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

THE COURTS OF SEWERS

Such piecemeal, not to mention conflicting, management of the marshes was no way to organize and control the ever-threatening flood-waters; and from the mid-thirteenth century, the responsibility for land drainage and reclamation from the sea began to devolve upon successive ‘commissions of sewers’, which were answerable to central government. A ‘sewer’ was a straight cut, the kind of geometrical channel beloved by modern engineers, and did not have the connotation of foul water which it has today. The first commission of sewers was set up in Lincolnshire by Henry de Bathe in 1258. Like fenland engineers 400 years later, de Bathe went for advice on procedure and administration to the heartland of organized land drainage, Romney Marsh. The subsequent courts of sewers were steadily reinforced by successive legislation, culminating in 1532 in Henry VIII’s Statute of Sewers, just at the moment when the power of the monastic lords of the levels was broken by the Reformation. These courts were to survive, incredibly, until 1930.

With the growth of commissions of sewers in the Middle Ages, the role of professional laypeople in such matters began to increase. In 1390 a commission was appointed to inspect and repair flood-banks and dykes on the Thames marshes between Greenwich and Woolwich. It included among its number the king’s clerk of works, no less than Geoffrey Chaucer.

The last major drainage operation in the medieval period, however, was instigated by a churchman. John Morton, later to become Henry VII’s lord chancellor, familiar to every schoolchild for his tax levies of ‘Morton’s Fork’, organized the construction of the channel still known as Morton’s Leam, when he was bishop of Ely between 1478 and 1486. This ambitious piece of engineering, extending for 12 miles between Peterborough and Wisbech, survives today, although the tower Morton built from which to watch over his work-force crumbled away in the early nineteenth century.

By the end of the Middle Ages, the marshes in Kent and Sussex had been sufficiently reclaimed to reveal an abiding characteristic of such operations: that in certain circumstances land drainage contains the seeds of its own destruction. In the mid-fifteenth century, floods and silting doomed the old port of Pevensey; and further along the coast, on Romney Marsh, a series of catastrophic storms culminating in 1287 obliterated the towns of Old Winchelsea and Broomhill. Although climatic deterioration in the later Middle Ages certainly worsened the situation, these disasters were not simply the haphazard expression of hostile Nature. They were made inevitable by human meddling. At Pevensey, reclamation of the adjacent estuary reduced tidal scouring, which had previously kept the river mouth open. In consequence, the water, unable to escape through the blocked outfall, flooded the land, and navigation up the river was also prevented. Successive new channels cut in 1402 and 1455 failed to remedy the problem, and Pevensey Castle, which still rises dramatically above the marshes whose creation ensured its demise, was abandoned.

On Romney Marsh, silting of river mouths was worsened by the problem of peat shrinkage. By the twelfth century, increasingly elaborate drainage schemes had led to contraction of the peat, thereby causing the land to drop ever lower in relation to the menacing waters of the English Channel. When the banks finally broke, the sea captured both arms of the river Rother, and created the present estuary south of Rye. This cat-and-mouse game between engineers and the elements was to become a major theme in the next great age of wetland reclamation, which began under the Tudors and reached its climax in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, the flood-waters began to rise again, since there were no monks to operate the sluices and dig the drains. At least, this was the opinion of Dugdale, writing a hundred years later; but it should be remembered that he was one of a long line of propagandists for land drainage, and that, while localized deterioration must have taken place, there is also ample evidence of the activities of the courts of sewers and of individual enterprise by secular landlords. In 1539 the gentry around Newhaven diverted the Sussex Ouse to improve the drainage of the estuarine marshland and to capture navigation and trade from their neighbours at Seaford. During the reign of Elizabeth, the Wealdmoors in Shropshire were a battleground between rival landlords intent on drainage and enclosure. In 1576 Thomas Cherrington complained in the Queen’s Council of the Marches, that Thurston Woodcock, lord of Meason, had assembled a gang armed with long staffs and billhooks, and had forcibly ploughed and then enclosed a piece of his waste ground with a ditch. Clearly Cherrington was not above such tactics either, for he seems to have destroyed the ditch. In 1583 the Woodcocks were back ‘with divers … desperate and lewde persons’ who ‘in riotous manner dug … one myghty diche more like in truthe a defence to have kepte owte some forren enemyes than an inclosure to keepe in cattell’.

Romney Marsh.

THE BATTLE FOR THE FENS

Towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, covetous eyes began to be cast on far grander prizes. The new card in the pack was foreign technology. In the reign of Henry VIII, Italian engineers had recovered Combe Marsh near Greenwich; and under Elizabeth, Plumstead and Erith marshes by the Thames were drained with the help of Dutch engineers and workmen.

In 1575 a certain Peter Morris of Dutch extraction obtained a licence from the queen to employ engines, or mills, for draining; and in 1589 Humphrey Bradley, who, despite his name, came from Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands, presented a treatise to Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley. It proposed nothing less than the reclamation for her kingdom of an area 70 miles long and 30 broad, equivalent to a whole new county, the ‘Great Level’ of the Fens. Shrewdly, in view of the trouble such ambitions were to cause her successors, the queen turned Bradley down. He went off to France, where, as Master of the Dykes for Henry IV, he supervised the draining of the great Poitevin marshes north of La Rochelle. But before she died, Elizabeth I signed an Act of Parliament in 1600 ‘for the recovering of many hundred thousand Acres of marshes’. The battle for the Fens was on.

The Stuart kings were forever short of money. The career of James I was marked by ingenious methods of raising cash, by fair means or foul; and similar expropriation was to lead his heir, Charles I, to his downfall. In such circumstances, the new engineering, which could apparently transform wetland wastes into sources of valuable crops to be sold to a growing population, must have seemed like something for nothing, and therefore irresistible. Francis Bacon advised King James to hold on to his royal wastes and hunting forests for exactly this potential; and, as if to confirm the good sense of such drainage enterprises, a series of bad winters between 1607 and 1613 created some of the worst 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’.

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’.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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. From the map made in 1639 by Thomas Arlebout, mariner, to mark 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’.

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;