Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding. Jeremy Purseglove

a useful sideline for the average peasant, and a basic livelihood for the poor.

      Peat was always a major wetland commodity. Rights of turf cutting, known as ‘turbary’, existed in Somerset and the Fens in the Middle Ages. Peat cutting became a major industry in the Lancashire mosses in the nineteenth century. On maps of Wicken Fen and Hatfield Chase, you will find ‘Poor Piece’, which was where the local cottagers could cut peat for themselves, subject to regulations prescribing a limited season for peat cutting and insisting that cottagers may extract as much peat as possible without outside assistance. Unlimited plundering of timber was similarly controlled. In 1337 a certain Robert Gyan was submitted to a brutal penance by the dean of Wells for carrying away ‘a great number of alder’ from Stan Moor in the Somerset Levels.²⁹ Thereafter he was allowed only six boatloads of brushwood a year, to be taken out under view of the bailiff. Such rulings are a key to our understanding of the old wetland economy. Long before our modern preoccupations with sustainability, the people of the wetlands harvested the wealth of their so-called wilderness with a sophisticated understanding of the need not to over-exploit its resources.

      Because of the hostile elements facing farmers in the wetlands, mutual co-operation was essential, both in sharing the upkeep of flood-banks and drains and in administering a system of checks and balances to ensure that each person got a fair deal out of the common pasture. If overstocking took place, then everyone was the loser. In 1242 Geoffrey de Langelegh was summoned by the abbot of Glastonbury to explain why he now had ‘one hundred and fifty goats and twenty oxen and cows beyond the number which he and his ancestors were wont always to have, to wit, sixteen oxen only’.³⁰ Annual ‘drifts’ were held, when cattle were rounded up, and excessive numbers were impounded and released only on payment of a fine. By Tudor times the Fen commons were subject to sophisticated management, controlled by the parish order-makers, who in turn appointed field reeves and fen reeves. These kept a close check on the taking in and pasturing of cattle by outsiders through a system of branding and regular drifts. During the reign of Edward VI, a code of fen law was drawn up, which remained fully operative in the Lincolnshire fens until the eighteenth century. Penalties were levied for putting diseased or unbranded cattle on to the fen, leaving animals unburied for more than three days, and allowing dogs to harass cattle on the moor. No reed was to be mown for thatch before it had two years’ growth. No swans’, cranes’, or bitterns’ eggs could be taken from the fen.³¹ In the sixteenth century, Otmoor was similarly controlled by a moor court, upon which the local villages were represented by two ‘moor men’.

      The fixing of dates was critical in preventing over-exploitation. As early as 1534, a closed season for wildfowling, between May and August, was instigated in the Cambridgeshire fens. All inhabitants of the manor of Epworth on the Isle of Axholme had the right to set bush nets and catch white fish on Wednesdays and Fridays. Stocking on some fen commons took place no earlier than old May Day, to ensure against overgrazing. Lammas land was pasture open to commoners from Lammas, or Loaf Mass, 1 August. Lammas meadows still exist, as at Twyning near Bredon in Worcestershire and, more famously, North Meadow beside the Thames at Cricklade.

      Such co-operative management existed even on some wetlands that were not commons. On the Derwent Ings in Yorkshire, the subdivision of the land into small hay plots and the subsequent pasturing were administered by a Court Leet, which annually appointed ‘Ings Masters’, who managed the pastures at East Cottingwith and Newton. In the Wheldrake Ings account book for 1868–1934, it is specified that the meadows be mown on the dates appointed by the Ings masters, and that, thereafter, a carefully controlled number of cattle, branded with a W, may be pastured until the autumn, when they are taken off on ‘Ings Breaking Day’.

      The water, flooding over the pastures in winter and oozing up through the summer marshes, held the key to these balanced systems. The black waters of the fen halted the plough, thereby limiting the expansion of economic growth which a fen parish could sustain. Organized common grazing on wetland pastures blunted incentives to enlarge adjacent farms, and also prevented the selective breeding of livestock. But technologies of drainage, refined with each succeeding century and reaching a climax in our own day, removed the subtle checks and limitations of the old wetland systems. As the water ebbed away, so the spell was broken.

      It is a mistake to be too naïve about the old wetland commons. They were open to abuse, and their system of controls did not always work. Overstocking took place on the Somerset Levels in the Middle Ages, aggravated by the rights of some commoners to take in cattle from outside the Levels for a fee. The Wallingfen court in the Vale of York set an upper limit for animals on the common in 1636 which was way above the actual carrying capacity of the land.³² In the eighteenth century, Thomas Stone noted that West Fen in Lincolnshire was ‘perfectly white with sheep’.³³ It was no doubt grossly overstocked. The damp conditions would exacerbate such a situation. Before the Brue valley drainage in 1770, 10,000 sheep rotted in one year in the Somerset parish of Mark.³⁴

      Nor were the commons some kind of pastoral socialist Utopia, open to all-comers. By the Middle Ages, Otmoor was already a restricted common, jealously guarded by the inhabitants of its ‘seven towns’. Albert Pell, a fen landlord, wrote in the mid-nineteenth century: ‘The vulgar idea of the general public having rights of any kind on the waste or commonable land was never for a moment admitted.’³⁵

      Under Cromwell, the truly radical Diggers demanded that all commons and wastes should be cultivated by the poor in communal ownership. When they began to dig up waste land on St George’s Hill in Surrey, they were driven off by local farmers, who almost certainly included small peasants angered at the usurpation of their common rights.

      The agricultural improvements resulting from drainage did open up the possibility of betterment for the small farmers, as well as for the great landowners. In the Middle Ages a degree of drainage, which allowed the conversion of pasture to meadow, provided livestock farmers with that most precious of commodities, winter fodder. In 1606 the lord and his tenants co-operated to reclaim part of the moor at Cossington in the Somerset Levels. In the 1830s the farmers of Burwell fen began to realize that they were missing out on the prosperity achieved through drainage by their neighbours at Swaffham. Protagonists of seventeenth-century fen drainage pointed out that a fat ox was better than a well-grown eel, and a tame sheep more use than a wild duck. Underlying local issues concerning the draining of the marshy commons was the national issue of the need for food. Bad harvests between 1593 and 1597 were the prelude to the great fen drainage projects of the seventeenth century, at a time when England’s growing population was increasingly concentrated in urban or rural industrial centres which were not self-sufficient. The farming achievements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were also motivated by the need for more food. By 1870, Europe was able to sustain a rapidly rising population, largely from its own resources: the agricultural revolution, including the critical part which drainage had played in it, had worked.

      But back on the marshes and fens, who was really to profit from this continual process of ever more intensive cultivation? Thomas Fuller, writing in 1655, had the answer: ‘Grant them drained, and so continuing; as now the great fishes therein prey on the less, so the wealthy men would devour the poorer sort of people … and rich men, to make room for themselves, would jostle the poor people out of their commons.’³⁶ For small farmers and commoners, drainage generally meant at best higher rents, at worst dispossession. Those undertaking the drainage were quick to stake their claim to the best bits of land. Thus James Bentham writes of the Fens: ‘The smallest spots, however, scattered or remote, which first showed themselves above the surrounding waters, were eagerly seized upon by these watchful discoverers, and claimed as part of their allotted reward.’³⁷

      It was a similar story in Somerset in the same period, worsened by the fact that access to the moor along the old drove-ways was severed by the new drainage ditches. An often quoted rhyme seems to sum it up:

      They hang the man and flog the woman

      Who steals the goose from off the Common;

      But let the greater villain loose

      Who steals the Common from the goose.

      Not that the goose ever had much of a deal. Live