There have been numerous attempts to drain the fens in order to make productive use of the soil. The Romans built banks to prevent flooding from the sea and rivers, and used the fens to grow crops. In the middle ages, monks built more banks to enable grazing of the area.
In the 17th century, the monarchy decided to drain the fens and reclaim the land. Their new landlords forced the local peasants to build dykes, dykes which they surreptitiously returned to at night to sabotage, as this reclamation of the land threatened the livelihoods of the fen folk, who relied on fishing and wild-fowling. As a result, prisoners and foreigners were employed top do the work. Despite frequent uprisings by the local folk, money and power won the day, and with the help of wind pumps, the fens were finally drained.
It was not, however, until steam power was introduced in the 1820s that the Fens were effectively drained. In more recent times, diesel then electric pumps, have been introduced, capable of raising thousands of gallons of water.
Today a sophisticated network of rivers and artificial drains (about 400 miles) - controlled by hundreds of manned and automatic pumps - help to protect the land from the ever present threat of rain and tide. The drainage has given us some of the most productive soil in Britain, used to grow cereals, root crops, vegetables, flowers and fruit. (This last section is taken from visitthefens.co.uk).
10 comments:
A fascinating account of the Cambridgeshire Fens - I'm glad you enjoyed your trip and hope we will see you here in Fenland again soon.
http://www.fenland.gov.uk
Hi - I study the history of the draining of the fens and the relationship between the drainers and the local people.
I have a couple of corrections to your history, if you don't mind them. Some recent archeological research has found that the Romans did not make the Sea Wall which keeps the tides out; this was made by the Anglo-Saxons in about the 9th century. Also, the Romans mostly had livestock, just like medieval fenmen.
But about the drainage and its opposition. There is good evidence in the contemporary petitions, etc, that the fenmen were not against drainage itself. Though some of them were fishers and fowlers, a great many more (and the richer among them) grazed livestock on the common fens, and improving the drainage would be good for them. But they were very much against the enclosure and sale of 1/3 of the fens to the drainers in recompense for the drainage works. The local inhabitants generally did not attack the banks of major rivers, but the banks and ditches which divided the new enclosures from the previously common fen.
Also, the drainage itself was not done by the Crown, though it was done with the support of the King. The drainers were private investors, some of whom were also local landowners, who hoped to make a great deal of money by selling or renting the newly "improved" fenland they were to receive. That said, they ended up spending so much money making the works, and the land wasn't very improved, that several were beggared, and the drainage company itself was in debt for most of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Of course, the local landowners could not force their tenants to work on the drainage works; by the seventeenth century, they were not serfs and thus did not have to do labour service, just pay their cash rents. Rather, the drainers hired labourers (local and non-local) to do the work, but there were not enough of them and they wanted high wages, so that's how the prisoners of war got involved (both Dutch and Scottish).
Money and power certainly did win, but it was a much more complicated struggle than many of us realize. And when the works began to fail towards the end of the seventeenth century, many of the local people were very upset with that - they had paid for their upkeep, after all, with the loss of part of their commons, and the drainers were not delivering the services they were supposed to.
I'm sorry to be so pedantic, but I am fascinated by the history of the fens. The best general book on the history of the fens is probably H.C. Darby's Changing Fenland, or his earlier works, but there are also many more recent studies (some in print, some not) which have changed our understanding of this history. Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.
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