Dutchman, Cornelius Vermuyden, who began his dyking and draining under
royal sanction and with Bedfordian aid in 1629. Vermuyden's is a great
figure historically considered, but his works are looked upon coldly
in these times, and it is even said that one of the principal labours
of modern engineers has been to rectify his errors. That view probably
originated with Rennie, who in 1810 was employed to drain and reclaim
the extensive marshland between Wisbeach and Lynn, and was bound, in
the usual professional manner, to speak evil things of one of the same
craft. There was little need, though, to be jealous of Vermuyden, who
had died obscurely, in poverty and in the cold shade of neglect, some
hundred and fifty years before. Vermuyden, as a matter of course,
employed Flamands and Hollanders in his works, for they were not merely
his own countrymen, but naturally skilled in labour of this technical
kind. These strangers aroused the enmity of the Fenmen, not for their
strangeness alone, but for the sake of the work they were engaged upon,
for the drainage of the Fens was then a highly unpopular proceeding.
The Fenmen loved their watery wastes, and little wonder that they did
so, for they knew none other, and they were a highly specialised race
of amphibious creatures, skilled in all the arts of the wild-fowler
and the fisherman, by which they lived. Farming was not within their
ken. They trapped and subsisted upon the innumerable fish and birds
that shared the wastes with them; birds of the duck tribe, the teal,
widgeon, and mallard; and greater fowl, like the wild goose and his
kind. For fish they speared and snared the eel, the pike, and the
lamprey--pre-eminently fish of the fens; for houses they contrived
huts of mud and stakes, thatched with the reeds that grew densely, to
a height of ten or twelve feet, everywhere; and as for firing, peat
was dug and stacked and burnt. Consider. The Fenman was a product of
the centuries. His father, his grandfather, his uttermost ancestors,
had squatted and fished and hunted where they would, and none could
say them nay. They paid no rent or tithe to anyone, for the Fens were
common, or waste. And now the only life the Fenman knew was like to be
taken from him. What could such an one do on dry land? A farmer put
aboard ship and set to navigate it could not be more helpless than the
dweller in those old marshes, dependent only upon his marsh lore, when
the water was drained off and the fishes gone, reed-beds cut down, the
land cultivated, and the wild-fowl dispersed. The fears of this people
were quaintly expressed in the popular verses then current, entitled
"The Powte's Complaint." "Powte," it should be said, was the Fen name
for the lamprey--
"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, if it be true the fens be undertaken,
And where we feed in fen and reed they'll feed both beef an 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,
And let the frogs and miry bogs destroy where they do enter.
Behold the great design, which they do now determine,
Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermine;
For they do mean all fens to drain and waters overmaster,
All will be dry, and we must die, 'cause Essex Calves want pasture.
Away with boats and rudders, farewell both boots and skatches,
No need of one nor t'other; men now make better matches;
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, O grievous case! to horned beasts and cattle,
Except that we can all agree to drive them out by battle."
Other verses follow, where winds, waves, and moon are invoked in aid,
but enough has been quoted to show exactly how affairs stood at this
juncture. But the Fenmen were not without their defender. He was found
in a certain young Huntingdonshire squire and brewer, one Oliver
Cromwell, Member of Parliament for Huntingdon, reclaimed from his
early evil courses, and now, a Puritan and a brand plucked timeously
from the burning, posing as champion of the people. Seven years past
this draining business had been going forward, and now that trouble
was brewing between King and people, and King wanted money, and people
would withhold it, the popular idea arose that the Fens were being
drained to provide funds for royal needs. Cromwell was at this time
resident in Ely, and seized upon the local grievances and exploited
them to his own end, with the result that the works were stopped and
himself raised to the extreme height of local popularity. But when
the monarchy was upset and Cromwell had become Lord Protector, he not
only authorised the drainage being resumed, but gave extreme aid and
countenance to William, Earl of Bedford, sending him a thousand Scots
prisoners from Dunbar, as pressed men, practically slaves, to work
in his trenches. Appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober is a famous
remedy, but appeal to Oliver, besotted with power, must have seemed
helpless to our poor Fen-slodgers, for they do not seem to have made
resistance, and the work progressed to its end.
XXX
IF most of those who have described Fenland have lacked imagination,
certainly the charge cannot be brought against that eighth-century
saint, Saint Guthlac, who fled into this great dismal swamp and founded
Crowland Abbey on its north-easterly extremity. Crowland has nothing to
do with the Ely and King's Lynn Road, but in describing what he calls
the "develen and luther gostes" that made his life a misery, Guthlac
refers to the evil inhabitants of the Fens in general. Precisely what a
"luther" ghost may be, does not appear. A Protestant spook, perhaps, it
might be surmised, except that Lutheran schisms did not arise for many
centuries later.
Saints were made of strange materials in ancient times, and Guthlac was
of the strangest. Truth was not his strong point, and he could and did
tell tales that would bring a blush to the hardy cheek of a Sir John
Mandeville, or arouse the bitter envy of a Munchausen. But Guthlac's
character shall not be taken away without good cause shown. He begins
reasonably enough, with an excellent descriptive passage, picturing the
"hideous fen of huge bigness which extends in a very long track even
to the sea, ofttimes clouded with mist and dark vapours, having within
it divers islands and woods, as also crooked and winding rivers"; but
after this mild prelude goes on to make very large demands upon our
credulity.
He had a wattle hut on an island, and to this poor habitation, he tells
us, the "develen and luther gostes" came continually, dragged him
out of bed and "tugged and led him out of his cot, and to the swart
fen, and threw and sunk him in the muddy waters." Then they beat him
with iron whips. He describes these devils in a very uncomplimentary
fashion. They had "horrible countenances, great heads, long necks, lean
visages, filthy and squalid beards, rough ears, fierce eyes, and foul
mouths; teeth like horses' tusks, throats filled with flame, grating
voices, crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind." It would have
been scarce possible to mistake one of these for a respectable peasant.
After fifteen years of this treatment, Guthlac died, and it is to
be hoped these hardy inventions of his are not remembered against
him. No one else found the Fens peopled so extravagantly. Only the
will-o'-wisps that danced fitfully and pallid at night over the
treacherous bogs, and the poisonous miasma exhaled from the noxious
beds of rotting sedge; only the myriad wild-fowl made the wilderness
strange and eerie.
Guthlac was the prime romancist of the Fens, but others nearly
contemporary with him did not altogether lack imagination and inventive
powers; as where one of the old monkish chroniclers gravely states
that the Fen-folk were born with yellow bellies, like frogs, and were
provided with webbed feet to fit them for their watery surroundings.
Asthma and ague were long the peculiar maladies of these districts.
Why they should have been is sufficiently evident, but Dugdale, who
has performed the difficult task of writing a dry book upon the Fens,
uses language that puts the case very convincingly. He says, "There
is no element good, the air being for the most part cloudy, gross,
and full of rotten harrs; the water putrid and muddy, yea, full of
loathsome vermin; the earth spungy and boggy." No wonder, then, that
the terrible disease of ague seized upon the unfortunate inhabitants of
this watery waste. Few called this miasmatic affection by that name:
they knew it as the "Bailiff of Marshland," and to be arrested by the
dread bailiff was a frequent experience of those who worked early or
late in the marshes, when the poisonous vapours still lingered. To
alleviate the miseries of ague the Fen-folk resorted to opium, and
often became slaves to that drug. Another very much dreaded "Bailiff"
was the "Bailiff of Bedford," as the Ouse, coming out of Bedfordshire,
was called. He of the marshland took away your health, but the flooded
Ouse, rising suddenly after rain or thaw, swept your very home away.
Still, in early morn, in Wicken Fen, precautions are taken by the
autumn sedge-cutter against the dew and the exhalations from the
earth, heavy with possibilities of marsh fever. He ties a handkerchief
over his mouth for that purpose, while to protect himself against the
sharp edges of the sedge he wears old stockings tied round his arms,
leather gaiters on his legs, and a calfskin waistcoat.
The modern Fen-folk are less troubled with ague than their immediate
ancestors, but the opium habit has not wholly left them. Whether
they purchase the drug, or whether it is extracted from the white
poppies that are a feature of almost every Fenland garden, they still
have recourse to it, and "poppy tea" is commonly administered to the
children to keep them quiet while their parents are at work afield.
The Fenlanders are, by consequence, a solemn and grim race, shaking
sometimes with ague, and at others "as nervous as a kitten," as they
are apt to express it, as a result of drugging themselves. Another,
and an entirely innocent, protection against ague is celery, and the
celery-bed is a cherished part of a kitchen-garden in the Fens.
One of the disadvantages of these oozy flats is the lack of good
drinking-water. The rivers, filled as they are with the drainings of
the dykes and ditches, can only offer water unpleasant both to smell
and taste, if not actually poisonous from the decaying matter and the
myriad living organisms in it; and springs in the Fens are practically
unknown. Under these circumstances the public-houses do a good trade in
beer and spirits.
XXXI
CAMBRIDGESHIRE is a singularly stoneless country, and in the Fens there
is not so much as a pebble to be found. Thus it has become a common
jest of the Cambridgeshire farmers to offer to swallow all the stones
you can pick up in their fields. Farm horses for this reason are never
shod, and it sounds not a little strange and uncanny to see one of the
great waggon-horses plodding along a Fenland "drove," as the roads
are named, and to hear nothing but the sound of his bells and the
indistinct thudding of his shoeless feet in the dust or the mud, into
whichever condition the weather has thrown the track.
A Fenland road is one thing among others peculiar to the Fens. It is a
very good illustration of eternity, and goes on, flat and unbending,
with a semi-stagnant ditch on either side, as far as eye can reach
in the vast solitary expanse, empty save for an occasional ash-tree
or group of Lombardy poplars, with perhaps a hillock rising in the
distance crowned by a church and a village. No "metal" or ballast has
ever been placed on the Fenland drove. In summer it is from six to
eight inches deep in a black dust, that rises in choking clouds to the
passage of a vehicle or on the uprising of a breeze; in winter it is
a sea of mud, congealed on the approach of frost into ruts and ridges
of the most appalling ruggedness. The Fen-folk have a home-made way
with their execrable "droves." When they become uneven they just harrow
them, as the farmer in other counties harrows his fields, and, when
they are become especially hard, they plough them first and harrow
them afterwards; a procedure that would have made Macadam faint with
horror. The average-constituted small boy, who throws stones by nature,
discovers something lacking in the scheme of creation as applied
to these districts. Everywhere the soil is composed of the ancient
alluvial silt brought down to these levels by those lazy streams,
the Nene, the Lark, the Cam, and the Ouse, and of the dried peat of
these sometime stagnant and festering morasses. Now that drainage has
so thoroughly done its work, that in ardent summers the soil of this
former inland sea gapes and cracks with dryness, it is no uncommon
sight to see water pumped on to the baking fields from the leams and
droves. The earth is of a light, dry black nature, consisting of
fibrous vegetable matter, and possesses the well-known preservative
properties of bog soil. Thus the trees of the primeval forest that
formerly existed here, and were drowned in an early stage of the
world's history, are often dug up whole. Their timber is black too,
as black as coal, as may be seen by the wooden bridges that cross the
drains and cuts, often made from these prehistoric trees.
Here is a typical dyke. Its surface is richly carpeted with
water-weeds, and the water-lily spreads its flat leaves prodigally
about it; the bright yellow blossoms reclining amid them like graceful
naiads on fairy couches. But the Fenland children have a more prosaic
fancy. They call them "Brandy-balls." The flowering rush, flushing a
delicate carmine, and the aquatic sort of forget-me-not, sporting the
Cambridge colours, are common inhabitants of the dykes; and in the more
stagnant may be found the "water-soldier," a queer plant without any
roots, living in the still slime at the bottom until the time comes for
it to put forth its white blossoms, when it comes to "attention" in the
light of day, displays its fleeting glory, and then sinks again, "at
ease," to its fetid bed. There is a current in the dykes, but the water
flows so imperceptibly that it does not deflect the upstanding spikes
of the daintiest aquatic plant by so much as a hair's-breadth. Indeed,
it would not flow at all, and would merely stagnate, were it not for
the windmill-worked pumps that suck it along and, somewhere in the void
distance, impel it up an inclined plane, and so discharge it into the
longer and higher drain, whence it indolently flows into one of the
canalised rivers, and so, through a sluice, eventually finds its way
into the sea at ebbtide.
The means by which the Fens are kept drained are not without their
interest. A glance at a map of Cambridgeshire and its neighbouring
counties will show the Great Level to be divided up into many
patches of land by hard straight lines running in every direction.
Some are thicker, longer, and straighter than others, but they all
inter-communicate, and eventually reach one or other of the rivers.
The longest, straightest, and broadest of these represents that great
drain already mentioned, the Old Bedford River, seventy feet wide and
twenty-one miles long; cut in the seventeenth century to shorten the
course of the Ouse and to carry off the floods. Others are the New
Bedford River, one hundred feet in width, cut only a few years later
and running parallel with the first; Vermuyden's Eau, or the Forty Foot
Drain, of the same period, feeding the Old Bedford River from the Nene,
near Ramsey, with their tributaries and counter-drains. The North Level
cuts belong principally to the early part of the nineteenth century,
when Rennie drained the Wisbeach and Lynn districts.
[Illustration: A WET DAY IN THE FENS.]
The main drains are at a considerably higher level than the surrounding
lands, the water in them only prevented from drowning the low-lying
fields again by their great and solid banks, fourteen to sixteen feet
high, and about ten feet in breadth at the top. These banks, indeed,
form in many districts the principal roads. Perilous roads at night,
even for those who know them well, and one thinks with a shudder of
the dangers encountered of old by local medical men, called out in the
darkness to attend some urgent case. Their custom was--perhaps it is in
some places still observed--to mount their steady nags and to jog along
with a lighted stable-lantern swinging from each stirrup, to throw a
warning gleam on broken bank or frequent sunken fence.
At an interval of two miles along these banks is generally to be found
a steam pumping-engine, busily and constantly occupied in raising water
from the lodes and dykes in the lower levels and pouring it into the
main channel. The same process is repeated in the case of raising the
water from the field-drains into the smaller dykes by a windmill or
"skeleton-pump," as it is often called. It is a work that is never
done, but goes forward, year by year, and is paid for by assessments
on the value of the lands affected by these operations. Commissioners,
themselves local landowners and tenants, and elected by the same
classes, look after the conduct and the efficiency of the work, and
see that the main drains are scoured by the "scourers"; the banks duly
repaired by the "bankers" and the "gaulters"; the moles, that might
bring disaster by burrowing through them, caught by the "molers"; and
the sluices kept in working order. The rate imposed for paying the
cost of these works is often a heavy one, but the land is wonderfully
rich and productive. Nor need the Fenland farmer go to extraordinary
expense for artificial manure, or for marling his fields when at length
he has cropped all the goodness out of the surface soil. The very best
of restoratives lies from some five to twelve feet under his own land,
in the black greasy clay formed from the decaying vegetable matter of
the old forests that underlie the Fens. A series of pits is sunk on the
land, the clay obtained from them is spread over it, and the fields
again yield a bounteous harvest.
Harvest-work and farm-work in general in the Fens is in some ways
peculiar to this part of the country, for farm-holdings are large and
farmsteads far between. The practice, under these conditions, arose of
the work being done by gangs; the hands assembling at break of day in
the farmyard and being despatched in parties to their distant day's
work in hoeing, weeding, or picking in the flat and almost boundless
fields; returning only when the day's labour is ended. Men, women,
and children gathered thus in the raw morning make a picture--and
in some ways a pitiful picture--of farming and rustic life, worthy
of a Millet. But our Millet has not yet come; and the gangs grow
fewer. If he does not hasten, they will be quite gone, and something
characteristic in Fenland-life quite lost. A Fenland farm-lass may
wear petticoats, or she may not. Sometimes she acts as carter, and
it is precisely in such cases that she sheds her feminine skirts and
dons the odd costume that astonishes the inquisitive stranger new to
these parts, who sees, with doubt as to whether he sees aright, a
creature with the boots and trousers of a man, a nondescript garment,
half bodice and half coat with skirts, considerably above the knees,
and a sun-bonnet on her head, working in the rick-yards, or squashing
heavily through the farmyard muck. Skirts are out of place in
farmyards and in cattle-byres, and the milkmaid, too, of these parts
is dressed in like guise. If you were to show a milkmaid in the Fens
a picture illustrating "Where are you going to, my pretty maid?" in
the conventional fashion, she would criticise very severely, as quite
incorrect, the skirted figure of a poet's dream usually presented. She
saves her skirts and her flower-trimmed hat for Sundays.
XXXII
AND now we must come from the general to the especial; from Fens and
Fen-folk in the mass to a bright particular star.
The greatest historical figure along the whole course of this road is
that of Hereward the Wake, the "last of the English," as he has been
called. "Hereward," it has been said, means "the guard of the army,"
while "the Wake" is almost self-explanatory, signifying literally the
Wide Awake, or the Watchful. He is thought to have been the eldest son
of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and of the famous Godiva, and to have been
banished by his father and outlawed. Like objects dimly glimpsed in a
fog, the figure of Hereward looms gigantic and uncertain through the
mists of history, and how much of him is real and how much legendary
no one can say. When Hereward was born, in the mild reign of Edward
the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxons who six hundred and fifty years before
had conquered Britain, and, driving a poor remnant of the enervated
race of Romanised Britons to the uttermost verge of the island, changed
the very name of the country from Britain to England, had themselves
degenerated. The Saxons were originally among the fiercest of savages,
and derived their name from the "sæxe," or short sword, with which they
came to close and murderous combat; but the growth of civilisation
and the security in which they had long dwelt in the conquered island
undermined their original combativeness, and for long before the
invasion of England by William the Conqueror they had been hard put
to it to hold their own against the even more savage Danes. Yet at
the last, at Hastings under Harold, they made a gallant stand against
the Normans, and if courage alone could have won the day, why then no
Norman dynasty had ever occupied the English throne. The Battle of
Hastings was only won by superior military dispositions on the part of
William. His archers gained him the victory, and by their disconcerting
arrow-flights broke the advance of the Saxons armed with sword and
battle-axe.
That most decisive and momentous battle in the world's history was
lost and won on the 14th day of October 1066. It was followed by a
thorough-going policy of plunder and confiscation. Everywhere the
Saxon landowners were dispossessed of their property, and Normans
replaced them. Even the Saxon bishops were roughly deprived of their
sees, and alien prelates from over sea took their place. The Saxon
race was utterly degraded and crushed, and to be an Englishman became
a reproach; so that the Godrics, Godbalds, and Godgifus, the Ediths,
the Alfreds, and other characteristic Saxon names, began to be replaced
by trembling parents with Roberts, and Williams, and Henrys, and other
names of common Norman use.
Now, in dramatic fashion, Hereward comes upon the scene. Two years
of this crushing tyranny had passed when, one calm summer's evening
in 1068, a stranger, accompanied by only one attendant, entered the
village of Brunne, in Lincolnshire, the place now identified with
Bourne; Bourne and its Teutonic original form of Brunne meaning a
stream. It was one of his father's manors. Seeking, unrecognised,
shelter for the night, he was met by lamentations, and was told that
Leofric, the great Earl, was dead; that his heir, the Lord Hereward,
was away in foreign parts; and that his younger brother, now become
heir, had only the day before been foully murdered by the Normans, who
had in derision fixed his head over the doorway. Moreover, the Normans
had seized the house and the manor. "Alas!" wailed the unhappy Saxon
dependants, "we have no power to revenge these things. Would that
Hereward were here! Before to-morrow's sunrise they would all taste of
the bitter cup they have forced on us."