Notes on Old Peterborough

by Andrew Percival

PART THE SECOND.

An Oasis in the Desert.—Old System of Castor Farming.—A Lighted Beacon.—The Fen Around Us.—Draining the Great Level.—The Mill System of Draining.—Snatched From the Sea.—How Land Improved in Value.—“Intelligent Fenmen.”—Old Town Bridge.—Old-time Jaunt through the City.—Poor House and New Gaol.—Thorpe Road Hostelry.—Newtown.—The Great Breweries and the Ponds.—Cabbage Row.—Burial at Cross Roads.—Frog Hall.—Gas Works Started.—Old Market.—Ladies and the Cattle.—Wednesday Market.—A Curiosity Market.—God’s Acre.

The great point which strikes us all, and which strikes everyone considering the history of the last seventy years in the City of Peterborough is the very great increase in the population, and when one began to think how it came about we used to say “it is owing to the railways.” But that is like telling you that the world, as the Indians say, is supported on the back of a tortoise! You want to know why the railways were wanted, what the tortoise stands upon, because if you look into statistics seventy years ago, before the railways, the population of Peterborough was considerably increasing, and the populations of agricultural districts altogether were very much increasing, and when you go a little further, if you look at all into the history of the land around Peterborough, or the country altogether, you will find within a century there had been a great change. Now, take for instance the immediate neighbourhood of Peterborough. My recollection of it begins, as I have said, at the latter end of 1833, at the commencement of the last century. I think the only parish, if I except Fletton, the only enclosed parish within some few miles of this place was the parish of Paston.

There you will rind the church, surrounded by old trees, and the parish differed very much from others. If you look into the Churchyard there you will find a great many names of the inhabitants of Peterborough and other parishes outside Paston. If you look into the Paston register you will find marriages solemnised between inhabitants not belonging to Paston, the undoubted fact being that the enclosed parish of Paston led people to desire they should be married and buried there. Paston was a kind of oasis in the desert.

Most of the parishes around here were in the position and character of Castor, which until recently was the only open field parish within many miles of this place. I was riding through Castor field some years ago, before it was enclosed, with a few farmers, when one turned round and said: “How should you like to farm this parish?” “Not at all,” was the reply. A man in the parish who had a farm of a hundred acres would have to go to his farm in four different parts of the parish—some against Ailsworth, Milton Park, Alwalton, and so on, perhaps scattered in pieces of one acre, two roods, and so forth. So that with a large farm a man would have to go to a farm of a hundred acres to as many different places two or three miles apart. The pieces were so narrow that they were like ribbons; you could plough lengthways but not crossways. As soon as you turned, you got on to your neighbour’s land, which was frequently a subject of dispute. Conceive the state of the cultivation of the country generally when that was the system not only in one parish, but in the general bulk, at all events, in this part of the kingdom.

Peterborough was open. All the parishes, to my knowledge, from Peterborough to Deeping, and east to west, have been enclosed since 1812. There was a beacon lighted at night to light the passengers over the weary waste, since brought into cultivation. Just conceive, if you can, the state in which this part of the country was then, and in what it is now, and consider the great increase of corn that can be grown, and not only corn that can be grown, but the stock that can be fed by the cultivation of roots and the introduction of bone manure, and then you get some idea of the increased production of the country, that rendered improved roads, terminating in railroads, necessary. For the same reason, the marvellous increase in the manufacturing districts has been kept pace with in the agricultural production of the country, another feature in our neighbourhood.

If you begin at Cambridge and draw a line along the high land by St. Ives, east of Peterborough, by Spalding and Boston, down to the Humber, you will find the tract of land known as the Fen Country. That country has undergone within the last seventy or eighty years, or a great part of it, a change even more striking than that which has passed over the uplands. At first you would be inclined to doubt whether there were any such places as the Fens at all. If you say to anybody “Don’t you live in the Fens”? the reply will be “Oh, no.” At Peterborough we are not in the Fens. Of course not! There is Flag Fen, and there is Borough Fen, but we are on high ground, and not in the Fen, and you will find, even if you go east of Wisbech, where the land is called marsh land, which sounds rather funny, that the farmers and graziers there will say they don’t live in the Fens. And walking towards the sea you will always be told you have come to the wrong place, you must go a little further, and then you will find the Fen country! But still, take the Fens as we know them, extending from Peterborough to Cambridge, and down by Boston nearly to the Humber.

I will confine my observations to that which most comes within my own knowledge, that district of the Fens known as the Bedford Level, called the South, the Middle, and the North Level. From the beginning of Crowland on the North, down to, say, the Middle by March and Lynn, and the South down to Cambridge. In the year 1637 a Charter was passed by Charles I. for the improvement of that country, and we form some notion of what it must have been—the weary waste of waters it must have been—from the preamble of the Charter of Incorporation. It is described as being generally covered with water, of little advantage to mankind, except yielding some few river fish and water fowl, that is when you may catch them, and on lucky days you may shoot wild ducks. Adventurers had endeavoured to make lines of meadows, which had made such progress that it was hoped this place, which had lately presented nothing to the eye but waters and a few reeds thinly scattered here and there, might, under Divine mercy, become some of it pleasant pasture for cattle, with many houses belonging to the inhabitants. That seemed to have been the extreme notion of what could be made of that country in the way of production. Going on to the year 1830, when the last history of the Bedford Level was written by Mr. Samuel Wells, well known as the Register of the Corporation, he speaks of it seventy-five years ago as a matter of congratulation that at that time, when they had improved it sufficiently to grow oats and cole seed, that the cultivation of wheat had begun to extend itself into the Fen country. He spoke of it almost as a novelty, and says that the Corporation, soon after its formation, had interfered to prevent the inhabitants, occupiers, and owners of property from improving and draining by mills. He says that the system of drainage by mills was abandoned in consequence of the result of the suit to prevent it being favourable to the Corporation.

However, in a short time, after many struggles, the Level becoming so inundated by the choking of interior drains, the defective state of the rivers, and neglected improvement of outfalls, the Corporation found it impossible to resist the importunity of the country to resort to artificial drainage, and therefore waived their objection, and allowed a return of the mill system. The mill system up to 1830 consisted simply of working a machine by wind to lift the water out of some embanked portion of the Fens into a drain at a higher level, to conduct it to one of the main drains of the Corporation to the outfall in the sea. Seventy years ago, Mr. Wells tells us, in the whole district of the Bedford Level—350,000 acres—there were only five steam engines, one being in the parish of Newboro’, put up on the enclosuse. He says there was a general opinion that steam drainage would be further prosecuted, but this depended upon the finances of the district, and he goes on to say many intelligent Fenmen indulged the hope of acquiring a natural drainage, when the result of the work now undertaken, in a greater or a less degree on all three levels, can be fully understood and ascertained. The author, however, says he cannot rank himself amongst the number of those sanguine persons. He thought it great progress to get five steam engines, and hoping they would get more, he, as an intelligent Fenman, thought it was as much as he could anticipate.