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CHAPTER 2
THE FEAR OF THE FLOOD
Traditional Attitudes to Wetlands

In the beginning, the waters covered the earth. The first thing you would notice about the landscape if you were to travel back in time was how wet it was. In prehistoric times rivers and streams ran unbridled over their flood plains, and most low ground consisted of marshes, fens, and very wet woodland. Well into modern times the major wetlands of England remained undrained: the Vale of York, the fens around the Humber, the Essex marshes, the Lancashire mosses, Romney Marsh, the Severn lowlands, the Somerset Levels, and, above all, the ‘Great Level’ of the Fens. Surveying these now prosaically productive acres of beet and potato, it is as hard to imagine their undrained state as if one were trying to conjure up some fabulous landscape lost beyond recall. Charles Kingsley, writing of the final destruction of the Fens, was perhaps the first to regret the loss of what must have been one of the finest natural systems in Europe. He describes immense tracts of pale reed and dark-green alder stretching from Cambridge to Peterborough, from King’s Lynn to the foot of the Lincolnshire wolds, where:

high overhead hung, motionless, hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see. Far off, upon the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke from a punt, invisible from its flatness and its white paint. Then down the wind came the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that sound another sound, louder as it neared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of terrified wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the great wild swan.

They are all gone now … Ah, well, at least we shall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more brandy-drinking and opium-eating; and children will live and not die.¹

Major wetlands present in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

There speaks the nineteenth century: all gone, but in a good cause. It is only our more ambivalent age, engaged in the very last mopping-up of the great wet waste that challenged our ancestors, which has begun to question whether the price of progress has been too high. We can see more clearly now that the ultimate end of such a process – the flood entirely tamed – is both impossible and undesirable. The long, and still unfolding, history of land drainage contains much that is progress in the best sense: the combating of diseases and terrifying floods and the production of food to sustain a growing population. But it is also a saga of human avarice and the abuse of power.

Quite apart from the major wetlands, every valley bottom below a certain contour line must have been soggy and at times impassable. Quite how wet any particular locality once was can often be guessed through detective work involving an enjoyable study of plants, place-names, and local history. At Henley-in-Arden in Warwickshire, two churches face each other across the little river Alne. Their presence is explained in an appeal of 1548 to retain both churches: ‘The town of Henley is severed from the Parish Church with a brook which in winter so riseth that none may pass over it without danger of perishing.’ Nearby, in the tell-tale peat, are stands of meadowsweet and sedge, the last remnants of Henley’s ancient marsh, now happily salvaged as an oasis within a new housing estate.

In other places, canals have provided a damp lifeline for plants surviving from much earlier wetlands. In the 1950s the redoubtable Eva Crackles, a Yorkshire teacher, was gathering grasses at the point where the Leven canal crosses the site of an ancient lake, now long vanished, but clearly just surviving when the canal was cut in 1802. There, just at the point where canal and lake site coincide, she found one of the few recorded colonies of the narrow small reed, tenaciously clinging to the mud. Newport in Shropshire was ‘new’ in the twelfth century when it was granted a charter by Henry I, who required that it supply fish to the royal household from its medieval fish pond. This pond survived just long enough to be incorporated into the Shropshire Union Canal in 1833, complete with an unusual wealth of water plants, which earned the canal basin the status of Site of Special Scientific Interest in 1986. At Gailey in Staffordshire, an unusually rich flora emerged in gravel workings abandoned in the 1960s. These were relics from the fen from which the place took its name, the Anglo-Saxon ‘gagol leah’, the clearing in the gale, or bog myrtle, that aromatic wetland shrub which gives an extra tang to home-made gin.²

Names on the map tell us a great deal about the ancient undrained landscape. The little village of Iwade commands the approaches to the Isle of Sheppey and the coastal marshes of the Swale. Its name means exactly what it says: ‘I wade’. Few place names are more telling on the Ordnance Survey map than the presence on the lowlands of the word ‘moor’. Examples include Morton or Moortown; Sedgemoor; Otmoor; Moorgate, the gate in London’s city wall which opened on to Moorfields. This was the marsh that William Dugdale, in his seventeenth-century classic on drainage, describes as a favourite resort of Londoners for skating.³ The people of the Somerset Levels paid a tithe called ‘moor-penny’; their cattle suffered from a disease called ‘moor-evil’; and in every pond and damp corner you will still see the jerking movements of the moorhen. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first meaning for ‘moor’ ‘uncultivated ground covered with heather’. To most of us, reared on Wuthering Heights, that is what a moor means. But to our ancestors, living when the hills were less thoroughly cleared and the lowlands were more universally wet, a moor was something more terrifying: a morass. The word ‘mor’ first occurs in Saxon accounts of King Alfred hiding in his wetland fastness in Somerset, and most evocatively of all in our national epic poem ‘Beowulf’. The hero, Beowulf, does battle with Grendel and Grendel’s mother, two enormous monsters which haunt the swamps – ‘moras’ in Anglo-Saxon – from which they emerge to wreak havoc before returning to a mere in the very heart of the fen: ‘The lake which they inhabit lies not many miles from here, overhung with groves of rime-crusted trees whose thick roots darken the water.’

Moorhen.

HOSTILE WETLANDS

This description, at the very beginning of our literature, sets the tone for accounts of wetlands, which through the ages have had a consistently bad press. When in the eighth century the Saxon saint Guthlac penetrated the heart of the Fens to found Crowland Abbey, he was described by the monk Felix of Crowland as encountering demons in the wilderness, which ‘came with such immoderate noises and immense horror, that it seemed to him that all between heaven and earth resounded with their dreadful cries’. They bound Guthlac ‘in all his limbs … and brought him to the black fen, and threw and sank him in the muddy waters’.⁴

With the passage of time, demons are about the only form of unpleasantness not recorded in accounts of the wetlands. William Lambarde, Elizabeth I’s archivist, described Romney Marsh in 1576 as ‘evil in winter, grievous in summer and never good’.⁵ In 1629 the Fens were vilified thus: ‘The Air nebulous, grosse and full of rotten harres; the water putred and muddy, yea full of loathsome vermine; the earth spuing, unfast and boggie.’⁶ (‘Harres’ were noxious gases.) Samuel Pepys, visiting his relations at Wisbech thirty-five years later, was equally unimpressed as he passed through ‘most sad fennes, all the way observing the sad life which the people of the place – which if they were born there, they do call the Breedlings of the place – do live, sometimes rowing from one spot to another and then wadeing’.⁷ For travellers such places provided a multitude of hazards. At best they involved a detour. At worst there was the danger – horror of horrors! – of falling in. The intrepid traveller Celia Fiennes had a near miss when her horse was almost sucked into a dyke near Ely in 1698; and in the same year she took care to avoid Martin Mere in Lancashire, ‘that as the proverb sayes has parted many a man and his mare indeed’.⁸

The fate awaiting someone pitched from a horse in such a place might be blood-poisoning, ‘being dreadfully venom’d by rolling in slake’, as William Hall put it in his nineteenth-century fen doggerel.⁹ Worse still, one might be swallowed for ever in the morass. Daniel Defoe wrote of Chat Moss, near Manchester, as ‘being too terrible to contemplate for it will bear neither man nor beast’.¹⁰

To outsiders, wetlands appeared hostile fastnesses, associated only with floods and disease.

Getting lost was another likelihood, unless, as at Longdon Marsh in Worcestershire, the traveller was able to pay a guide to show the way across. On the swampy willow scrub of the Wealdmoors in Shropshire, the local rector described in 1673 how ‘the inhabitants commonly hang’d bells about the necks of their cows that they might the more easily find them’.¹¹ Otmoor was notorious as a place in which to get lost, and verses celebrate how the curfew rung on winter nights from Charlton church guided travellers out of the intractable moor. Fog, the one element which no drainer can ever quite banish from the marshes, still rolls out over Otmoor. A farmer’s wife giving evidence at the Otmoor M40 inquiry in 1983 described how she had once become completely lost in one of her own fields while counting sheep. Daniel Defoe describes the Fens shrouded in fog, through which nothing could be seen ‘but now and then the lanthorn or cupola of Ely Minster’.¹² To further terrify lost, wandering travellers, igniting marsh gas created the alarming phenomena, still not fully understood by scientists, known as will-o’-the-wisps, jack-o’-lanterns, or corpse-candles.¹³ Perhaps the gloomiest wetland in literature is the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in which the protagonist Christian sinks under the weight of his sins. Bunyan was a tinker’s son from Bedford and he is thought to have been inspired by ‘Soul’s Slough’ near Tempsford where the Rivers Ivel and Ouse often must have bogged down travellers on the Great North Road. The flooded meadows can still be seen from the A1 trunk road in winter but sadly, as yet, there is no Slough of Despond Site of Special Scientific Interest.

‘Infect her beauty,/ You fen-sucked fogs,’ inveighed Shakespeare’s King Lear against his daughter. Our ancestors associated wetlands with disease. They had good reason. As late as 1827, travellers were ‘fearful of entering the fens of Cambridgeshire lest the Marsh Miasma should shorten their lives’.¹⁴ On the Somerset Levels, inundated by heavy floods in 1872 and 1873, a report described how ‘Ague set in early in the spring and is now very prevalent … among the poorer families who are badly fed and clothed.’¹⁵ ‘Ague’ was malaria, meaning literally ‘bad air’, the marshy miasma which, until the discovery of the malarial mosquito in 1880, was believed to be the main cause of the disease. Mosquitoes that carry malaria breed far north into Europe and were responsible for many deaths. Malaria was endemic in the English wetlands. ‘As bad as an Essex Ague’ was a common expression;¹⁶ and in the 1870s the garrison at Tilbury Fort was changed every six months because of the prevalence of malaria. The Thames marshes ensured that the ague was carried into the courts of kings, who were less resistant to it than the hardy people of the fen. James I was declared by his contemporaries to have died of it, and his victim Sir Walter Raleigh, awaiting execution in the Tower, prayed that he would not be seized by a fit of ague on the scaffold, lest his enemies should proclaim that he had met his death shivering with fear.

The terror, if not the actuality, of the disease has survived into our own time. In the early 1970s Strood District Council was spraying the dykes in the North Kent Marshes with DDT as a precaution against malaria. Malaria is caused by parasites transmitted from an infected person to another person in the saliva of a mosquito’s bite. Therefore, if there are no people with malaria from whom it can be transmitted in a given area, the disease dies out, as it did eventually in England. For the same reason, the commonly voiced concern that modern wetland creation schemes may bring back malaria can be discounted in the UK.

As towns grew larger, they began to pollute the adjacent marshes and valley bottoms, which in turn developed ominous reputations for disease. Bubonic plague is not directly associated with water, but the rats which carried it arrived by boat at riverside wharves. The Great Plague of London is said to have broken out in 1665 in a marshy district known as the Seven Dials, and it was especially prevalent along the old river Fleet. In the nineteenth century the stagnant waters of cities were haunted by the shadow of cholera. It is no accident that many slums were built on marshes: Mosside in Manchester, the Bogside in Londonderry, and much of the East End of London, where the suffix ‘ey’ to many of the place-names tells us that they were islands in Saxon times: Hackney, Stepney, and, most notorious of all, Bermondsey, where, in the 1850s, the river Neckinger, ‘the colour of strong green tea’, flowed round Jacob’s Island, which was used by Dickens as a setting for Oliver Twist, and was described by him as ‘the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London’. Social reformers were not slow to describe the horrors of such places. Friedrich Engels singled out the river Aire in Leeds and the Irk in Manchester for special mention: ‘In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depth of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable.’¹⁷ A hundred years later George Orwell described the stagnant pools of the Ince flashes at Wigan as ‘covered with ice the colour of raw umber … nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water.’¹⁸

Add to this the limitations that wetlands impose on farming – short grazing seasons, foot-rot in sheep, suppression of root growth in the damp soil, and the hazards of high water for cereal crops, not to mention the terror of a flood – and it is enough to make one want to rush out and drain all remaining wetlands on sight. Certainly, it is easy to understand why drainage was regarded as a major manifestation of progress. But there is another side to the story. It is a curious fact that the poor benighted people who were unfortunate enough to live in the rural wetlands did not seem to share the prejudices of their visitors at all. Celia Fiennes, in high disgust at finding ‘froggs and slow-worms and snailes in my roome’ when lodging in Ely, had the honesty to qualify her personal dislike for the place, which ‘must needs be very unhealthy, tho’ the natives say much to the contrary which proceeds from custom and use’.¹⁹

THE HARVESTS OF THE WETLANDS

It really was exasperating to observe how the natives seemed to like their marshes. William Elstobb found the eighteenth-century fen dwellers content with ‘uncomfortable accommodations’;²⁰ and Vancouver wrote of Burwell in 1794: ‘Any attempt in contemplation for the better drainage of this fen is considered hostile to the true interests of these deluded people.’²¹

Back in 1646, one of the few articulate defenders of such deluded people maintained that those who would undertake drainage ‘have always vilified the Fens, and have misinformed many Parliament men, that all the Fens is a mere quagmire … of little or no value: but those which live in the Fens, and are neighbours to it, know the contrary.’ The anonymous author of The Anti-Projector proceeded to list the bounty of the fen. There were horses, cattle, fodder, sheep, osiers, and reed; and ‘Lastly, we have many thousand cottagers, which live on our Fens, which must otherwise go a-begging.’²²

Such people knew how to make the watery wilderness yield up its riches. Pre-eminent among the benefits was summer grazing. The very word ‘Somerset’ (Sumorsaetan) is Anglo-Saxon, possibly meaning ‘summer dwellers’, those who came down to graze the levels in summer-time. It is thought that those who occupied the Malvern hill forts may have herded their cattle down the Worcestershire drove-ways to pasture them on Longdon Marsh in the summers before the Roman conquest. Shortage of grass in high summer was a continual problem in the open-field system of the Middle Ages. No such lack of lush pasture afflicted the Fens, especially in the silt belt, where medieval prosperity is commemorated by mighty churches and confirmed by historians’ research into medieval and sixteenth-century tax returns. It was the flood itself that often ensured the rich grazing. The commons of the Isle of Axholme lay under water from around Martinmas (11 November) until May Day. As the inhabitants were to inform the people who set out to drain these wetlands in the seventeenth century, this flood brought with it ‘a thick fatt water’. After drainage had removed this regular winter flood, the people were left with ‘thin hungry starving water’, which rendered the land incapable of supporting the large grazing herds which it had formerly sustained.²³ Even now, local farmers around Axholme regard the ‘warped land’ which was deliberately flooded with silt as the best land in the region.

The inhabitants of the wetlands depended upon them for their survival. Economic resources of the Fens – pasture, wildfowl, and domestic geese – are here illustrated on the village sign of Cowbit in Lincolnshire.

William Cobbett declared that the marshes of South Holderness in the East Riding, together with the Fens, were the richest land in England.²⁴ What cheeses must such land have produced! A cheese resembling Camembert was the glory of Cottenham in Cambridgeshire, where records for cheese-making go back to as early as 1280; and production ceased only in the mid-nineteenth century with the enclosure of the common fen.²⁵ Domestic geese, herded on the Fens and the marshes, kept the rest of the country supplied with quill-pens. On the wetland commons of western France, geese are still kept, and furnish a nice line in duvets.

In the wettest and wildest parts of the marshes, fishing and fowling replaced more organized farming. The terse Latin of a Cambridgeshire assize role records how, in the fourteenth century, a boy went out on stilts after birds’ eggs and was drowned in the heart of the fen.²⁶ With the passage of time, such perilous subsistence gave way to more profitable wildfowling. Birds were netted and exported to London. A check-list that would make a modern bird-watcher salivate was served up on the Elizabethan menu: ‘the food of heroes, fit for the palates of the great’, as Camden describes pewits, godwits, knot, and dotterel.²⁷ Fish were also exported. Daniel Defoe saw fish transported live from the Fenland to London ‘in great butts fill’d with water in waggons as the carriers draw other goods’. Islip eels from Otmoor supplied the Ship Inn at Greenwich. Eels, speared through their gills on an eel stick, had long been standard rent in the Fens and Somerset Levels. ‘Ely’ itself means the district of eels. The method of catching eels with a glaive or trident lasted just long enough in the Fens to be recorded on an early documentary film.

Many wild plants of the wetlands were also harvested. Until the mid-nineteenth century, basket-makers were actively cutting willow at Beckley on Otmoor, a place which also sent water lilies to Covent Garden. Purple moor grass, which forms the pale-fawn undercarpet of the scattered birch woodlands of such wetlands as the Lancashire mosses and Hatfield Chase, was popular for cattle bedding. From Burwell Fen, sedge was sent out by boat for the purpose of drying malt, and Cambridge imported fen sedge as kindling. Bedmakers in Cambridge colleges were issued with stout gloves to protect their hands from the sharp sedge as they lit the fires in undergraduates’ rooms. Clogs were made from alder, and reed was used for thatch.

Eel and eel glaive.

Oak for building the ships of the British navy has always been famous as a resource essential for our national survival. A commonly grown crop of the wetlands was almost as important. Hemp, from which the word ‘hempenspun’, or ‘homespun’, originates, is a fibre crop still grown in Russia and the developing world. In England it provided sails and cables for the fleet; and for this reason, legislation going back to the reign of Henry VIII required that a small proportion of land be set aside for its production. This is a far cry from the laws which now pertain to this crop, more familiar today under its Latin name of Cannabis sativa. It flourishes best in deep moist ground, and Michael Drayton described south Lincolnshire as ‘hemp-bearing Holland’s Fen’.²⁸ On the Isle of Axholme, where little wool was produced, hemp was the basis for a spinning and weaving industry, which provided 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.