Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely

by John William Edward Conybeare

CHAPTER XIX

Draining of Fens.—Monastic Works, Morton's Leam.—Diversion of Ouse.—Local Government, Jurats, Discontent.—Jacobean polemics.—First Drainage Company.—Rising of Fen-men.—Second Company, Huguenot Labourers.—Third Company, Earl of Bedford, Vermuyden.—Old River.—Cromwell.—Fourth Company, Prisoner Slaves, New River, Denver Sluice.—Later Developments.

The thought of the Fenland Abbeys leads on to the fascinating story of the draining of the fens. For the monks were the first to reclaim from the morass such little patches of ground as each Abbey could bank in, and to discover how very fertile such reclaimed soil is. Their early chronicles speak with rapture of the hay that could be mown three times a year, and the amazing fecundity of the corn-land. Thus it was their interest constantly to be enclosing fresh acres. They discovered, too, that by judiciously letting in the flood water on to a field they could get a fresh deposit of silt, and gradually raise the level of the soil. And the first attempt at drainage work on a large scale was also due to a monk, Bishop Morton, Abbot of Ely, who in 1480 cut the twelve mile long "Leam," or channel, which still bears his name, to divert the River Nene from its long meandering course through Whittlesea Mere and Outwell, and to bring it straight to Wisbech.

Thus it came about that the reclamation of the fens went hand in hand with the prosperity of the Abbeys around them. When these were prosperous, the whole district prospered; when misfortune befell them, the fens likewise suffered; and it often took many years for the marks of the ruin to be effaced. After the wholesale destruction wrought by the great Danish raid of 870, centuries did not suffice for this. The story we have just told of the sack of Crowland clearly shows that the place was then accessible by land. But in the hundred and fifty years of desolation that followed, such works as the brethren had effected fell into decay, and the land once more became waterlogged. Even when William of Malmesbury wrote, in the twelfth century, he tells us that Crowland could still only be reached by boat. And the yet more wholesale destruction wrought by Henry the Eighth was followed by a like period of reversion to waste.

The zeal, however, of these early civilisers was not always according to knowledge; and at quite an early date a grievous mistake was made, which caused endless difficulties ever after, and still affects the whole drainage system of the district. This was the cutting, at some date between 1215 and 1270, of a leam, not two miles long, from the Great Ouse at Littleport to the Little Ouse,[241] thereby diverting the waters of the former into the channel of the latter, and bringing their united volume into the sea at Lynn. Before that date the Great Ouse ran from Littleport to Outwell, where it was met by the Nene, and by a branch of the Little Ouse. The joint river was called the Well Stream, and poured into the sea at Wisbech.

That this had been the age-long course of the Fenland waters is shown by the existence of a huge Roman sea wall running round the old coast line from Lynn to Wisbech, and from Wisbech to Sutton in Lincolnshire. This wall traces for us the outline of a great tidal estuary running up to Wisbech, which continued an estuary even to the eighteenth century. But the diversion of the greater part of its river water to Lynn proved fatal to it. Such stream as was left, scarcely more than that of the Nene, could not, at the ebb, scour out the channel through the sands which the flood-tide continually tended to silt up. Wisbech became more and more shut off from the sea, and is now ten miles away from it. And further, the inability to escape quickly enough through these choking sands drove the river water at Wisbech back upon itself and forced it to "drown" the neighbouring fens; while at Lynn the same disastrous effect was produced by the new volume of water being too great for the narrow bed of the Little Ouse and flooding over the banks all round. The Marshland, as the Norfolk district protected by the Roman wall was called, suffered especially from this result of interfering with Nature.

Nor did it prove possible to undo the mischief. When once a short cut has been made for a great river, it is no easy matter to turn the stream back into its old tortuous course; and, when once an estuary has got thoroughly silted up, it is yet more difficult to restore it to its old condition. Throughout the Middle Ages constant complaints were made, and occasional attempts; but these were always brought to nought by some conflicting interest or other which got the ear of the Government. The fen problem was early recognised as a matter of national concern, and, from the time of Edward the First onwards, the Crown tried to grapple with it, but by hopelessly futile methods.

To begin with, the system of Local Government already established for the regulation of Romney Marsh in Kent was extended to the Fenland. The Sheriff was bound to summon twenty-four "jurats" from the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, to deal with each difficulty as it arose. But a plan which worked well enough for a district only some ten miles by fifteen, and with no river to speak of, was wholly inadequate to deal with the huge area and mighty forces of the Fenland, even when this was divided (as it still is for drainage purposes) into three "Levels," "North," "Middle," and "South." The jurats hated their invidious office, and were themselves hated by the inhabitants; each man always declaring that they had saddled him with repairs which ought to have been laid upon some neighbour, and each man ready to see his own land "drown" rather than put in a single spadeful of work which, in his view, should have been someone else's job.

Besides, the drain or the dam or the embankment which was good for one set of interests was bad for another. We have seen how Cambridge complained of the erection of Denver Sluice; and like grievances fill page after page of the Plantagenet Rolls. The men of Lynn complain that whereas they were of old able to sail straight to Peterborough, only thirty miles, they now have to go round by Littleport, over fifty miles, owing to the erection of a dam by the jurats. And, again, that a new cut has so diverted the waters that they can no longer take "navigable" (i.e. sea-going) vessels to Yaxley and Holme in Huntingdonshire, "whereby our trade is greatly decayed." Loud and incessant are the cries from all quarters (except Lynn alone) to "bring back the waters into their natural outfall" at Wisbech. But this, as we have said, had become beyond the power of man; and, despite the well-meant efforts of the unhappy jurats, and of such philanthropists as Bishop Morton, things kept getting worse decade by decade; till the suppression of the Abbeys completed the ruin, and the fens became the dismal tangle of decayed waterways, small and great, new and old, artificial and natural, usable and unusable, the unravelling of which occupied the next three centuries.

Feeble efforts were locally made here and there to control the waters; but, as the historian Carter puts it, the next wet and windy winter "down comes the bailiff of Bedford (for so the country people call the overflowing of the river Ouse), attended, like a person of quality, with many servants (the accession of tributary brooks), and breaks down all their paper banks as not waterproof, reducing all to their former condition." He goes on to give a vivid description of the puzzle-headed conservatism with which the reformers had to contend: