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

      THE PEOPLE OF THE WETLANDS

      Taming the flood necessitated taming the people of the flood-lands. Outsiders, who generally initiated the drainage, were as unimpressed by the people of the marshes as they were by their stagnant swamps. Camden described fenmen in 1586 as ‘rude, uncivil and envious to all others whom they call Upland Men; who stalking on high upon stilts apply their minds to grazing, fishing and fowling’.³⁸ Lieutenant Hammond, writing in 1635, went further: ‘I think they be halfe fish, halfe flesh, for they drinke like fishes and sleep like hogges.’ The people of Ely ‘have but a turfy scent and fenny posture about them, which smell I did not relish at all with any content’.³⁹

      ‘Fenmen, disgusting representations of ignorance and indecency!’ exclaimed the judge in the Littleport riots in 1816. In the same period, Arthur Young, subsidized by the big landlords to promote agricultural improvement, put his finger on what must have been a general attitude, when he described cattle-stealers in the Lincolnshire fens: ‘So wild a country nurses up a race of people as wild as the fen, and thus the morals and eternal welfare of numbers are hazarded and ruined for want of an inclosure.’⁴⁰ They certainly were a rough lot. Thomas Stone in 1794 described Deeping fen as a frequent resort of cattle-thieves. Between the 1740s and the 1820s, Romney Marsh was openly terrorized by armed gangs of smugglers. Richard Gough, in his ‘History of Myddle’ in Shropshire, written in 1700, describes how resentment aroused by increased rents for peat cutting following drainage improvements bubbled over into violence. The agent of Sir Edward Kinaston approached a certain Clarke for rent, when he was ‘cutting peates on Haremeare Mosse … But one of Clarke’s sons with a turfe spade, which they call a peate iron, (a very keen thing,) struck Sir Edward’s man on the head and cloave out his brains. The bayliffe fled.’⁴¹

      In the 1860s the first policeman ever sent to the fen village of Wicken was killed when he tried to break up a Saturday-night brawl. His body was wheeled off in a peat barrow and cremated in the local brick kiln.

      Ever since opposition to drainage in the seventeenth century, the men of the Cambridgeshire fens were known as ‘fen tigers’. Their women folk must have been equally formidable. In 1632 ‘a crowd of women and men, armed with scythes and pitchforks, uttered threatening words’ to anyone attempting to drive their cattle off Holme fen.⁴² In 1539 Sir Richard Brereton decided to enclose and drain the Dogmore, a marshy common near Prees in Shropshire, which he had bought from the bishop of Lichfield. The bishop was harangued by ‘fourtie wyfes of Prees’, one of whom ‘rudeley began to take his horse by the bridell whereat the horse sprang aside and put the Bysshop in danger of a fall’. Twelve years later, Brereton again went to the Dogmore, to appease ‘great tumults of the Tennants ther gathered together’. The local justice of the peace excused himself, saying he was ‘dysseasid of styche’.⁴³ The prospect of an armed mob, including that monstrous regiment of ‘wyfes’, must have been enough to bring on an immediate headache. A riot in 1694 at Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme is described by George Stovin, who was born the year after the events described: ‘Whilst the corn was growing, several men, women and children of Belton and among others the said Popplewell’s wife encouraged by him – in a riotous manner pulled down and burnt and laid waste the thorns and destroyed the corn.’⁴⁴ The ‘thorns’ must refer to the new enclosure hedges planted on the commons.

      Such tough independent people must have posed a threat to both central and local government. Just as the Biesbosch on the Rhine delta was a centre for the Dutch underground opposition to Hitler, so the English wetlands have a long history as centres of resistance. Dio Cassius describes the difficulties with which the Romans subdued the ancient Britons, who hid in the marshes ‘with their heads only out of the water!’⁴⁵ Alfred the Great led the resistance against the Danes from Athelney in the Somerset Levels; and although every schoolchild knows that William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he did not succeed in subduing Ely and the surrounding fens until 1071, when Hereward the Wake submitted. Marshes have always been easy to defend. Romney Marsh was flooded as a defence against both Napoleon and Hitler, and Calais was lost in 1557 in part because the sluices were not opened in time to flood out the besiegers. The strategic importance of rivers and wetlands in medieval battles was commonplace whereby rival armies were bogged down in swamps or river crossings and cut to pieces. In this way the flower of English chivalry was destroyed by William Wallace at Sterling in 1297.^fn1

      It would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of wetlands in national insurrections. Nevertheless, three marshland villages in Essex led the way in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; Sedgemoor will always be associated with Monmouth’s Rebellion; and agitations against fen drainage played a small, but significant, part in both the career of Oliver Cromwell and the origins of the English Revolution.

      The place that seems above all to encapsulate the spirit of the Derwent Ings is Aughton church, standing alone in the marshlands, its churchyard lapped by floods each winter and haunted by the bubbling call of the curlew in spring. On the church wall is carved the watery symbol of a newt. Small boys in Yorkshire and Worcestershire, going out with their jam jars to collect newts and tiddlers, still talk of going out after ‘asks’. The newt at Aughton is the emblem of Robert Aske, and it was from here that Aske set out in 1536 to lead the Pilgrimage of Grace against the religious reforms of Henry VIII. Aske’s main aim was a return of the smaller monasteries, but his appeal included requests to halt enclosure and drainage. He typifies the marshman’s feudal protest against central authority, together with his longing, not for a new order, but for a return of the old.

      The wetlands are lost landscapes. Just as they defy access, they defy organization by outsiders. Even long-drained regions, such as Longdon Marsh in Worcestershire, are easy to pick out as ‘holes’ on the Ordnance Survey map. Cul-de-sacs skirt warily down to them and then peter out. Some, such as the Somerset Levels, Chat Moss, and Hatfield and Thorne Wastes, are visible from motorways, from which there seems to be no exit from where they can be reached. Approached more closely, they still challenge the intruder. Otmoor and Hatfield Chase are both encircled by moats of ditches, crossed in the case of Hatfield by only one bridge. If you do venture by car on to the edge of Otmoor, there is the feeling that you will be unable to turn around in the narrow space between the dykes, or may get stuck up to the axles in mud. The single rough road across Simonswood Moss near Liverpool is barred at either end by the intimidating iron gates of the Knowsley estate. Romney Marsh, which lacks a central inaccessible fastness, is crossed by a maze of switchback lanes, which seem determined to throw off even the most diligent map-reader. In Somerset, the old drove-ways still branch off the main routes into the moors, like spines on a stickleback. These are truly the landscapes of the ‘No Through Road’.

      A newt, the emblem of Robert Aske, carved on the wall of Aughton church, Derwent Ings, Yorkshire.

      Straddling boundaries, some wetlands still defy comprehensive administration. Romney Marsh is shared by Kent and Sussex; what is left of the great moss system of the Mersey valley is carved up between Lancashire and Cheshire and the urban authorities of Manchester, Liverpool, and Warrington. Hatfield and Thorne Wastes are bewilderingly divided among Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and South Humberside. The inhabitants would probably not admit allegiance to any of these authorities, and huge signs proclaim the Isle of Axholme – known locally as ‘The Isle’ – as if it were an independent State. If such is the character of these places now, what must they have been like when both people and livestock could only get around them by boat, and parishes such as Dogdyke in Lincolnshire had in the eighteenth century ‘not two houses communicable for whole winters round’.⁴⁶

      For all their imperfections, the old wetland commons had a certain self-sufficiency and self-containment providing a standard against which to judge the enthusiastic, never-satisfied ambitions of the agriculturalists and drainage engineers who set out to exploit them. Traditional management of the marshes was tuned to the finest nuances of the local water table. Each wetland evolved a landscape character as individual as the spirit of its people was independent. A few marshes in western France are still managed very strictly