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

Andrew Motion’s poem ‘Inland’ describes how a society, as much as an ecology, was overturned by drainage projects in the seventeenth-century fens. In this extract, a fen villager watches the arrival by boat of the men who are going to change his life:

Sun flicked round the bay,

binding the outline of farms

to their reflections in grey

bands of light. The marsh

always survives. Always.

Cattle stirred in their shed,

uncoiling sweet whisps

of breath over my head;

fresh shadows spilt down

their flanks and spread

across water to flake

into shrinking fragments

over the strangers’ wake.

Their boat put down

some men; one staked

its prow into our land,

waded towards us

over the grass, and

lifted one arm. Our world

dried on his hand.

That world was one of many fen villagers co-operating in order to survive. In the battle to save West Sedgemoor and the Derwent Ings in the 1970s and 1980s, the large number of small landowners was to militate against the efficiency with which large-scale drainage schemes could be organized. In 1794 Billingsley described the Somerset Levels as ‘destitute of gentlemen’s houses’;

and the 1580 muster returns for Holland in Lincolnshire lamented ‘the want of gentlemen here to inhabit’.

Charlton-on-Otmoor means ‘town of the churls’. A ‘churl’ was a free peasant (note the slur implied by present dictionary usage), and Charlton never had a resident squire, being dismissed in eighteenth-century diocesan returns as having ‘no family of note’.

The people of Charlton must have cherished their independence, especially when they looked at the fate of the neighbouring village of Noke, which, it was said, was lost in a game of cards by Lily, duchess of Marlborough.

Reports on current or just completed land-drainage schemes emphasize the trend whereby large farmers accrue the benefit much more commonly than small holders. The theory behind such schemes is that ambitious large farmers will set an example, which will encourage their small backward neighbours. The latter are described in all current cost-benefit reports of the Ministry of Agriculture as ‘laggards’. The assumptions behind this unfortunate word go back a long way. In 1652 Dugdale described fenmen as a ‘lazy and beggarly people’. Billingsley castigated the farmers of the Somerset Levels in the late eighteenth century thus:

The possession of a cow or two, with a hog and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant in his own conception, above his brethren in the same rank of society … In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence … and at length the sale of a half-fed cow or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.

No doubt such people must have seemed slow-witted. In order to counteract the effects of malaria, they were frequently doped with opium, which was sold over the counter in the village shop or grown in the fens (where Poppy Hill and Poppy Farm still exist as place-names). Where cannabis was grown as an important fibre crop in the Cambridgeshire fens, the workers in the hemp fields were known to become exceedingly drowsy. Moreover, the isolation of the people of the wetlands led to inbreeding. In 1870 the geologist de Rance commented on the number of idiots in the Lancashire Fylde, which resulted from ‘the dislike of the people to marry outside the district’.

The laggards were constantly encouraged to improve for their own good. Arthur Young, as usual, has the last word. Here he describes the wetlands of Lincolnshire: ‘Fens of water, mud, wildfowl, frogs and agues have been converted to rich pasture and arable worth from 20 shillings to 40 shillings an acre: health improved, morals corrected and the community enriched’.

The history of drainage since the sixteenth century has seen the decline of enforced co-operation in sharing a resource, in the face of individual private enterprise. The big farmer has got bigger, and the small farmer smaller. This thought brings us bang up to date. The great agricultural revolution of our own times, in which drainage has played no small part, has accelerated the decline of the small farmer just as surely as it has imperilled the ecological system previously sustained by communal wetland management; and it has begun to destroy the basic resources of the land, as ever deeper drainage has created mineral problems in the soil, wastage of peat, and an increasing dependence upon pumping. Attempts to tame the flood have not always progressed smoothly. There have been frequent and major setbacks; and it may be that we are now on the threshold of a new era, in which, for the first time, leaders in society will make a conscious decision to allow the flood-waters in some areas to rise again.

With all the themes previously outlined in mind, it is time to make a brief chronological survey of that process, which began in the mists of time, and has made inevitable the problems and conflicts described in the remaining chapters of this book. We are witnessing only the latest episode in that long history, in which geography itself has been remade, and the landscape, now more than ever, is transformed not so much by the efforts of individuals, as by public policy and the stroke of a pen.

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_db7c2a88-3df6-53fb-96af-0912e6160e38)

THE WINNING OF THE WATERS (#ulink_db7c2a88-3df6-53fb-96af-0912e6160e38)

A History of the Fight against Flooding until the Post-War Era

Today, land-drainage operations are administered from tower blocks, with the aid of computers in the office and sophisticated machinery on the river bank. It all seems a peculiarly modern phenomenon. In fact, the technocrats of land drainage are heirs to one of the oldest forms of organized local government. In 1252 the ‘jurats’ of Romney Marsh are recorded as having had the power to repair the sea wall and to control the ditches ‘from time out of mind’.

Similarly, organized bodies of people walked the marshes of the Thames, setting out in the early morning mist to assess the repairs required, which were paid for by a charge known as ‘wallscot’ or ‘scottage’. Those who escaped these earliest of water-rates could be deemed to have got off ‘scot free’. In the Domesday Book, our first named drainage specialist makes his appearance. He lived on the Somerset Levels, and was called Girard Fossarius, Gerard of the Drain.

The people of the Middle Ages inherited sea walls and drainage channels which had survived from the Roman occupation. The Romans had gained expertise in flood alleviation and in irrigation projects from the Greeks and the Etruscans before them. They industriously developed these skills throughout Europe, and were quick to export them to their colonies.

The emperor Hadrian is commemorated in Britain not only by the engineering achievement of his famous wall, but also by the Car dyke, a catch-water drain encircling the western edge of the Fens, linking the river Cam at Waterbeach with the Witham near Lincoln.

On the Medway estuary in Kent, raised banks built by the Romans to keep out the sea lasted substantially until the eighteenth century,

and the extent of Roman reclamation appears to have been formidable. The military and political decline of the Roman Empire coincided with a worsening of the climate, and both contributed to a rising of the swamps in the Dark Ages. This must have reinforced the terror of such places, as portrayed in ‘Beowulf’ and the chronicles relating to St Guthlac. Nonetheless, settlement persisted in some of the wetlands. The priest Rumen, or Romanus, who was chaplain to King Oswy’s wife in the seventh century, probably gave his name to Romney Marsh, large areas of which he owned and may have farmed. Charters of 875 and 972 concerning Longdon Marsh in Worcestershire give a picture of clearing and enclosure among streams and marshes, including a duck pond ‘on ducan seathe’, traces of which still survive under the M50 motorway.

Piecemeal drainage and reclamation in the Cambridgeshire fens, carried out by Saxon farmers around Wisbech and Ely, have been traced through the detective work of archaeologists, using aerial photography and careful analysis of the evidence on the ground.

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH

With the dawning of the Middle Ages, the driving force for reclamation of the marshes became the Church. Many monasteries had settled for safety on secluded islands in the wetlands. The Cistercians even took their name from cisterna, the Latin name for a swamp. By the sixth century, a colony of holy men had gathered at Glastonbury in the Somerset Levels. As the confidence and prosperity of the monasteries increased, so did the enthusiasm with which the monks began to drain and develop the wetlands around them. This was the pattern in wetlands all over the country until the Reformation. It is hard to underestimate the impact of the monasteries, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The monks of Furness reclaimed the coastal marshes of Walney, with embankments incorporating beach pebbles. Cockersands Abbey drained and hedged part of the Lancashire Fylde. The surviving network of ditches on the Monmouthshire Levels beside the Bristol Channel is essentially that dug by the Benedictines in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth century the bishop of Durham instigated extensive drainage works along the northern shores of the Humber. The monks of Meaux were active in the Hull valley, and those of Fountains on the Derwent Ings. In 1180 the canons of St Thomas drained the flood-lands at Eccleshall in Staffordshire. Battle Abbey actively reclaimed the Pevensey Levels in Sussex, and on Romney Marsh a lead was given by the priors of Christ Church, Canterbury, and by the archbishops themselves. Just as the church at Aughton stands as a touchstone of the spirit of the Derwent Ings, so the little church of St Thomas à Becket at Fairfield represents all the romance and loneliness of Romney Marsh. Prior to drainage work in the 1960s, Fairfield was regularly islanded by winter floods. Sheep graze up to its walls, mellow with yellow lichen, and the reedy dykes which surround it are famous for their marsh frogs, whose operatic baritone can be heard a mile away on May nights. The dedication of the church to St Thomas is no accident. Becket may well have been closely involved in building the great walls of packed clay which still enclose the local ‘innings’, or sheep pastures. They must have added considerably to the wealth of the See of Canterbury.

Near Fairfield you can still see the innings of St Thomas. On a grander scale, the dog-toothed vault of Crowland Abbey arches like the jawbone of a mighty whale above the Lincolnshire fens, a monument to the riches which the monks harvested from the marsh.

The church of St Thomas à Becket at Fairfield epitomizes all the romance and loneliness of Romney Marsh. © Jo Nelson

The 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’.

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.

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.