Through East Anglia in a Motor Car

by James Edmund Vincent

Who will not remember the last words of Kingsley's Hereward the Wake, when they are quoted?

"Let us send over to Normandy for a fair white stone of Caen, and let us carve a tomb worthy of thy grand-parents."

"And what shall we write thereon?"

"What but that which is there already? 'Here lies the last of the English.'"

"Not so. We will write, 'Here lies the last of the old English.' But upon thy tomb, when thy time comes, the monks of Crowland shall write, 'Here lies the first of the new English; who, by the inspiration of God, began to drain the Fens.'"

Here is absolute truth of sentiment, and to say this is by no means to deny sympathetic appreciation of the dogged resistance offered by the Fenmen of many generations to those who rescued the Fens from the condition of a watery wilderness. Of course the Fenmen hated the very idea of the subjugation of the Marshland. Their feeling towards those who began the long and arduous work differed only in degree from that with which the savage inhabitants of a new country—new to us, that is to say—regard the advance of civilization. They were not savages, but they were hard men and hardy, for only the fittest survived the agues and the fevers, accustomed to a free out-door life, having its pleasures no less than its trials. Let me quote Kingsley:—

"Overhead the arch of heaven spread more ample than elsewhere, as over the open sea; and that vastness gave, and still gives, such cloudlands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles. They might well have been star worshippers, those Gervii, had their sky been clear as that of the East; but they were like to have worshipped the clouds rather than the stars, according to the too universal law, that mankind worship the powers which do them harm, rather than the powers which do them good. Their priestly teachers, too, had darkened still further their notion of the world around, as accursed by sin and swarming with evil spirits. The gods and fairies of their old mythology had been transformed by the Church into fiends, alluring or loathsome, but all alike destructive to man, against whom the soldier of God, the celibate monk, fought day and night with relics, Agnus Dei, and sign of Holy Cross. And therefore the Danelagh men, who feared not mortal sword or axe, feared witches, ghosts, Pucks, Wills-o'-the-Wisp, Werewolves, spirits of the wells and the trees, and all dark, capricious and harmful beings whom their fancy called up out of the wild, wet, and unwholesome marshes, or the dark, wolf-haunted woods. For that fair land, like all things on earth, had its dark aspect. The foul exhalations of the autumn called up fever and ague, crippling and enervating, and tempting, almost compelling, to that wild and desperate drinking which was the Scandinavian's special sin. Dark and sad were those short autumn days, when all the distances were shut off, and the air reeked with foul brown fog and drenching rains from the eastern sea; and pleasant the bursting forth of the keen north-east wind, with all its whirling snowstorms. For though it sent men hurrying into the storm, to drive the cattle in from the fen, and lift the sheep out of the snow-wreaths, and now and then never to return, lost in mist and mire, in ice and snow; yet all knew that after the snow would come the keen frost and bright sun and cloudless blue sky, and the Fenman's yearly holiday, when, work being impossible, all gave themselves up to play, and swarmed upon the ice on skates and sledges, to run races, township against township, or visit old friends forty miles away; and met everywhere faces as bright and ruddy as their own, cheered by the keen wind of that dry and bracing frost."

Tumultuously eloquent Kingsley gives here an impression which, as an overture to the stirring story of Hereward the Wake may not have been guiltless of anachronism; but it suits our purpose the better. He is too severe, in this case as in others, on the Roman Catholic clergy. Most likely the Gervii were not immigrants from oversea, not historical immigrants at any rate. Their traditions, it may well be, were of that Druidism which the Romans understood so little. Outlaws and desperate men, Saxon and Dane, naturally drifted to the Fens, bringing in their own traditions, and became one people with them. Sledges the denizens of the Fens doubtless used, and snowshoes perhaps, in the days of Hereward, when the Fens were indeed the last stronghold of the English; but one would like to see some kind of evidence for skates. As for the merrymaking on the ice, the friendly visits and the like, the chances are that they were as much the products of a happy imagination as the ancient Fenman's joy in the wild north-easter. Life really was hard and lonely for him. He probably cursed the north-easter as heartily as a rheumatic man does now, and if he welcomed the frost it was because it enabled him to approach and kill the more easily the wild birds with which the Fens teemed. In the main he was hunter, fisher, fowler, and that was why he resisted civilization. Junketings on the ice belonged to a later period altogether. Oliver Cromwell resisted the reclamation of the Fens because he thought he saw in it a subtle device of the great to enrich themselves. The Fenman resisted it because he was a fowler and a fisher, and the draining reduced the area of his happy hunting grounds and of the waters of which he was free and out of which he could make a scanty living. Men might call him "slodger," "yellow-belly"—the first word sounds like the very quintessence of churned mud, the second is eloquent of sickness—and he might grumble at the hardships of his lot. Still he knew no other way of living. He could snare the myriad wildfowl, many of them no longer known in England, which haunted the fastnesses of the reeds as no other man could. He knew the flight of each kind at every hour of the day and at every season of the year. No man so cunningly as he could capture the mighty luce or pike, noosing him sometimes, at others, and especially in winter, catching him with baits, craftily let down through a hole in the ice, or could so artfully trap the fat eels wherewith the clergy of Ely or of Crowland might turn a fast in the letter into a feast in the spirit. With his stilts and his leaping pole he could travel over the marshes with the most astonishing celerity; but that he enjoyed his life so keenly as Kingsley would have us believe is in the last degree unlikely.

Still the Fenman knew the life, and he knew his powers. He had no ambition to drive the slow oxen, to turn the fertile furrow, to garner the golden grain. Indifferent to questions of national welfare he was, as of course. The rustic of to-day is absolutely indifferent to considerations of the kind. He likes to see the straw so heavy that it cannot be cut by machines, laid by storms so that the sickle must needs be employed, because that means more work for men. Time was, and that not so very long ago, when, following the example of the artisans and weavers of manufacturing England, Hodge rioted and broke up the thrashing machines and the like, which did the work of twenty men and more. "It stands to reason," he used to say, "that such newfangled notions are bad for the likes of us." It stood to reason, from the Fenman's point of view, that to drain the Fens would be to leave him without the only occupation for which he was fit; it probably never occurred to him that he might adapt himself to altered circumstances and become a regular worker, tied to fixed hours, instead of an amphibious wanderer, fowling and fishing when he pleased, or when necessity drove him to exertion. Who shall blame him? Certainly not the sportsman, the naturalist, or the botanist, who have felt a pang of regret as they have watched, elsewhere than in the Fens it may be, the marsh that always held snipe, from which the bittern has been known to rise, in the recesses of which some almost extinct herb survived, converted into a fruitful field. Yet what man familiar with the life of the country has not felt these regrets, even while he knew all the time that the change was for the public good and that his own livelihood would not be directly affected? Is it possible, then, not to sympathize with the resistance of the Fenmen, who knew nothing of "the public good" and saw their livelihood, or the chance of obtaining it, destroyed before their helpless eyes. It was the old story. One man's meat is another man's poison all the world over and for all time; and there can be no progress, no wholesale and beneficial change in the ways of life, without much incidental tribulation. Nevertheless, when all things are weighed in the balance, not a scintilla of doubt remains that the draining of the Fens was begun and continued, as the old knight in Hereward the Wake said, "by the inspiration of God." It banished a few birds; but we could better spare a few kinds of birds than preserve them with the fevers and the agues which were the inseparable accident of their haunts. It was the end of the "slodgers" and the "yellow-bellies," who were but a handful of men; but in their place are thousands of human beings who, in spite of agricultural troubles which the drainers of the Fens could not by any means have foreseen, are at least sufficiently clad and fed, and decently housed.

It is not always, it is not indeed often, that the reflections appropriate to a scene throng into one's mind when that scene is visited. Sometimes, at the foot of Niagara, for example, thoughts refuse to come into the mind at all; it is only afterwards that with Dickens one reflects, it was surely only afterwards he reflected, that the one abiding impression left by Niagara is the remembrance from time to time that a like mass of water is still falling, and falling, and falling, yesterday to-day and for ever. But, in relation to the Fens, I can truthfully say that most of these thoughts ran through my mind as we rolled along the road. Details of course did not. I had forgotten about Sir Cornelius Vermuyden and Rennie, but I remembered the great deeds of the House of Bedford and boyhood's delight in Hereward. As the road followed the sinuous bank of cabined Ouse, as I looked at the flat fields of rich black soil in which the corn showed green or of pasture springing into life, I felt to realize that on these very places the reeds had whispered and, as Sir Bedivere said to King Arthur, so man might have reported, to Hereward if you will, "Nought heard I, save the waves wap and the waters wan." Each church with its hamlet rose a little above the general level of the plain, making it the easier to understand that each stood on firm ground, once an island among the marshes, upon which the church had set her beacon light. If Downham Church, which we passed, might be taken as a sample—and it may be with safety—then the more leisurely topographers who have gone before are abundantly justified in saying that the churches of the Fen country are of an uncommon stateliness and beauty. This place, by the way, shares with North Walsham the honour of having taken a share in the education of Nelson.