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

had the temerity to refuse. Furthermore, since the Crown had earlier inherited Hatfield subject to the maintenance of rights of common, it was not entirely the king’s to either sell or drain. This was something which the inhabitants were not going to overlook as lightly as Charles had done. A lawsuit of April 1629 between Vermuyden and the commoners attests how the people of Torksey:

      came unto the workmen and beat and terrified them, threatening to kill them, if they would not leave their work, threw some of them in the river and kept them under water with long poles, and at several other times, upon the Knelling of a Bell, came to the said works in riotous and warlike manner, divided themselves into companies, to take the workmen and filled up the ditches and drains, made to carry away the water, burned up the working tools and other materials of the Relator and his workmen, and set up poles in the form of gallows, to terrifie the workmen and threatened to break their arms and legs, and beat and hurt many of them and made others flee away, whom they pursued to a town with such terror and threats, that they were forced to guard the town.¹⁹

      Reports in the previous year that a local man had been killed by the Dutch workforce make it clear that the battles over the digging of the ditches were far from one-sided. Worse was to follow. The inhabitants made it clear that their commons had been reduced to between half and a third of their former size. While propagandists of drainage, such as Dugdale, admired the corn and the oil-seed rape which could now be sown on the drained land, they failed to appreciate that the people of Axholme already grew sufficient corn for their needs on the higher land. What the people wanted on the fen was what they had already: grazing. The ignorance with which the outsiders set about overturning a perfectly satisfactory agricultural economy at Axholme suggests parallels with the notorious ground-nut scheme instigated in East Africa in the late 1940s. In addition, the villagers of the north-west of the region complained, with justification, that the engineering works had simply sent the water down to flood them out. After much legal deliberation, the lord president of the Council of the North, the earl of Strafford, pronounced that Vermuyden must bear the cost of a major new channel, still called ‘Dutch River’, to rectify the situation. The project ended in financial disaster, and Vermuyden was temporarily imprisoned for not paying his debts. Catastrophic floods inundated the region in 1636 and again in 1697, exacerbated no doubt by deliberate sabotage by the commoners, but also caused by the insufficient capacity of the new channels and by peat shrinkage. The people remained as uncontrollable as the waters, burning down the Dutch settlement at Sandtoft during the Civil War and again in 1688.²⁰ Peace did not really reign again at Hatfield Chase until well into the eighteenth century.

      The drainage of Hatfield Chase.

      Two commoners of Hatfield Chase greet a gentleman, perhaps one of the Dutch drainage engineers. In reality they were rather less deferential. From the map made in 1639 by Thomas Arlebout, mariner, to mark the enclosure awards following the drainage of Hatfield Chase. © Nottingham University

      However, long before these disastrous developments, Vermuyden was wiping the mud of Hatfield off his boots and casting around for greener pastures. From 1629 to 1632 he held leases in Malvern Chase, which included Longdon Marsh, and in 1632 he bought part of Charles I’s share of King’s Sedgemoor in Somerset. But Vermuyden never achieved effective drainage in the West. In 1636 he was accused by the king’s agent for Somerset of fraud and duplicity, charges which were revived when he made another attempt to tackle the Somerset Levels in 1655. The Somerset commoners succeeded in fighting off most attempts at drainage where their contemporaries in the eastern counties had failed. After 1638 nearly two-thirds of the Somerset Levels were still unreclaimed, and even as late as 1769, the local drainage agent, Richard Locke, was stoned, and his effigy was burned ‘by the owners of geese’.²¹ Old habits die hard in the wetlands. In 1983 the descendants of these owners of geese were to burn the local conservationists in effigy.

      The finest prize for the reclaimers remained the Great Level. In 1630 Francis Russell, earl of Bedford, agreed to undertake the drainage of the fens in Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, and parts of Norfolk and Lincolnshire. In 1631 thirteen other business adventurers joined the earl, forming the Bedford Level Corporation and employing the services of Cornelius Vermuyden. Thus was inaugurated a period of extensive engineering works, culminating in the construction of the Old Bedford river in 1637. The adventurers then proceeded to bid for their profit. There was a general outcry. Many complained that the flooding was as bad as ever; others that Bedford had cheated them of their land. In 1638 Charles I intervened, and, re-engaging Vermuyden, declared himself undertaker. The king’s ambitions were characteristically grandiose. Not only did he require a grant of 57,000 acres of the drained land, but, according to Dugdale, he intended to transform the village of Manea into a town to be called Charlemont, which would command the new river system. One can imagine the cloud-capped towers of Inigo Jones’s elegant Baroque soaring above the Fens. As it is, Manea (pronounced Mainy) remains a tiny hamlet in the Ouse washes, haunted by the ghost of what might have been.

      Events were moving fast to overtake all such enterprises. From his first arrival in the Fens, Vermuyden had been faced with the now familiar rioting. A drinking song called ‘Powtes Complaint’ – ‘powte’ being a lamprey – circulated in the taverns:

      Come, Brethren of the water, and let us all assemble,

      To treat upon this matter, which makes us quake and tremble;

      For we shall rue it, if’t be true, that Fens be undertaken,

      And where we feed in Fen and Reed, they’ll feed both Beef and Bacon.

      They’ll sow both beans and oats, where never man yet thought it,

      Where men did row in boats, ere undertakers bought it:

      But, Ceres, thou, behold us now, let wild oats be their venture,

      Oh let the frogs and miry bogs destroy where they do enter.

      The beauty of many rivers lies in their long history of human management. Water crowfoot can be an indicator of ancient fords (top). The millrace is one of the human contributions to the landscape quality of the river (bottom).

      In the early eighteenth century windmills were adopted throughout the Fens for pumping water

      The main drains on the Southern Fenland, including approximate dates of construction.

      LEADING FIGURES IN THE BATTLE TO DRAIN THE FENS

      A Dutch engineer, believed to be Cornelius Vermuyden. © London Borough of Barking and Dagenham

      Charles I. © National Portrait Gallery

      Oliver Cromwell, painted in the year of the execution of Charles I. © National Portrait Gallery

      The contemporary chronicler and advocate of seventeenth-century drainage, Sir William Dugdale.