Читать книгу Taming the Flood: Rivers, Wetlands and the Centuries-Old Battle Against Flooding - Jeremy Purseglove - Страница 18

With the dawning of the Middle Ages, the driving force for reclamation of the marshes became the Church. Many monasteries had settled for safety on secluded islands in the wetlands. The Cistercians even took their name from cisterna, the Latin name for a swamp. By the sixth century, a colony of holy men had gathered at Glastonbury in the Somerset Levels. As the confidence and prosperity of the monasteries increased, so did the enthusiasm with which the monks began to drain and develop the wetlands around them. This was the pattern in wetlands all over the country until the Reformation. It is hard to underestimate the impact of the monasteries, especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The monks of Furness reclaimed the coastal marshes of Walney, with embankments incorporating beach pebbles. Cockersands Abbey drained and hedged part of the Lancashire Fylde. The surviving network of ditches on the Monmouthshire Levels beside the Bristol Channel is essentially that dug by the Benedictines in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth century the bishop of Durham instigated extensive drainage works along the northern shores of the Humber. The monks of Meaux were active in the Hull valley, and those of Fountains on the Derwent Ings. In 1180 the canons of St Thomas drained the flood-lands at Eccleshall in Staffordshire. Battle Abbey actively reclaimed the Pevensey Levels in Sussex, and on Romney Marsh a lead was given by the priors of Christ Church, Canterbury, and by the archbishops themselves. Just as the church at Aughton stands as a touchstone of the spirit of the Derwent Ings, so the little church of St Thomas à Becket at Fairfield represents all the romance and loneliness of Romney Marsh. Prior to drainage work in the 1960s, Fairfield was regularly islanded by winter floods. Sheep graze up to its walls, mellow with yellow lichen, and the reedy dykes which surround it are famous for their marsh frogs, whose operatic baritone can be heard a mile away on May nights. The dedication of the church to St Thomas is no accident. Becket may well have been closely involved in building the great walls of packed clay which still enclose the local ‘innings’, or sheep pastures. They must have added considerably to the wealth of the See of Canterbury.⁷ Near Fairfield you can still see the innings of St Thomas. On a grander scale, the dog-toothed vault of Crowland Abbey arches like the jawbone of a mighty whale above the Lincolnshire fens, a monument to the riches which the monks harvested from the marsh.

The church of St Thomas à Becket at Fairfield epitomizes all the romance and loneliness of Romney Marsh. © Jo Nelson

The dog-toothed vault of Crowland Abbey arches like the jawbone of a mighty whale above the Fens, which the Abbey’s founder St Guthlac believed to be the haunt of demons.

In a few cases the wetlands proved too much for them. The abbey of Otley on Otmoor was abandoned after three years, in 1141, as ‘fitter for an ark than a monastery’.⁸ But in general, the abbeys and their abbots fattened up together. Tithes of reed were reserved for the local priest on the Somerset Levels, and Chaucer’s monk cast an entirely practical eye on the local birdlife: ‘he liked a swan best, and roasted whole.’ The holy men, whose heirs, such as the Carmelites on the Derwent Ings, now venerate God’s wilderness which washes up to their walls, began to compete with each other as to who could plunder it the most. In 1305 the abbot of Thorney in the Fens complained that the abbot of Peterborough ‘lately by night raised a dyke across the high road’, and so cut off the former’s access to corn and pasture.⁹ On the Somerset Levels, intermittent war was waged throughout the Middle Ages between successive abbots of Glastonbury and bishops of Wells. They were forever breaking up each other’s fish-weirs and quarrelling over competing interests in pasture and peat cutting. In 1278 the abbot’s men destroyed a piggery belonging to the bishop in Godney Moor, and again in 1315. In 1326 someone set fire to the peat moor in the Brue valley, with the idea of burning Glastonbury Abbey. The bishop followed up this preliminary scorching with a promise of eternal fire for the abbot of Glastonbury, upon whom he pronounced sentence of excommunication for the sin of damaging his property.¹⁰