the Tudors and reached its climax in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Following the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, the flood-waters began to rise again, since there were no monks to operate the sluices and dig the drains. At least, this was the opinion of Dugdale, writing a hundred years later; but it should be remembered that he was one of a long line of propagandists for land drainage, and that, while localized deterioration must have taken place, there is also ample evidence of the activities of the courts of sewers and of individual enterprise by secular landlords. In 1539 the gentry around Newhaven diverted the Sussex Ouse to improve the drainage of the estuarine marshland and to capture navigation and trade from their neighbours at Seaford. During the reign of Elizabeth, the Wealdmoors in Shropshire were a battleground between rival landlords intent on drainage and enclosure. In 1576 Thomas Cherrington complained in the Queen’s Council of the Marches, that Thurston Woodcock, lord of Meason, had assembled a gang armed with long staffs and billhooks, and had forcibly ploughed and then enclosed a piece of his waste ground with a ditch. Clearly Cherrington was not above such tactics either, for he seems to have destroyed the ditch. In 1583 the Woodcocks were back ‘with divers … desperate and lewde persons’ who ‘in riotous manner dug … one myghty diche more like in truthe a defence to have kepte owte some forren enemyes than an inclosure to keepe in cattell’.13
Romney Marsh.
THE BATTLE FOR THE FENS
Towards the end of Elizabeth I’s reign, covetous eyes began to be cast on far grander prizes. The new card in the pack was foreign technology. In the reign of Henry VIII, Italian engineers had recovered Combe Marsh near Greenwich; and under Elizabeth, Plumstead and Erith marshes by the Thames were drained with the help of Dutch engineers and workmen.14 In 1575 a certain Peter Morris of Dutch extraction obtained a licence from the queen to employ engines, or mills, for draining; and in 1589 Humphrey Bradley, who, despite his name, came from Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands, presented a treatise to Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley. It proposed nothing less than the reclamation for her kingdom of an area 70 miles long and 30 broad, equivalent to a whole new county, the ‘Great Level’ of the Fens. Shrewdly, in view of the trouble such ambitions were to cause her successors, the queen turned Bradley down. He went off to France, where, as Master of the Dykes for Henry IV, he supervised the draining of the great Poitevin marshes north of La Rochelle. But before she died, Elizabeth I signed an Act of Parliament in 1600 ‘for the recovering of many hundred thousand Acres of marshes’. The battle for the Fens was on.
The Stuart kings were forever short of money. The career of James I was marked by ingenious methods of raising cash, by fair means or foul; and similar expropriation was to lead his heir, Charles I, to his downfall. In such circumstances, the new engineering, which could apparently transform wetland wastes into sources of valuable crops to be sold to a growing population, must have seemed like something for nothing, and therefore irresistible. Francis Bacon advised King James to hold on to his royal wastes and hunting forests for exactly this potential; and, as if to confirm the good sense of such drainage enterprises, a series of bad winters between 1607 and 1613 created some of the worst floods in living memory. In Somerset ‘the tops of trees and houses only appeared … as if, at the beginning of the world, townes had been built in the bottom of the sea’.15 In the Fens, mothers abandoned their children ‘swimming in their beds, till good people, adventuring their lives, went up to the breast in the waters to fetch them out at the windows’.16
For the flood to yield up its riches, two things were required: a competent engineer and plenty of capital. To obtain the latter, there emerged a peculiarly modern group of businessmen who called themselves ‘undertakers’ or ‘adventurers’. An undertaker was one who contracted to ‘undertake’ a drainage scheme; an ‘adventurer’ was one who ‘adventured’ his capital on such an undertaking. The security of both was the promise of a large proportion of the land after the drainage operation had been successfully completed.
‘Covetous and bloodie Popham’, an early drainer of the Fens, lies in state in Wellington church, Somerset.
In 1605 Lord Chief Justice Popham, prosecutor of Guy Fawkes, Raleigh, and the Queen of Scots, ‘undertook’ to drain the fen at Upwell. He has left behind him a flamboyant monument in Wellington church, Somerset, and the channel known as Popham’s Eau in Cambridgeshire, which was abandoned at his death in 1607. The judge’s real memorial, however, is his reputation. In 1606 James I received an anonymous letter accusing ‘covetous and bloodie Popham’ of ruining the poor people of the Fens.17 The commoners, who had everything to lose from undertakings such as his, were firing an opening shot. The wetlands and wastes of England were soon to be loud with their tumults.
In 1618 James made his first move in Somerset. He decided to drain King’s Sedgemoor, which the Crown had inherited entire at the dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey. Three years later, in 1621, the king declared that he would himself undertake the drainage of the Fens for a recompense of 120,000 acres; and in that year, there arrived in England a Dutchman who was destined to become one of the greatest architects of the English landscape. His name was Cornelius Vermuyden.
In 1625 the old king died, having achieved no effective drainage operations. Vermuyden had been occupied with rebuilding the Thames flood defences at Dagenham, which, according to an inquiry of 1623, he left ‘in a worse condition than it was before’.18 From this bad beginning, Vermuyden turned his attention to the great wetland system around Hatfield Chase, south of the Humber. It was here that he made his name, carrying out the first really ambitious operation of its kind in the country, which was to be a blueprint for his ‘Great Design’ for the Fens. It is also at Hatfield that we first get a clear glimpse of the tricky controversial personality of Cornelius Vermuyden.
The name ‘Trent’ comes from the Celtic word ‘Trisanton’ meaning ‘trespasser’, which describes the wandering nature of the river. The river Trent has always flooded, and nowhere more so than on the levels between where its own waters and those of the Yorkshire Aire flow out into the Humber. Apart from the little Isle of Axholme, this basin must all have been a flooded fen roughly 8 miles wide by 12 miles long. It remains one of the least known, and, despite much intensively farmed land, one of the wildest regions of lowland England. At its heart lie two raised mires of deep peat, wildernesses of scattered birch, where adders sun themselves among the fern, and amber dragonflies haunt the peaty pools. The larger mire, Thorne Waste, approached by surmounting the incongruous dereliction of Moor Ends Colliery, stretches out as far as the eye can see, an astonishing 6,000 acres of untamed wetland. To its south lies the smaller Hatfield Moor, still quite large enough to get lost in. Ruined cottages nestle among its birches, and miners, with guns over their shoulders, roam its maze of tracks on the look-out for duck and rabbit. At dusk the air is filled with the eerie chuckle of nightjars. In its very centre, accessible only by an earth track, is the ancient manor of Lindholme, which was, from the Middle Ages, a royal hunting-lodge. It was from here that the Stuarts sized up the potential of the area for exploitation. In 1626 Charles I signed an agreement with Vermuyden for the drainage of Hatfield Chase, for which the latter would be awarded one-third of the land drained. Work started immediately, and within three years the scheme was completed. The dykes he dug to create the farmland around Hatfield Moors can still be seen, harbouring the aquatic flora of the ancient fen: butter-yellow bladderwort and the feathery spires of mare’s-tail.
Adders still sun themselves on Hatfield Chase.
In January 1629 the king knighted Vermuyden at Whitehall, and a month later he sold him his royal manor of Hatfield for £10,000 cash down and an annual interest of £195. 3s. 5d. and a red rose. But matters had not gone as smoothly as all that. Even the knighthood was not the honour it might seem, for James I had instigated the practice of charging for knighthoods, and Charles I had