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,