologies of drainage, refined with each succeeding century and reaching a climax in our own day, removed the subtle checks and limitations of the old wetland systems. As the water ebbed away, so the spell was broken.

It is a mistake to be too naïve about the old wetland commons. They were open to abuse, and their system of controls did not always work. Overstocking took place on the Somerset Levels in the Middle Ages, aggravated by the rights of some commoners to take in cattle from outside the Levels for a fee. The Wallingfen court in the Vale of York set an upper limit for animals on the common in 1636 which was way above the actual carrying capacity of the land.

In the eighteenth century, Thomas Stone noted that West Fen in Lincolnshire was ‘perfectly white with sheep’.

It was no doubt grossly overstocked. The damp conditions would exacerbate such a situation. Before the Brue valley drainage in 1770, 10,000 sheep rotted in one year in the Somerset parish of Mark.

Nor were the commons some kind of pastoral socialist Utopia, open to all-comers. By the Middle Ages, Otmoor was already a restricted common, jealously guarded by the inhabitants of its ‘seven towns’. Albert Pell, a fen landlord, wrote in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘The vulgar idea of the general public having rights of any kind on the waste or commonable land was never for a moment admitted.’

Under Cromwell, the truly radical Diggers demanded that all commons and wastes should be cultivated by the poor in communal ownership. When they began to dig up waste land on St George’s Hill in Surrey, they were driven off by local farmers, who almost certainly included small peasants angered at the usurpation of their common rights.

The agricultural improvements resulting from drainage did open up the possibility of betterment for the small farmers, as well as for the great landowners. In the Middle Ages a degree of drainage, which allowed the conversion of pasture to meadow, provided livestock farmers with that most precious of commodities, winter fodder. In 1606 the lord and his tenants co-operated to reclaim part of the moor at Cossington in the Somerset Levels. In the 1830s the farmers of Burwell fen began to realize that they were missing out on the prosperity achieved through drainage by their neighbours at Swaffham. Protagonists of seventeenth-century fen drainage pointed out that a fat ox was better than a well-grown eel, and a tame sheep more use than a wild duck. Underlying local issues concerning the draining of the marshy commons was the national issue of the need for food. Bad harvests between 1593 and 1597 were the prelude to the great fen drainage projects of the seventeenth century, at a time when England’s growing population was increasingly concentrated in urban or rural industrial centres which were not self-sufficient. The farming achievements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were also motivated by the need for more food. By 1870, Europe was able to sustain a rapidly rising population, largely from its own resources: the agricultural revolution, including the critical part which drainage had played in it, had worked.

But back on the marshes and fens, who was really to profit from this continual process of ever more intensive cultivation? Thomas Fuller, writing in 1655, had the answer: ‘Grant them drained, and so continuing; as now the great fishes therein prey on the less, so the wealthy men would devour the poorer sort of people … and rich men, to make room for themselves, would jostle the poor people out of their commons.’

For small farmers and commoners, drainage generally meant at best higher rents, at worst dispossession. Those undertaking the drainage were quick to stake their claim to the best bits of land. Thus James Bentham writes of the Fens: ‘The smallest spots, however, scattered or remote, which first showed themselves above the surrounding waters, were eagerly seized upon by these watchful discoverers, and claimed as part of their allotted reward.’

It was a similar story in Somerset in the same period, worsened by the fact that access to the moor along the old drove-ways was severed by the new drainage ditches. An often quoted rhyme seems to sum it up:

They hang the man and flog the woman

Who steals the goose from off the Common;

But let the greater villain loose

Who steals the Common from the goose.

Not that the goose ever had much of a deal. Live plucking was normal practice by the commoners, in order to ensure quills of the best quality.

THE PEOPLE OF THE WETLANDS

Taming the flood necessitated taming the people of the flood-lands. Outsiders, who generally initiated the drainage, were as unimpressed by the people of the marshes as they were by their stagnant swamps. Camden described fenmen in 1586 as ‘rude, uncivil and envious to all others whom they call Upland Men; who stalking on high upon stilts apply their minds to grazing, fishing and fowling’.

Lieutenant Hammond, writing in 1635, went further: ‘I think they be halfe fish, halfe flesh, for they drinke like fishes and sleep like hogges.’ The people of Ely ‘have but a turfy scent and fenny posture about them, which smell I did not relish at all with any content’.

‘Fenmen, disgusting representations of ignorance and indecency!’ exclaimed the judge in the Littleport riots in 1816. In the same period, Arthur Young, subsidized by the big landlords to promote agricultural improvement, put his finger on what must have been a general attitude, when he described cattle-stealers in the Lincolnshire fens: ‘So wild a country nurses up a race of people as wild as the fen, and thus the morals and eternal welfare of numbers are hazarded and ruined for want of an inclosure.’

They certainly were a rough lot. Thomas Stone in 1794 described Deeping fen as a frequent resort of cattle-thieves. Between the 1740s and the 1820s, Romney Marsh was openly terrorized by armed gangs of smugglers. Richard Gough, in his ‘History of Myddle’ in Shropshire, written in 1700, describes how resentment aroused by increased rents for peat cutting following drainage improvements bubbled over into violence. The agent of Sir Edward Kinaston approached a certain Clarke for rent, when he was ‘cutting peates on Haremeare Mosse … But one of Clarke’s sons with a turfe spade, which they call a peate iron, (a very keen thing,) struck Sir Edward’s man on the head and cloave out his brains. The bayliffe fled.’

In the 1860s the first policeman ever sent to the fen village of Wicken was killed when he tried to break up a Saturday-night brawl. His body was wheeled off in a peat barrow and cremated in the local brick kiln.

Ever since opposition to drainage in the seventeenth century, the men of the Cambridgeshire fens were known as ‘fen tigers’. Their women folk must have been equally formidable. In 1632 ‘a crowd of women and men, armed with scythes and pitchforks, uttered threatening words’ to anyone attempting to drive their cattle off Holme fen.

In 1539 Sir Richard Brereton decided to enclose and drain the Dogmore, a marshy common near Prees in Shropshire, which he had bought from the bishop of Lichfield. The bishop was harangued by ‘fourtie wyfes of Prees’, one of whom ‘rudeley began to take his horse by the bridell whereat the horse sprang aside and put the Bysshop in danger of a fall’. Twelve years later, Brereton again went to the Dogmore, to appease ‘great tumults of the Tennants ther gathered together’. The local justice of the peace excused himself, saying he was ‘dysseasid of styche’.

The prospect of an armed mob, including that monstrous regiment of ‘wyfes’, must have been enough to bring on an immediate headache. A riot in 1694 at Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme is described by George Stovin, who was born the year after the events described: ‘Whilst the corn was growing, several men, women and children of Belton and among others the said Popplewell’s wife encouraged by him – in a riotous manner pulled down and burnt and laid waste the thorns and destroyed the corn.’

The ‘thorns’ must refer to the new enclosure hedges planted on the commons.

Such tough independent people must have posed a threat to both central and local government. Just as the Biesbosch on the Rhine delta was a centre for the Dutch underground opposition to Hitler, so the English wetlands have a long history as centres of resistance. Dio Cassius describes the difficulties with which the Romans subdued the ancient Britons, who hid in the marshes ‘with their heads only out of the water!’

Alfred the Great led the resistance against the Danes from Athelney in the Somerset Levels; and although every schoolchild knows that William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he did not succeed in subduing Ely and the surrounding fens until 1071, when Hereward the Wake submitted. Marshes have always been easy to defend. Romney Marsh was flooded as a defence against both Napoleon and Hitler, and Calais was lost in 1557 in part because the sluices were not opened in time to flood out the besiegers. The strategic importance of rivers and wetlands in medieval battles was commonplace whereby rival armies were bogged down in swamps or river crossings and cut to pieces. In this way the flower of English chivalry was destroyed by William Wallace at Sterling in 1297.

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’.

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.