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

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.

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.

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’.

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’.

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 latter was re-engaged in 1650.

The following year, despite the midnight activities of ‘the meaner sort of Burwell’

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.

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.

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?

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.

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’.

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.

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’;

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.

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.

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.

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 £1,000 to carry out a survey of his achievements. It was in the reign of ‘Farmer George’ that drainage became more than ever in vogue, ‘improvement’ being all the rage. In the eighteenth century this word had two meanings, basically different faces of the same coin. ‘Capability Brown’, and later Repton were employed to ‘improve’ the beauties of the grounds around country houses. It seems curious that for all those hard-riding, hard-drinking squires, the eternal search for a status symbol should have taken the form of building temples to nymphs and dryads. Nonetheless, the universality of this practice is attested by one wit who told Brown that he would like to die before him, so that he could have a look at heaven before Brown ‘improved’ it. The other meaning of the word, still current in farming circles, is to intensify agricultural production. This form of improvement no doubt helped to pay the fees of Brown and Repton, along with all the other bills. Invoking a doctrine of the ‘spirit of place’, they felled ancient woodlands and drained the marshes. Villages were razed to the ground, so that they did not disrupt the view from drawing-room windows, with the same enthusiasm with which the peasantry on the more distant corners of the estate were dispossessed of their wetland commons in the pursuit of productive farming.

The environmental contradictions implicit in all this activity scarcely occurred to anyone, of course. Sir Joseph Banks, the greatest naturalist of the age, founder of Kew Gardens and botanist-companion to Captain Cook, first developed his boyhood passion for natural history in East, West, and Wildmoor fens, which washed up to the foot of the Lincolnshire wolds, and so to the very gates of Revesby Abbey, the Banks’s family home. In his old age, Banks presided over the destruction of these fens, supporting the drainage projects of John Rennie, according to the Farmer’s Magazine of February 1807, against ‘a party of uninformed people, headed by a little parson and a magistrate’.

His portrait hangs in the place of honour in the Boston office of the Anglian Water Authority.

Another botanist, William Roscoe, founder of Liverpool botanic gardens and commemorated by the genus Roscoea beloved of alpine gardeners, actually bankrupted himself as a result of a drainage scheme.

In 1793 Roscoe began work on Trafford Moss, part of the mighty Chat Moss, 2,500 acres of sphagnum, sundew, and bog asphodel. Roscoe’s ambition was to drain the whole wetland, and to this end he organized ditching, marling, and importation from nearby Manchester of boatload upon boatload of human ordure, which was forked by hand on to the moss. One of Roscoe’s ideas was a windmill plough, whose sails would actually churn up the bog. Unsurprisingly, in view of such projects, he was financially ruined, and his interest in Chat Moss was bought out by 1821.

No one was worse at making connections about the consequences of his actions than William Madocks who reclaimed the coastal marshes of the Traeth Mawr in North Wales.

His embankment across the Glaslyn estuary was completed in 1811 amidst much rejoicing and ox-roasting, only to collapse the following year. After its final reconstruction, it was to bear the main road and railway out of Portmadoc, named in honour of its founder, who, with sublime inconsistency, passionately espoused the fashionable ideals of picturesque landscape. The man who rammed a causeway across the front of the finest prospect of Snowdonia was actually given to carving breathless verses to the water sprites on the river cliffs at Dolgellau. As he imposed his geometrical grid of drainage ditches across the newly filled-in estuary of the Traeth, it occurred to Madocks for a brief, but anxious, moment that the whole project resembled ‘Dutch gardening’; but in no time the poet Shelley arrived to help him with his endeavours, declaiming on the ‘poetry of engineering’. Only one man could see the situation clearly: Thomas Love Peacock, who described the scenic effect of Madocks’s project in his novel Headlong Hall: ‘The mountain frame remains unchanged, unchangeable: but the liquid mirror it enclosed is gone.’

ENCLOSURE IN THE NAPOLEONIC ERA

What it felt like to be on the receiving end of such operations and the hammering that the landscape endured in those early years of the nineteenth century are painfully conveyed by another poet whose roots were in the East Midlands. By the Napoleonic era, when the war with France intensified the need for food, enclosure of common land by Act of Parliament began to replace enclosure by agreement. In 1809 an Act was passed for the enclosing of the parishes of Maxey and Helpston in Northamptonshire. One aspect of the landscape revolution that this entailed appears to have been major drainage works, which drastically modified the stream between the two villages, to create what is now known as the Maxey Cut. John Clare, in his poem ‘Remembrances’, describes the damage done to his parish by the axe of ‘spoiler and self-interest’:

O I never call to mind