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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
XXVII
Through Chesterton, overlooked by the Castle and deriving its name
from it, the road leaves Cambridge for Ely, passing through the
village of Milton, where the Fenland begins, or what is more by
usage than true description so-called now the Fens are drained and
the land once sodden with water and covered with beds of dense
reeds and rushes made to bear corn and to afford rich pasture for
cattle. This is the true district of the "Cambridgeshire Camels," as
the folk of the shire are proverbially called. The term, a very old one,
doubtless took its origin in the methods of traversing the Fens
formerly adopted by the rustic folk. They used stilts, or "stetches,"
as they preferred to call them, and no doubt afforded an amusing
spectacle to strangers, as they straddled high above the reeds and
stalked from one grassy tussock to another in the quaking bogs.
There is a choice of routes at Milton, the road running in a loop for
two miles. The left-hand branch, through Landbeach, selected by the
Post Office as the route of its telegraph-poles, might on that account
be considered the main road, but the right-hand route has decidedly
the better surface. Midway of this course, where the Slap Up Inn
stands, is the lane leading to Waterbeach, a scattered village near
the Cam, much troubled by the floods from that stream in days gone
by.
Something of what Waterbeach was like in the eighteenth century
may be gathered from the correspondence of the Rev. William Cole,
curate there from 1767 to 1770. Twenty guineas a year was the
modest sum he received, but that, fortunately for him, was not the
full measure of his resources, for he possessed an estate in the
neighbourhood. The value of his land could not have been great,
and may be guessed from his letters. Writing in 1769, he says: "A
great part of my estate has been drowned these two years: all this
part of the country is now covered with water and the poor people
of this parish utterly ruined." And again in 1770: "This is the third
time within six years that my estate has been drowned, and now
worse than ever." Shortly after writing that letter he removed. "Not
being a water-rat," he says, "I left Waterbeach," and went to the
higher and drier village of Milton, two miles away.
Waterbeach long retained its old-world manners and customs. May
Day was its greatest holiday, and was ushered in with elaborate
preparations. The young women collected materials for a garland,
consisting of ribbons, flowers, and silver spoons, with a silver
tankard to suspend in the centre; while the young men, early in the
morning, or late at night, went forth into the fields to collect
emblems of their esteem or disapproval of the young women
aforesaid. "Then," says the old historian of these things, "woe betide
the girl of loose habits, the slattern and the scold; for while the
young woman who had been foremost in the dance, or whose
amiable manners entitled her to esteem, had a large branch or tree
of whitethorn planted by her cottage door, the girl of loose manners
had a blackthorn at hers." The slattern's emblem was an elder tree,
and the scold's a bunch of nettles tied to the latch of the door.
After having thus (under cover of darkness, be it said) left their
testimonials to the qualities or defects of the village beauties, the
young men, just before the rising of the sun, went for the garland
and suspended it in the centre of the street by a rope tied to
opposite chimneys. This done, sunrise was ushered in by ringing the
village bells. Domestic affairs were attended to until after midday,
and then the village gave itself up to merrymaking. Dancing on the
village green, sports of every kind, and kiss-in-the-ring were for the
virtuous and the industrious; while the recipients of the elders, the
blackthorns, and the nettles sat in the cold shade of neglect, wished
they had never been born, and made up their minds to be more
objectionable than ever. Such was Waterbeach about 1820.
Some thirty years later the village acquired an enduring title to fame
as the first charge given to that bright genius among homely
preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. It was in 1851, while yet only
in his seventeenth year, that Spurgeon was made pastor of the
Baptist Chapel here. Already his native eloquence had made him
famed in Colchester, where, two years before, he had first spoken in
public. The old thatched chapel where the youthful preacher
ministered, on a stipend of twenty pounds a year, almost identical
with that enjoyed by the Reverend William Cole, curate in the parish
church eighty years before, has long since disappeared, destroyed
by fire in 1861; and on its site stands a large and very ugly
"Spurgeon Memorial Chapel" in yellow brick with red facings. Scarce
two years and a half passed before the fame of Spurgeon's
eloquence spread to London, and he was offered, and accepted, the
pastorate of New Park Street Chapel, Southwark, there to fill that
conventicle to overflowing, and presently draw all London to Exeter
Hall. Even at this early stage of his wonderful career there were
those who dilated upon the marvel of "this heretical Calvinist and
Baptist" drawing a congregation of ten thousand souls while St.
Paul's and Westminster Abbey resounded with the echoing footsteps
of infrequent worshippers; but Spurgeon preached shortly
afterwards to a congregation numbering twenty-four thousand, and
maintained his hold until the day of his death, nearly forty years
after. Where shall that curate, vicar, rector, dean, bishop, or
archbishop of the Church of England be found who can command
such numbers?
That his memory is held in great reverence at Waterbeach need
scarce be said. There are still those who tell how the "boy-preacher,"
when announced to hold a night service in some remote village, not
only braved the worst that storms and floods could do, but how,
finding the chapel empty and the expected congregation snugly
housed at home, out of the howling wind and drenching rain, he
explored the place with a borrowed stable-lantern in his hand, and
secured a congregation by dint of house-to-house visits!
XXVIII
The left-hand loop, through Landbeach, if an inferior road, has more
wayside interest. Landbeach is in Domesday Book called "Utbech,"
that is to say Outbeach, or Beach out (of the water). "Beach" in this
and other Fenland instances means "bank"; Waterbeach being thus
"water bank." Wisbeach, away up in the extreme north of the
county, is a more obscure name, but on inquiry is found to mean
Ousebank, that town standing on the Ouse in days before the course
of that river was changed. Landbeach Church stands by the wayside,
and has its interest for the ecclesiologist, as conceivably also for
those curious people interested in the stale and futile controversy as
to who wrote Shakespeare's plays; for within the building lies the
Reverend William Rawley, sometime chaplain to Bacon, and not only
so, but the author of a life of him and the publisher of his varied
acknowledged works. He, if anyone, would have known it if Bacon
had been that self-effacing playwright, so we must needs think it a
pity there is so little in spiritualism save idiotic manifestations of
horseplay and showers of rappings in the dark; otherwise the
obvious thing would be to summon Rawley's shade and discreetly
pump it.
LANDBEACH.
Beyond Landbeach, close by the fifty-sixth milestone from London,
the modern road falls into the Roman Akeman Street, running from
Brancaster (the Roman "Branodunum") on the Norfolk coast,
through Ely, to Cambridge, to Dunstable, and eventually, after many
leagues, to Bath. Those who will may attempt the tracing of it back
between this point and Cambridge, a difficult enough matter, for it
has mostly sunk into the spongy ground, but here, where it exists
for a length of five miles, plain to see, it is still a causeway raised in
places considerably above the levels, and occasionally showing
stretches of imposing appearance. It remains thus a striking
monument to the surveying and engineering skill of that great
people, confronted here in far-off times with a wilderness of reeking
bogs. The object in view—to reach the coast in as straight a line as
possible—meant wrestling with the difficulties of road-making in the
mixed and unstable elements of mud and water, but they faced the
problem and worked it out with such completeness that a solid way
arose that only fell into decay when the civilisation they had planted
here, on the rim and uttermost verge of the known world, was
blotted out. Onwards as far as Lynn a succession of fens stretched
for sixty-five miles, but so judiciously did the Romans choose their
route that only some ten miles of roadway were actually constructed
in the ooze. It picked a careful itinerary, advancing from isle to isle
amid the swamps, and, for all its picking and choosing of a way,
went fairly direct. It was here that it took the first plunge into the
sloughs and made direct, as a raised bank, through them for the
Ouse, where Stretham Bridge now marks the entrance to the Isle of
Ely. How that river, then one of great size and volume, was crossed
we do not know. Beyond it, after some three miles of floundering
through the slime, the causeway came to firm ground again where
the village of Stretham (its very name suggestive of solid roadway)
stands on a rise that was once an island. Arrived at that point, the
road took its way for ten miles through the solid foothold of the Isle
of Ely, leaving it at Littleport and coming, after struggling through six
miles of fen, to the Isle of Southery. Crossing that islet in little more
than a mile, it dipped into fens again at the point now known as
Modney Bridge, whence it made for the eyot of Hilgay. Only one
difficulty then remained: to cross the channel of the Wissey River
into Fordham. Thenceforward the way was plain.
We have already made many passing references to the Fens, and
now the district covered in old times by them is reached, it is
necessary, in order to make this odd country thoroughly understood,
to explain them. What are the Fens like? The Fens, expectant reader,
are gone, like the age of miracles, like the dodo, the pterodactyl, the
iguanodon, and the fancy zoological creatures of remote antiquity.
Ages uncountable have been endeavouring to abolish the Fens.
When the Romans came, they found the native tribes engaged upon
the task, and carried it on themselves, in succession. Since then
every age has been at it, and at length, some seventy or eighty
years ago, when steam-pumps were brought to aid the old draining
machinery, the thing was done. There is only one little specimen of
natural fen now left, and that is preserved as a curiosity. But
although the actual morasses are gone, the flat drained fields of
Fenland are here, and we shall presently see in these pages that
although the sloughs are in existence no longer, it is no light thing in
these districts to venture far from the main roads.
No one has more eloquently or more truly described the present
appearance of the Fen country than Cobbett. "The whole country,"
he says, "is as level as the table on which I am now writing. The
horizon like the sea in a dead calm: you see the morning sun come
up, just as at sea; and see it go down over the rim, in just the same
way as at sea in a calm. The land covered with beautiful grass, with
sheep lying about upon it, as fat as hogs stretched out sleeping in a
stye. Everything grows well here: earth without a stone so big as a
pin's head; grass as thick as it can grow on the ground."
The Fenland has, in fact, the wild beauty that comes of boundless
expanse. Only the range of human vision limits the view. Above is
the summer sky, blue and vast and empty to the sight, but filled to
the ear with the song of the soaring skylark, trilling as he mounts
higher and higher; the sound of his song diminishing as he rises,
until it becomes like the "still small voice of Conscience," and at last
fades out of hearing, like the whisper of that conscience
overwrought and stricken dumb.
These levels have a peculiar beauty at sunset, and Cambridgeshire
sunsets are as famous in their way as Cambridge sausages. They
(the sunsets, not the sausages) have an unearthly glory that only a
Turner in his most inspired moments could so much as hint at. The
vastness of the Fenland sky and the humid Fenland atmosphere
conspire to give these effects.
The Fenland is a land of romance for those who know its history and
have the wit to assimilate its story from the days of fantastic legend
to these of clear-cut matter-of-fact. If you have no reading, or even
if you have that reading and do not bring to it the aid of imagination,
the Fens are apt to spell dulness. If so, the dulness is in yourself.
Leave these interminable levels, and in the name of God go
elsewhere, for the flatness of the Great Level added to the flatness
of your own mind will in combination produce a horrible monotony.
On the other hand, if some good fairy at your cradle gave you the
gift of seeing with a vision not merely physical, why, then, the
Fenland is fairyland; for though to the optic nerve there is but a level
stretching to the uttermost horizon, criss-crossed with dykes and
lodes and leams of a severe straightness, there is visible to the
mind's eye, Horatio, an ancient order of things infinitely strange and
uncanny. Antiquaries have written much of the Fens, but they do not
commonly present a very convincing picture of them. They tell of
Iceni, of Romans, fierce Norsemen marauders, Saxons, Danes, and
the conquering Normans, but they cannot, or do not, breathe the
breath of life into those ancient peoples, and make them live and
love and hate, fight and vanquish or be vanquished. The geologists,
too, can speculate learnedly upon the origin of the Fens, and can
prove, to their own satisfaction at least, that this low-lying, once
flooded country was produced by some natural convulsion that
suddenly lowered it to the level of the sea; but no one has with any
approach to intimacy with the subject taken us back to the
uncountable æons when the protoplasm first began to move in the
steaming slime, and so conducted us by easy stages through the
crucial and hazardous period when the jelly-fish was acquiring the
rudiments of a backbone (if that was the order of the progress) to
the exciting era when the crocodile played the very devil with
aboriginal man, and the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus wallowed
in the mud. The Iceni are very modern, compared with these very
ancient inhabitants, and have done what those inarticulate
protoplasms, neolithic men and others, could not do; that is, they
gave their names to many places in these East Anglian shires, and a
title that still survives to a great road. Look on any map of East
Anglia and the surrounding counties and you shall see many place-
names beginning with "Ick": Ickborough, Ickworth, Ickleton,
Icklington, Ickleford, and Ickwell.
These are the surviving names of Icenian settlements. There is a
"Hickling" on the Broads, in Norfolk, which ought by rights to be
"Ickling"; but the world has ever been at odds on the subject of
aspirate or no aspirate, certainly since the classic days of the Greeks
and the Romans. Does not Catullus speak of a certain Arrius who
horrified the Romans by talking of the "Hionian Sea"? and is not Tom
Hood's "Ben Battle" familiar? "Don't let 'em put 'Hicks jacet' there,"
he said, "for that is not my name."
When the Romans came and found the Iceni here, the last stone-
age man and the ultimate crocodile (the former inside the latter) had
for ages past been buried in the peat of the Fens, resolving into a
fossil state. The Iceni probably, the purposeful Romans certainly,
endeavoured to drain the Fens, or at least to prevent their being
worse flooded by the sea; and the Roman embankment between
Wisbeach and King's Lynn, built to keep out the furious wind-driven
rollers of the Wash, gave a name to the villages of Walsoken,
Walton, and Walpole (once Wall-pool). When the Romano-British
civilisation decayed, the defences against the sea decayed with it,
and the level lay worse flooded than before. Far and wide, from
Lynn, on the seacoast in the north, to Fen Ditton, in the south,
almost at the gates of Cambridge; from Mildenhall in the east, to St.
Ives and Peterborough in the west, a vast expanse of still and
shallow water covered an area of, roughly, seventy miles in length
and thirty in breadth: about 2100 square miles. Out of this dismal
swamp rose many islands, formed of knobs of the stiff clay or gault
that had not been washed away with the surrounding soil. It was on
these isles that prehistoric man lived, and where his wretched
wattle-huts were built beside the water. He had his dug-out canoe
and his little landing-stage, and sometimes, when his islet was very
diminutive and subject to floods, he built his dwelling on stakes
driven into the mud. In peaceful and plenteous times he sat on his
staging overhanging the water, and tore and gnawed at the birds
and animals that had fallen to his arrow or his spear. Primitive man
was essentially selfish. He first satisfied his own hunger and then
tossed the remainder to his squaw and the brats, and when they
had picked the bones clean, and saved those that might be useful
for fashioning into arrow-heads, they threw the remains into the
water, whence they sent up in the fulness of time an evil smell which
did not trouble him and his in the least, primitive as they were in
every objectionable sense of the word.
Relics of him and his domestic odds and ends are often found, ten
feet or so beneath the present surface of the land. His canoe is
struck by the spade of the gaulter, his primitive weapons unearthed,
his dustbin and refuse-heap turned over and examined by curious
antiquaries and naturalists, who can tell you exactly what his menu
was. Sometimes they find primitive man himself, lying among the
ruins of his dwelling, overwhelmed in the long ago by some
cataclysm of nature, or perhaps killed by a neighbouring primitive.
To these isles in after centuries, when the Romans had gone and the
Saxons had settled down and become Christians, came hermits and
monks like Guthlac, who reared upon them abbeys and churches,
and began in their several ways to cultivate the land and to dig
dykes and start draining operations. For the early clergy earned their
living, and were not merely the parasites they have since become.
These islands, now that the Fens are drained, are just hillocks in the
great plain. They are still the only villages in the district, and on
those occasions when an embankment breaks and the Fens are
flooded, they become the islands they were a thousand years ago.
The very names of these hillocks and villages are fen-eloquent,
ending as they do with "ey" and "ea," corruptions of the Anglo-
Saxon words "ig," an island, and "ea," a river. Ely, the largest of
them, is said by Bede to have obtained its name from the abundance
of eels, and thus to be the "Eel Island." There are others who derive
it from "helig," a willow, and certainly both eels and willows were
abundant here; but the name, in an ancient elision of that awkward
letter "h," is more likely to come from another "helig," meaning holy,
and Ely to really be the "holy island."
Other islands, most of them now with villages of the same name,
were Coveney, Hilgay, Southery, Horningsea, Swavesey, Welney,
Stuntney, and Thorney. There was, too, an Anglesey, the Isle of the
Angles, a Saxon settlement, near Horningsea. A farm built over the
site of Anglesey Abbey now stands there.
But many Fenland place-names are even more eloquent. There are
Frog's Abbey, Alderford, Littleport, Dry Drayton and Fenny Drayton,
Landbeach and Waterbeach. Littleport, really at one time a port to
which the ships of other ages came, is a port no longer; Fenny
Drayton is now as dry as its fellow-village; and Landbeach and
Waterbeach are, as we have already seen, not so greatly the
opposites of one another as they were.
XXIX
A great part of the Fens seems to have been drained and cultivated
at so early a time as the reigns of Stephen and Henry the Second,
for William of Malmesbury describes this as then "the paradise of
England," with luxuriant crops and flourishing gardens; but this
picture of prosperity was suddenly blotted out by the great gale that
arose on the morrow of St. Martin 1236, and continued for eight
days and nights. The sea surged over the embankments and flowed
inwards past Wisbeach, and the rivers, instead of flowing away, were
forced back and so drowned the levels. Some attempts to reclaim
the land were made, but a similar disaster happened seventeen
years later, and the fen-folk seem to have given up all efforts at
keeping out the waters, for in 1505 we find the district described as
"one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm; a land of
marshy ague and unwholesome swamps." But already the idea of
reclamation was in the air, for Bishop Morton, in the time of Henry
the Seventh,—a most worshipful Bishop of Ely, Lord Chancellor too,
churchman, statesman, and engineer,—had a notion for making the
stagnant Nene to flow forth into the sea, instead of doubling upon
itself and seething in unimaginable bogs as it had done for hundreds
of years past. He cut the drain that runs from Stanground, away up
in the north near Peterborough, to Wisbeach, still known as Morton's
Leam, and thus began a new era. But though he benefited the land
to the north-west of Ely, the way between his Cathedral city and
Cambridge was not affected, and remained in his time as bad as it
had been for centuries; and he, like many a Bishop before him and
others to come after, commonly journeyed between Ely and
Cambridge by boat. Our road, indeed, did not witness the full activity
of the good Bishop and his successors. Their doings only attained to
great proportions in the so-called Great Level of the Fens, the
Bedford Level, as it is alternatively called, that stretches over a
district beginning eight miles away and continuing for sixteen or
twenty miles, by Thorney, Crowland, and Peterborough. This map,
from Dugdale's work, showing the Fens as they lay drowned, and
the islands in them, will give the best notion of this curious district.
You will perceive how like an inland sea was this waste of mud and
water, not full fathom five, it is true, but less readily navigable than
the sea itself. Here you see the road from Cambridge to Ely and on
to Downham Market pictured, with no great accuracy, you may be
sworn, and doubtless with as much margin of error as it is
customary to allow in the somewhat speculative charts of Arctic
continents and regions of similarly difficult access. In this map, then,
it will be perceived how remote the Bedford Level lies from our
route. Why "Bedford Level," which, in point of fact, is in
Cambridgeshire and not in Bedfordshire at all? For this reason: that
these are lands belonging to the Earls (now Dukes) of Bedford. To
the Russells were given the lands belonging to Thorney Abbey, but
their appetite for what should have been public property was only
whetted by this gift, and when in the reign of Charles the First
proposals were made to drain and reclaim 310,000 acres of
surrounding country, they, in the person of Francis, the then Earl,
obtained of this vast tract no less than 95,000 acres. It is true that
this grant was made conditional upon the Earl taking part in the
drainage of the land, and that it was a costly affair in which the
smaller adventurers were ruined and the Earl's own resources
strained; but in the result a princely heritage fell to the Bedfords.
THE FENS.
[After Dugdale.]
The great engineering figure at this period of reclamation was the
Dutchman, Cornelius Vermuyden, who began his dyking and draining
under royal sanction and with Bedfordian aid in 1629. Vermuyden's
is a great figure historically considered, but his works are looked
upon coldly in these times, and it is even said that one of the
principal labours of modern engineers has been to rectify his errors.
That view probably originated with Rennie, who in 1810 was
employed to drain and reclaim the extensive marshland between
Wisbeach and Lynn, and was bound, in the usual professional
manner, to speak evil things of one of the same craft. There was
little need, though, to be jealous of Vermuyden, who had died
obscurely, in poverty and in the cold shade of neglect, some hundred
and fifty years before. Vermuyden, as a matter of course, employed
Flamands and Hollanders in his works, for they were not merely his
own countrymen, but naturally skilled in labour of this technical kind.
These strangers aroused the enmity of the Fenmen, not for their
strangeness alone, but for the sake of the work they were engaged
upon, for the drainage of the Fens was then a highly unpopular
proceeding. The Fenmen loved their watery wastes, and little
wonder that they did so, for they knew none other, and they were a
highly specialised race of amphibious creatures, skilled in all the arts
of the wild-fowler and the fisherman, by which they lived. Farming
was not within their ken. They trapped and subsisted upon the
innumerable fish and birds that shared the wastes with them; birds
of the duck tribe, the teal, widgeon, and mallard; and greater fowl,
like the wild goose and his kind. For fish they speared and snared
the eel, the pike, and the lamprey—pre-eminently fish of the fens;
for houses they contrived huts of mud and stakes, thatched with the
reeds that grew densely, to a height of ten or twelve feet,
everywhere; and as for firing, peat was dug and stacked and burnt.
Consider. The Fenman was a product of the centuries. His father, his
grandfather, his uttermost ancestors, had squatted and fished and
hunted where they would, and none could say them nay. They paid
no rent or tithe to anyone, for the Fens were common, or waste.
And now the only life the Fenman knew was like to be taken from
him. What could such an one do on dry land? A farmer put aboard
ship and set to navigate it could not be more helpless than the
dweller in those old marshes, dependent only upon his marsh lore,
when the water was drained off and the fishes gone, reed-beds cut
down, the land cultivated, and the wild-fowl dispersed. The fears of
this people were quaintly expressed in the popular verses then
current, entitled "The Powte's Complaint." "Powte," it should be said,
was the Fen name for the lamprey—
"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, if it be true the fens be undertaken,
And where we feed in fen and reed they'll feed both beef an
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,
And let the frogs and miry bogs destroy where they do enter.
Behold the great design, which they do now determine,
Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermine;
For they do mean all fens to drain and waters overmaster,
All will be dry, and we must die, 'cause Essex Calves want
pasture.
Away with boats and rudders, farewell both boots and skatches,
No need of one nor t'other; men now make better matches;
Stilt-makers all and tanners shall complain of this disaster,
For they will make each muddy lake for Essex Calves a pasture.
The feather'd fowls have wings, to fly to other nations,
But we have no such things to help our transportations;
We must give place, O grievous case! to horned beasts and cattle,
Except that we can all agree to drive them out by battle."
Other verses follow, where winds, waves, and moon are invoked in
aid, but enough has been quoted to show exactly how affairs stood
at this juncture. But the Fenmen were not without their defender. He
was found in a certain young Huntingdonshire squire and brewer,
one Oliver Cromwell, Member of Parliament for Huntingdon,
reclaimed from his early evil courses, and now, a Puritan and a
brand plucked timeously from the burning, posing as champion of
the people. Seven years past this draining business had been going
forward, and now that trouble was brewing between King and
people, and King wanted money, and people would withhold it, the
popular idea arose that the Fens were being drained to provide
funds for royal needs. Cromwell was at this time resident in Ely, and
seized upon the local grievances and exploited them to his own end,
with the result that the works were stopped and himself raised to
the extreme height of local popularity. But when the monarchy was
upset and Cromwell had become Lord Protector, he not only
authorised the drainage being resumed, but gave extreme aid and
countenance to William, Earl of Bedford, sending him a thousand
Scots prisoners from Dunbar, as pressed men, practically slaves, to
work in his trenches. Appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober is a
famous remedy, but appeal to Oliver, besotted with power, must
have seemed helpless to our poor Fen-slodgers, for they do not
seem to have made resistance, and the work progressed to its end.
XXX
If most of those who have described Fenland have lacked
imagination, certainly the charge cannot be brought against that
eighth-century saint, Saint Guthlac, who fled into this great dismal
swamp and founded Crowland Abbey on its north-easterly extremity.
Crowland has nothing to do with the Ely and King's Lynn Road, but
in describing what he calls the "develen and luther gostes" that
made his life a misery, Guthlac refers to the evil inhabitants of the
Fens in general. Precisely what a "luther" ghost may be, does not
appear. A Protestant spook, perhaps, it might be surmised, except
that Lutheran schisms did not arise for many centuries later.
Saints were made of strange materials in ancient times, and Guthlac
was of the strangest. Truth was not his strong point, and he could
and did tell tales that would bring a blush to the hardy cheek of a Sir
John Mandeville, or arouse the bitter envy of a Munchausen. But
Guthlac's character shall not be taken away without good cause
shown. He begins reasonably enough, with an excellent descriptive
passage, picturing the "hideous fen of huge bigness which extends
in a very long track even to the sea, ofttimes clouded with mist and
dark vapours, having within it divers islands and woods, as also
crooked and winding rivers"; but after this mild prelude goes on to
make very large demands upon our credulity.
He had a wattle hut on an island, and to this poor habitation, he tells
us, the "develen and luther gostes" came continually, dragged him
out of bed and "tugged and led him out of his cot, and to the swart
fen, and threw and sunk him in the muddy waters." Then they beat
him with iron whips. He describes these devils in a very
uncomplimentary fashion. They had "horrible countenances, great
heads, long necks, lean visages, filthy and squalid beards, rough
ears, fierce eyes, and foul mouths; teeth like horses' tusks, throats
filled with flame, grating voices, crooked shanks, and knees big and
great behind." It would have been scarce possible to mistake one of
these for a respectable peasant.
After fifteen years of this treatment, Guthlac died, and it is to be
hoped these hardy inventions of his are not remembered against
him. No one else found the Fens peopled so extravagantly. Only the
will-o'-wisps that danced fitfully and pallid at night over the
treacherous bogs, and the poisonous miasma exhaled from the
noxious beds of rotting sedge; only the myriad wild-fowl made the
wilderness strange and eerie.
Guthlac was the prime romancist of the Fens, but others nearly
contemporary with him did not altogether lack imagination and
inventive powers; as where one of the old monkish chroniclers
gravely states that the Fen-folk were born with yellow bellies, like
frogs, and were provided with webbed feet to fit them for their
watery surroundings.
Asthma and ague were long the peculiar maladies of these districts.
Why they should have been is sufficiently evident, but Dugdale, who
has performed the difficult task of writing a dry book upon the Fens,
uses language that puts the case very convincingly. He says, "There
is no element good, the air being for the most part cloudy, gross,
and full of rotten harrs; the water putrid and muddy, yea, full of
loathsome vermin; the earth spungy and boggy." No wonder, then,
that the terrible disease of ague seized upon the unfortunate
inhabitants of this watery waste. Few called this miasmatic affection
by that name: they knew it as the "Bailiff of Marshland," and to be
arrested by the dread bailiff was a frequent experience of those who
worked early or late in the marshes, when the poisonous vapours
still lingered. To alleviate the miseries of ague the Fen-folk resorted
to opium, and often became slaves to that drug. Another very much
dreaded "Bailiff" was the "Bailiff of Bedford," as the Ouse, coming
out of Bedfordshire, was called. He of the marshland took away your
health, but the flooded Ouse, rising suddenly after rain or thaw,
swept your very home away.
Still, in early morn, in Wicken Fen, precautions are taken by the
autumn sedge-cutter against the dew and the exhalations from the
earth, heavy with possibilities of marsh fever. He ties a handkerchief
over his mouth for that purpose, while to protect himself against the
sharp edges of the sedge he wears old stockings tied round his
arms, leather gaiters on his legs, and a calfskin waistcoat.
The modern Fen-folk are less troubled with ague than their
immediate ancestors, but the opium habit has not wholly left them.
Whether they purchase the drug, or whether it is extracted from the
white poppies that are a feature of almost every Fenland garden,
they still have recourse to it, and "poppy tea" is commonly
administered to the children to keep them quiet while their parents
are at work afield. The Fenlanders are, by consequence, a solemn
and grim race, shaking sometimes with ague, and at others "as
nervous as a kitten," as they are apt to express it, as a result of
drugging themselves. Another, and an entirely innocent, protection
against ague is celery, and the celery-bed is a cherished part of a
kitchen-garden in the Fens.
One of the disadvantages of these oozy flats is the lack of good
drinking-water. The rivers, filled as they are with the drainings of the
dykes and ditches, can only offer water unpleasant both to smell and
taste, if not actually poisonous from the decaying matter and the
myriad living organisms in it; and springs in the Fens are practically
unknown. Under these circumstances the public-houses do a good
trade in beer and spirits.
XXXI
Cambridgeshire is a singularly stoneless country, and in the Fens there
is not so much as a pebble to be found. Thus it has become a
common jest of the Cambridgeshire farmers to offer to swallow all
the stones you can pick up in their fields. Farm horses for this reason
are never shod, and it sounds not a little strange and uncanny to see
one of the great waggon-horses plodding along a Fenland "drove,"
as the roads are named, and to hear nothing but the sound of his
bells and the indistinct thudding of his shoeless feet in the dust or
the mud, into whichever condition the weather has thrown the track.
A Fenland road is one thing among others peculiar to the Fens. It is
a very good illustration of eternity, and goes on, flat and unbending,
with a semi-stagnant ditch on either side, as far as eye can reach in
the vast solitary expanse, empty save for an occasional ash-tree or
group of Lombardy poplars, with perhaps a hillock rising in the
distance crowned by a church and a village. No "metal" or ballast
has ever been placed on the Fenland drove. In summer it is from six
to eight inches deep in a black dust, that rises in choking clouds to
the passage of a vehicle or on the uprising of a breeze; in winter it is
a sea of mud, congealed on the approach of frost into ruts and
ridges of the most appalling ruggedness. The Fen-folk have a home-
made way with their execrable "droves." When they become uneven
they just harrow them, as the farmer in other counties harrows his
fields, and, when they are become especially hard, they plough them
first and harrow them afterwards; a procedure that would have
made Macadam faint with horror. The average-constituted small boy,
who throws stones by nature, discovers something lacking in the
scheme of creation as applied to these districts. Everywhere the soil
is composed of the ancient alluvial silt brought down to these levels
by those lazy streams, the Nene, the Lark, the Cam, and the Ouse,
and of the dried peat of these sometime stagnant and festering
morasses. Now that drainage has so thoroughly done its work, that
in ardent summers the soil of this former inland sea gapes and
cracks with dryness, it is no uncommon sight to see water pumped
on to the baking fields from the leams and droves. The earth is of a
light, dry black nature, consisting of fibrous vegetable matter, and
possesses the well-known preservative properties of bog soil. Thus
the trees of the primeval forest that formerly existed here, and were
drowned in an early stage of the world's history, are often dug up
whole. Their timber is black too, as black as coal, as may be seen by
the wooden bridges that cross the drains and cuts, often made from
these prehistoric trees.
Here is a typical dyke. Its surface is richly carpeted with water-
weeds, and the water-lily spreads its flat leaves prodigally about it;
the bright yellow blossoms reclining amid them like graceful naiads
on fairy couches. But the Fenland children have a more prosaic
fancy. They call them "Brandy-balls." The flowering rush, flushing a
delicate carmine, and the aquatic sort of forget-me-not, sporting the
Cambridge colours, are common inhabitants of the dykes; and in the
more stagnant may be found the "water-soldier," a queer plant
without any roots, living in the still slime at the bottom until the time
comes for it to put forth its white blossoms, when it comes to
"attention" in the light of day, displays its fleeting glory, and then
sinks again, "at ease," to its fetid bed. There is a current in the
dykes, but the water flows so imperceptibly that it does not deflect
the upstanding spikes of the daintiest aquatic plant by so much as a
hair's-breadth. Indeed, it would not flow at all, and would merely
stagnate, were it not for the windmill-worked pumps that suck it
along and, somewhere in the void distance, impel it up an inclined
plane, and so discharge it into the longer and higher drain, whence
it indolently flows into one of the canalised rivers, and so, through a
sluice, eventually finds its way into the sea at ebbtide.
The means by which the Fens are kept drained are not without their
interest. A glance at a map of Cambridgeshire and its neighbouring
counties will show the Great Level to be divided up into many
patches of land by hard straight lines running in every direction.
Some are thicker, longer, and straighter than others, but they all
inter-communicate, and eventually reach one or other of the rivers.
The longest, straightest, and broadest of these represents that great
drain already mentioned, the Old Bedford River, seventy feet wide
and twenty-one miles long; cut in the seventeenth century to
shorten the course of the Ouse and to carry off the floods. Others
are the New Bedford River, one hundred feet in width, cut only a few
years later and running parallel with the first; Vermuyden's Eau, or
the Forty Foot Drain, of the same period, feeding the Old Bedford
River from the Nene, near Ramsey, with their tributaries and
counter-drains. The North Level cuts belong principally to the early
part of the nineteenth century, when Rennie drained the Wisbeach
and Lynn districts.
A WET DAY IN THE FENS.
The main drains are at a considerably higher level than the
surrounding lands, the water in them only prevented from drowning
the low-lying fields again by their great and solid banks, fourteen to
sixteen feet high, and about ten feet in breadth at the top. These
banks, indeed, form in many districts the principal roads. Perilous
roads at night, even for those who know them well, and one thinks
with a shudder of the dangers encountered of old by local medical
men, called out in the darkness to attend some urgent case. Their
custom was—perhaps it is in some places still observed—to mount
their steady nags and to jog along with a lighted stable-lantern
swinging from each stirrup, to throw a warning gleam on broken
bank or frequent sunken fence.
At an interval of two miles along these banks is generally to be
found a steam pumping-engine, busily and constantly occupied in
raising water from the lodes and dykes in the lower levels and
pouring it into the main channel. The same process is repeated in
the case of raising the water from the field-drains into the smaller
dykes by a windmill or "skeleton-pump," as it is often called. It is a
work that is never done, but goes forward, year by year, and is paid
for by assessments on the value of the lands affected by these
operations. Commissioners, themselves local landowners and
tenants, and elected by the same classes, look after the conduct and
the efficiency of the work, and see that the main drains are scoured
by the "scourers"; the banks duly repaired by the "bankers" and the
"gaulters"; the moles, that might bring disaster by burrowing
through them, caught by the "molers"; and the sluices kept in
working order. The rate imposed for paying the cost of these works
is often a heavy one, but the land is wonderfully rich and productive.
Nor need the Fenland farmer go to extraordinary expense for
artificial manure, or for marling his fields when at length he has
cropped all the goodness out of the surface soil. The very best of
restoratives lies from some five to twelve feet under his own land, in
the black greasy clay formed from the decaying vegetable matter of
the old forests that underlie the Fens. A series of pits is sunk on the
land, the clay obtained from them is spread over it, and the fields
again yield a bounteous harvest.
Harvest-work and farm-work in general in the Fens is in some ways
peculiar to this part of the country, for farm-holdings are large and
farmsteads far between. The practice, under these conditions, arose
of the work being done by gangs; the hands assembling at break of
day in the farmyard and being despatched in parties to their distant
day's work in hoeing, weeding, or picking in the flat and almost
boundless fields; returning only when the day's labour is ended.
Men, women, and children gathered thus in the raw morning make a
picture—and in some ways a pitiful picture—of farming and rustic
life, worthy of a Millet. But our Millet has not yet come; and the
gangs grow fewer. If he does not hasten, they will be quite gone,
and something characteristic in Fenland-life quite lost. A Fenland
farm-lass may wear petticoats, or she may not. Sometimes she acts
as carter, and it is precisely in such cases that she sheds her
feminine skirts and dons the odd costume that astonishes the
inquisitive stranger new to these parts, who sees, with doubt as to
whether he sees aright, a creature with the boots and trousers of a
man, a nondescript garment, half bodice and half coat with skirts,
considerably above the knees, and a sun-bonnet on her head,
working in the rick-yards, or squashing heavily through the farmyard
muck. Skirts are out of place in farmyards and in cattle-byres, and
the milkmaid, too, of these parts is dressed in like guise. If you were
to show a milkmaid in the Fens a picture illustrating "Where are you
going to, my pretty maid?" in the conventional fashion, she would
criticise very severely, as quite incorrect, the skirted figure of a
poet's dream usually presented. She saves her skirts and her flower-
trimmed hat for Sundays.
XXXII
And now we must come from the general to the especial; from Fens
and Fen-folk in the mass to a bright particular star.
The greatest historical figure along the whole course of this road is
that of Hereward the Wake, the "last of the English," as he has been
called. "Hereward," it has been said, means "the guard of the army,"
while "the Wake" is almost self-explanatory, signifying literally the
Wide Awake, or the Watchful. He is thought to have been the eldest
son of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and of the famous Godiva, and to have
been banished by his father and outlawed. Like objects dimly
glimpsed in a fog, the figure of Hereward looms gigantic and
uncertain through the mists of history, and how much of him is real
and how much legendary no one can say. When Hereward was born,
in the mild reign of Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxons who six
hundred and fifty years before had conquered Britain, and, driving a
poor remnant of the enervated race of Romanised Britons to the
uttermost verge of the island, changed the very name of the country
from Britain to England, had themselves degenerated. The Saxons
were originally among the fiercest of savages, and derived their
name from the "sæxe," or short sword, with which they came to
close and murderous combat; but the growth of civilisation and the
security in which they had long dwelt in the conquered island
undermined their original combativeness, and for long before the
invasion of England by William the Conqueror they had been hard
put to it to hold their own against the even more savage Danes. Yet
at the last, at Hastings under Harold, they made a gallant stand
against the Normans, and if courage alone could have won the day,
why then no Norman dynasty had ever occupied the English throne.
The Battle of Hastings was only won by superior military dispositions
on the part of William. His archers gained him the victory, and by
their disconcerting arrow-flights broke the advance of the Saxons
armed with sword and battle-axe.
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