Читать книгу Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding - Jeremy Purseglove - Страница 16

Taming the flood necessitated taming the people of the flood-lands. Outsiders, who generally initiated the drainage, were as unimpressed by the people of the marshes as they were by their stagnant swamps. Camden described fenmen in 1586 as ‘rude, uncivil and envious to all others whom they call Upland Men; who stalking on high upon stilts apply their minds to grazing, fishing and fowling’.³⁸ Lieutenant Hammond, writing in 1635, went further: ‘I think they be halfe fish, halfe flesh, for they drinke like fishes and sleep like hogges.’ The people of Ely ‘have but a turfy scent and fenny posture about them, which smell I did not relish at all with any content’.³⁹

‘Fenmen, disgusting representations of ignorance and indecency!’ exclaimed the judge in the Littleport riots in 1816. In the same period, Arthur Young, subsidized by the big landlords to promote agricultural improvement, put his finger on what must have been a general attitude, when he described cattle-stealers in the Lincolnshire fens: ‘So wild a country nurses up a race of people as wild as the fen, and thus the morals and eternal welfare of numbers are hazarded and ruined for want of an inclosure.’⁴⁰ They certainly were a rough lot. Thomas Stone in 1794 described Deeping fen as a frequent resort of cattle-thieves. Between the 1740s and the 1820s, Romney Marsh was openly terrorized by armed gangs of smugglers. Richard Gough, in his ‘History of Myddle’ in Shropshire, written in 1700, describes how resentment aroused by increased rents for peat cutting following drainage improvements bubbled over into violence. The agent of Sir Edward Kinaston approached a certain Clarke for rent, when he was ‘cutting peates on Haremeare Mosse … But one of Clarke’s sons with a turfe spade, which they call a peate iron, (a very keen thing,) struck Sir Edward’s man on the head and cloave out his brains. The bayliffe fled.’⁴¹

In the 1860s the first policeman ever sent to the fen village of Wicken was killed when he tried to break up a Saturday-night brawl. His body was wheeled off in a peat barrow and cremated in the local brick kiln.

Ever since opposition to drainage in the seventeenth century, the men of the Cambridgeshire fens were known as ‘fen tigers’. Their women folk must have been equally formidable. In 1632 ‘a crowd of women and men, armed with scythes and pitchforks, uttered threatening words’ to anyone attempting to drive their cattle off Holme fen.⁴² In 1539 Sir Richard Brereton decided to enclose and drain the Dogmore, a marshy common near Prees in Shropshire, which he had bought from the bishop of Lichfield. The bishop was harangued by ‘fourtie wyfes of Prees’, one of whom ‘rudeley began to take his horse by the bridell whereat the horse sprang aside and put the Bysshop in danger of a fall’. Twelve years later, Brereton again went to the Dogmore, to appease ‘great tumults of the Tennants ther gathered together’. The local justice of the peace excused himself, saying he was ‘dysseasid of styche’.⁴³ The prospect of an armed mob, including that monstrous regiment of ‘wyfes’, must have been enough to bring on an immediate headache. A riot in 1694 at Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme is described by George Stovin, who was born the year after the events described: ‘Whilst the corn was growing, several men, women and children of Belton and among others the said Popplewell’s wife encouraged by him – in a riotous manner pulled down and burnt and laid waste the thorns and destroyed the corn.’⁴⁴ The ‘thorns’ must refer to the new enclosure hedges planted on the commons.

Such tough independent people must have posed a threat to both central and local government. Just as the Biesbosch on the Rhine delta was a centre for the Dutch underground opposition to Hitler, so the English wetlands have a long history as centres of resistance. Dio Cassius describes the difficulties with which the Romans subdued the ancient Britons, who hid in the marshes ‘with their heads only out of the water!’⁴⁵ Alfred the Great led the resistance against the Danes from Athelney in the Somerset Levels; and although every schoolchild knows that William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he did not succeed in subduing Ely and the surrounding fens until 1071, when Hereward the Wake submitted. Marshes have always been easy to defend. Romney Marsh was flooded as a defence against both Napoleon and Hitler, and Calais was lost in 1557 in part because the sluices were not opened in time to flood out the besiegers. The strategic importance of rivers and wetlands in medieval battles was commonplace whereby rival armies were bogged down in swamps or river crossings and cut to pieces. In this way the flower of English chivalry was destroyed by William Wallace at Sterling in 1297.^fn1

It would be a mistake to exaggerate the role of wetlands in national insurrections. Nevertheless, three marshland villages in Essex led the way in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; Sedgemoor will always be associated with Monmouth’s Rebellion; and agitations against fen drainage played a small, but significant, part in both the career of Oliver Cromwell and the origins of the English Revolution.

The place that seems above all to encapsulate the spirit of the Derwent Ings is Aughton church, standing alone in the marshlands, its churchyard lapped by floods each winter and haunted by the bubbling call of the curlew in spring. On the church wall is carved the watery symbol of a newt. Small boys in Yorkshire and Worcestershire, going out with their jam jars to collect newts and tiddlers, still talk of going out after ‘asks’. The newt at Aughton is the emblem of Robert Aske, and it was from here that Aske set out in 1536 to lead the Pilgrimage of Grace against the religious reforms of Henry VIII. Aske’s main aim was a return of the smaller monasteries, but his appeal included requests to halt enclosure and drainage. He typifies the marshman’s feudal protest against central authority, together with his longing, not for a new order, but for a return of the old.

The wetlands are lost landscapes. Just as they defy access, they defy organization by outsiders. Even long-drained regions, such as Longdon Marsh in Worcestershire, are easy to pick out as ‘holes’ on the Ordnance Survey map. Cul-de-sacs skirt warily down to them and then peter out. Some, such as the Somerset Levels, Chat Moss, and Hatfield and Thorne Wastes, are visible from motorways, from which there seems to be no exit from where they can be reached. Approached more closely, they still challenge the intruder. Otmoor and Hatfield Chase are both encircled by moats of ditches, crossed in the case of Hatfield by only one bridge. If you do venture by car on to the edge of Otmoor, there is the feeling that you will be unable to turn around in the narrow space between the dykes, or may get stuck up to the axles in mud. The single rough road across Simonswood Moss near Liverpool is barred at either end by the intimidating iron gates of the Knowsley estate. Romney Marsh, which lacks a central inaccessible fastness, is crossed by a maze of switchback lanes, which seem determined to throw off even the most diligent map-reader. In Somerset, the old drove-ways still branch off the main routes into the moors, like spines on a stickleback. These are truly the landscapes of the ‘No Through Road’.

A newt, the emblem of Robert Aske, carved on the wall of Aughton church, Derwent Ings, Yorkshire.

Straddling boundaries, some wetlands still defy comprehensive administration. Romney Marsh is shared by Kent and Sussex; what is left of the great moss system of the Mersey valley is carved up between Lancashire and Cheshire and the urban authorities of Manchester, Liverpool, and Warrington. Hatfield and Thorne Wastes are bewilderingly divided among Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and South Humberside. The inhabitants would probably not admit allegiance to any of these authorities, and huge signs proclaim the Isle of Axholme – known locally as ‘The Isle’ – as if it were an independent State. If such is the character of these places now, what must they have been like when both people and livestock could only get around them by boat, and parishes such as Dogdyke in Lincolnshire had in the eighteenth century ‘not two houses communicable for whole winters round’.⁴⁶

For all their imperfections, the old wetland commons had a certain self-sufficiency and self-containment providing a standard against which to judge the enthusiastic, never-satisfied ambitions of the agriculturalists and drainage engineers who set out to exploit them. Traditional management of the marshes was tuned to the finest nuances of the local water table. Each wetland evolved a landscape character as individual as the spirit of its people was independent. A few marshes in western France are still managed very strictly as commons. To visit them is to gain an insight into what many of our own wetlands must have been like. The Marais Communal of Curzon lies in the lap of low scrubby hills, like a green sea of stillness. It is quite without the trees or hedges which enclose all the country around it. Cattle, herded down to it along drove-ways used from time immemorial, slowly graze across its moist levels. From the steady centre of this tranquillity flickers the occasional silver of snipe or redshank, like fish rising from the still heart of a pool. The real beauty of such places is not their actual visual components, but the system that underlies them: the harmony between the people and the nature they represent.

Andrew Motion’s poem ‘Inland’ describes how a society, as much as an ecology, was overturned by drainage projects in the seventeenth-century fens. In this extract, a fen villager watches the arrival by boat of the men who are going to change his life:

Sun flicked round the bay,

binding the outline of farms

to their reflections in grey

bands of light. The marsh

always survives. Always.

Cattle stirred in their shed,

uncoiling sweet whisps

of breath over my head;

fresh shadows spilt down

their flanks and spread

across water to flake

into shrinking fragments

over the strangers’ wake.

Their boat put down

some men; one staked

its prow into our land,

waded towards us

over the grass, and

lifted one arm. Our world

dried on his hand.⁴⁷

That world was one of many fen villagers co-operating in order to survive. In the battle to save West Sedgemoor and the Derwent Ings in the 1970s and 1980s, the large number of small landowners was to militate against the efficiency with which large-scale drainage schemes could be organized. In 1794 Billingsley described the Somerset Levels as ‘destitute of gentlemen’s houses’;⁴⁸ and the 1580 muster returns for Holland in Lincolnshire lamented ‘the want of gentlemen here to inhabit’.⁴⁹ Charlton-on-Otmoor means ‘town of the churls’. A ‘churl’ was a free peasant (note the slur implied by present dictionary usage), and Charlton never had a resident squire, being dismissed in eighteenth-century diocesan returns as having ‘no family of note’.⁵⁰ The people of Charlton must have cherished their independence, especially when they looked at the fate of the neighbouring village of Noke, which, it was said, was lost in a game of cards by Lily, duchess of Marlborough.

Reports on current or just completed land-drainage schemes emphasize the trend whereby large farmers accrue the benefit much more commonly than small holders. The theory behind such schemes is that ambitious large farmers will set an example, which will encourage their small backward neighbours. The latter are described in all current cost-benefit reports of the Ministry of Agriculture as ‘laggards’. The assumptions behind this unfortunate word go back a long way. In 1652 Dugdale described fenmen as a ‘lazy and beggarly people’. Billingsley castigated the farmers of the Somerset Levels in the late eighteenth century thus:

The possession of a cow or two, with a hog and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant in his own conception, above his brethren in the same rank of society … In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence … and at length the sale of a half-fed cow or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.⁵¹

No doubt such people must have seemed slow-witted. In order to counteract the effects of malaria, they were frequently doped with opium, which was sold over the counter in the village shop or grown in the fens (where Poppy Hill and Poppy Farm still exist as place-names). Where cannabis was grown as an important fibre crop in the Cambridgeshire fens, the workers in the hemp fields were known to become exceedingly drowsy. Moreover, the isolation of the people of the wetlands led to inbreeding. In 1870 the geologist de Rance commented on the number of idiots in the Lancashire Fylde, which resulted from ‘the dislike of the people to marry outside the district’.⁵²

The laggards were constantly encouraged to improve for their own good. Arthur Young, as usual, has the last word. Here he describes the wetlands of Lincolnshire: ‘Fens of water, mud, wildfowl, frogs and agues have been converted to rich pasture and arable worth from 20 shillings to 40 shillings an acre: health improved, morals corrected and the community enriched’.⁵³

The history of drainage since the sixteenth century has seen the decline of enforced co-operation in sharing a resource, in the face of individual private enterprise. The big farmer has got bigger, and the small farmer smaller. This thought brings us bang up to date. The great agricultural revolution of our own times, in which drainage has played no small part, has accelerated the decline of the small farmer just as surely as it has imperilled the ecological system previously sustained by communal wetland management; and it has begun to destroy the basic resources of the land, as ever deeper drainage has created mineral problems in the soil, wastage of peat, and an increasing dependence upon pumping. Attempts to tame the flood have not always progressed smoothly. There have been frequent and major setbacks; and it may be that we are now on the threshold of a new era, in which, for the first time, leaders in society will make a conscious decision to allow the flood-waters in some areas to rise again.

With all the themes previously outlined in mind, it is time to make a brief chronological survey of that process, which began in the mists of time, and has made inevitable the problems and conflicts described in the remaining chapters of this book. We are witnessing only the latest episode in that long history, in which geography itself has been remade, and the landscape, now more than ever, is transformed not so much by the efforts of individuals, as by public policy and the stroke of a pen.