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

of the climate, and both contributed to a rising of the swamps in the Dark Ages. This must have reinforced the terror of such places, as portrayed in ‘Beowulf’ and the chronicles relating to St Guthlac. Nonetheless, settlement persisted in some of the wetlands. The priest Rumen, or Romanus, who was chaplain to King Oswy’s wife in the seventh century, probably gave his name to Romney Marsh, large areas of which he owned and may have farmed. Charters of 875 and 972 concerning Longdon Marsh in Worcestershire give a picture of clearing and enclosure among streams and marshes, including a duck pond ‘on ducan seathe’, traces of which still survive under the M50 motorway.⁵ Piecemeal drainage and reclamation in the Cambridgeshire fens, carried out by Saxon farmers around Wisbech and Ely, have been traced through the detective work of archaeologists, using aerial photography and careful analysis of the evidence on the ground.⁶

      THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH

      With the dawning of the Middle Ages, the driving force for reclamation of the marshes became the Church. Many monasteries had settled for safety on secluded islands in the wetlands. The Cistercians even took their name from cisterna, the Latin name for a swamp. By the sixth century, a colony of holy men had gathered at Glastonbury in the Somerset Levels. As the confidence and prosperity of the monasteries increased, so did the enthusiasm with which the monks began to drain and develop the wetlands around them. This was the pattern in wetlands all over the country until the Reformation. It is hard to underestimate the impact of the monasteries, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

      The monks of Furness reclaimed the coastal marshes of Walney, with embankments incorporating beach pebbles. Cockersands Abbey drained and hedged part of the Lancashire Fylde. The surviving network of ditches on the Monmouthshire Levels beside the Bristol Channel is essentially that dug by the Benedictines in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth century the bishop of Durham instigated extensive drainage works along the northern shores of the Humber. The monks of Meaux were active in the Hull valley, and those of Fountains on the Derwent Ings. In 1180 the canons of St Thomas drained the flood-lands at Eccleshall in Staffordshire. Battle Abbey actively reclaimed the Pevensey Levels in Sussex, and on Romney Marsh a lead was given by the priors of Christ Church, Canterbury, and by the archbishops themselves. Just as the church at Aughton stands as a touchstone of the spirit of the Derwent Ings, so the little church of St Thomas à Becket at Fairfield represents all the romance and loneliness of Romney Marsh. Prior to drainage work in the 1960s, Fairfield was regularly islanded by winter floods. Sheep graze up to its walls, mellow with yellow lichen, and the reedy dykes which surround it are famous for their marsh frogs, whose operatic baritone can be heard a mile away on May nights. The dedication of the church to St Thomas is no accident. Becket may well have been closely involved in building the great walls of packed clay which still enclose the local ‘innings’, or sheep pastures. They must have added considerably to the wealth of the See of Canterbury.⁷ Near Fairfield you can still see the innings of St Thomas. On a grander scale, the dog-toothed vault of Crowland Abbey arches like the jawbone of a mighty whale above the Lincolnshire fens, a monument to the riches which the monks harvested from the marsh.

      The church of St Thomas à Becket at Fairfield epitomizes all the romance and loneliness of Romney Marsh. © Jo Nelson

      The dog-toothed vault of Crowland Abbey arches like the jawbone of a mighty whale above the Fens, which the Abbey’s founder St Guthlac believed to be the haunt of demons.

      In a few cases the wetlands proved too much for them. The abbey of Otley on Otmoor was abandoned after three years, in 1141, as ‘fitter for an ark than a monastery’.⁸ But in general, the abbeys and their abbots fattened up together. Tithes of reed were reserved for the local priest on the Somerset Levels, and Chaucer’s monk cast an entirely practical eye on the local birdlife: ‘he liked a swan best, and roasted whole.’ The holy men, whose heirs, such as the Carmelites on the Derwent Ings, now venerate God’s wilderness which washes up to their walls, began to compete with each other as to who could plunder it the most. In 1305 the abbot of Thorney in the Fens complained that the abbot of Peterborough ‘lately by night raised a dyke across the high road’, and so cut off the former’s access to corn and pasture.⁹ On the Somerset Levels, intermittent war was waged throughout the Middle Ages between successive abbots of Glastonbury and bishops of Wells. They were forever breaking up each other’s fish-weirs and quarrelling over competing interests in pasture and peat cutting. In 1278 the abbot’s men destroyed a piggery belonging to the bishop in Godney Moor, and again in 1315. In 1326 someone set fire to the peat moor in the Brue valley, with the idea of burning Glastonbury Abbey. The bishop followed up this preliminary scorching with a promise of eternal fire for the abbot of Glastonbury, upon whom he pronounced sentence of excommunication for the sin of damaging his property.¹⁰

      THE COURTS OF SEWERS

      Such piecemeal, not to mention conflicting, management of the marshes was no way to organize and control the ever-threatening flood-waters; and from the mid-thirteenth century, the responsibility for land drainage and reclamation from the sea began to devolve upon successive ‘commissions of sewers’, which were answerable to central government. A ‘sewer’ was a straight cut, the kind of geometrical channel beloved by modern engineers, and did not have the connotation of foul water which it has today. The first commission of sewers was set up in Lincolnshire by Henry de Bathe in 1258. Like fenland engineers 400 years later, de Bathe went for advice on procedure and administration to the heartland of organized land drainage, Romney Marsh. The subsequent courts of sewers were steadily reinforced by successive legislation, culminating in 1532 in Henry VIII’s Statute of Sewers, just at the moment when the power of the monastic lords of the levels was broken by the Reformation. These courts were to survive, incredibly, until 1930.

      With the growth of commissions of sewers in the Middle Ages, the role of professional laypeople in such matters began to increase. In 1390 a commission was appointed to inspect and repair flood-banks and dykes on the Thames marshes between Greenwich and Woolwich. It included among its number the king’s clerk of works, no less than Geoffrey Chaucer.¹¹ The last major drainage operation in the medieval period, however, was instigated by a churchman. John Morton, later to become Henry VII’s lord chancellor, familiar to every schoolchild for his tax levies of ‘Morton’s Fork’, organized the construction of the channel still known as Morton’s Leam, when he was bishop of Ely between 1478 and 1486. This ambitious piece of engineering, extending for 12 miles between Peterborough and Wisbech, survives today, although the tower Morton built from which to watch over his work-force crumbled away in the early nineteenth century.

      By the end of the Middle Ages, the marshes in Kent and Sussex had been sufficiently reclaimed to reveal an abiding characteristic of such operations: that in certain circumstances land drainage contains the seeds of its own destruction. In the mid-fifteenth century, floods and silting doomed the old port of Pevensey; and further along the coast, on Romney Marsh, a series of catastrophic storms culminating in 1287 obliterated the towns of Old Winchelsea and Broomhill. Although climatic deterioration in the later Middle Ages certainly worsened the situation, these disasters were not simply the haphazard expression of hostile Nature. They were made inevitable by human meddling. At Pevensey, reclamation of the adjacent estuary reduced tidal scouring, which had previously kept the river mouth open. In consequence, the water, unable to escape through the blocked outfall, flooded the land, and navigation up the river was also prevented. Successive new channels cut in 1402 and 1455 failed to remedy the problem, and Pevensey Castle, which still rises dramatically above the marshes whose creation ensured its demise, was abandoned.¹² On Romney Marsh, silting of river mouths was worsened by the problem of peat shrinkage. By the twelfth century, increasingly elaborate drainage schemes had led to contraction of the peat, thereby causing the land to drop ever lower in relation to the menacing waters of the English Channel. When the banks finally broke, the sea captured both arms of the river Rother, and created the present estuary south of Rye. This cat-and-mouse game between engineers and the