The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway

by Charles G. Harper

XXIX

A great part of the Fens seems to have been drained and cultivated at so early a time as the reigns of Stephen and Henry the Second, for William of Malmesbury describes this as then "the paradise of England," with luxuriant crops and flourishing gardens; but this picture of prosperity was suddenly blotted out by the great gale that arose on the morrow of St. Martin 1236, and continued for eight days and nights. The sea surged over the embankments and flowed inwards past Wisbeach, and the rivers, instead of flowing away, were forced back and so drowned the levels. Some attempts to reclaim the land were made, but a similar disaster happened seventeen years later, and the fen-folk seem to have given up all efforts at keeping out the waters, for in 1505 we find the district described as "one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm; a land of marshy ague and unwholesome swamps." But already the idea of reclamation was in the air, for Bishop Morton, in the time of Henry the Seventh,—a most worshipful Bishop of Ely, Lord Chancellor too, churchman, statesman, and engineer,—had a notion for making the stagnant Nene to flow forth into the sea, instead of doubling upon itself and seething in unimaginable bogs as it had done for hundreds of years past. He cut the drain that runs from Stanground, away up in the north near Peterborough, to Wisbeach, still known as Morton's Leam, and thus began a new era. But though he benefited the land to the north-west of Ely, the way between his Cathedral city and Cambridge was not affected, and remained in his time as bad as it had been for centuries; and he, like many a Bishop before him and others to come after, commonly journeyed between Ely and Cambridge by boat. Our road, indeed, did not witness the full activity of the good Bishop and his successors. Their doings only attained to great proportions in the so-called Great Level of the Fens, the Bedford Level, as it is alternatively called, that stretches over a district beginning eight miles away and continuing for sixteen or twenty miles, by Thorney, Crowland, and Peterborough. This map, from Dugdale's work, showing the Fens as they lay drowned, and the islands in them, will give the best notion of this curious district. You will perceive how like an inland sea was this waste of mud and water, not full fathom five, it is true, but less readily navigable than the sea itself. Here you see the road from Cambridge to Ely and on to Downham Market pictured, with no great accuracy, you may be sworn, and doubtless with as much margin of error as it is customary to allow in the somewhat speculative charts of Arctic continents and regions of similarly difficult access. In this map, then, it will be perceived how remote the Bedford Level lies from our route. Why "Bedford Level," which, in point of fact, is in Cambridgeshire and not in Bedfordshire at all? For this reason: that these are lands belonging to the Earls (now Dukes) of Bedford. To the Russells were given the lands belonging to Thorney Abbey, but their appetite for what should have been public property was only whetted by this gift, and when in the reign of Charles the First proposals were made to drain and reclaim 310,000 acres of surrounding country, they, in the person of Francis, the then Earl, obtained of this vast tract no less than 95,000 acres. It is true that this grant was made conditional upon the Earl taking part in the drainage of the land, and that it was a costly affair in which the smaller adventurers were ruined and the Earl's own resources strained; but in the result a princely heritage fell to the Bedfords.

THE FENS.
[After Dugdale.]

The great engineering figure at this period of reclamation was the 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.