Home > Authors Index > Browse all available works of Charles Kingsley > Text of Fens
An essay by Charles Kingsley |
||
The Fens |
||
|
________________________________________________
Title: The Fens Author: Charles Kingsley [More Titles by Kingsley] A certain sadness is pardonable to one who watches the destruction of a grand natural phenomenon, even though its destruction bring blessings to the human race. Reason and conscience tell us, that it is right and good that the Great Fen should have become, instead of a waste and howling wilderness, a garden of the Lord, where And yet the fancy may linger, without blame, over the shining meres, the golden reed-beds, the countless water-fowl, the strange and gaudy insects, the wild nature, the mystery, the majesty--for mystery and majesty there were--which haunted the deep fens for many a hundred years. Little thinks the Scotsman, whirled down by the Great Northern Railway from Peterborough to Huntingdon, what a grand place, even twenty years ago, was that Holme and Whittlesea, which is now but a black, unsightly, steaming flat, from which the meres and reed- beds of the old world are gone, while the corn and roots of the new world have not as yet taken their place. But grand enough it was, that black ugly place, when backed by Caistor Hanglands and Holme Wood, and the patches of the primaeval forest; while dark-green alders, and pale-green reeds, stretched for miles round the broad lagoon, where the coot clanked, and the bittern boomed, and the sedge-bird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the birds around; while high overhead hung, motionless, hawk beyond hawk, buzzard beyond buzzard, kite beyond kite, as far as eye could see. Far off, upon the silver mere, would rise a puff of smoke from a punt, invisible from its flatness and its white paint. Then down the wind came the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that sound another sound, louder as it neared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skein of terrified wild-fowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings, while clear above all sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the great wild swan. They are all gone now. No longer do the ruffs trample the sedge into a hard floor in their fighting-rings, while the sober reeves stand round, admiring the tournament of their lovers, gay with ears and tippets, no two of them alike. Gone are ruffs and reeves, spoonbills, bitterns, avosets; the very snipe, one hears, disdains to breed. Gone, too, not only from Whittlesea but from the whole world, is that most exquisite of English butterflies, Lycaena dispar--the great copper; and many a curious insect more. Ah, well, at least we shall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more typhus and ague; and, it is to be hoped, no more brandy-drinking and opium-eating; and children will live and not die. For it was a hard place to live in, the old Fen; a place wherein one heard of 'unexampled instances of longevity,' for the same reason that one hears of them in savage tribes--that few lived to old age at all, save those iron constitutions which nothing could break down. And now, when the bold Fen-men, who had been fighting water by the help of wind, have given up the more capricious element for that more manageable servant fire; have replaced their wind-mills by steam- engines, which will work in all weathers; and have pumped the whole fen dry--even too dry, as the last hot summer proved; when the only bit of the primaeval wilderness left, as far as I know, is 200 acres of sweet sedge and Lastraea thelypteris in Wicken Fen: there can be no harm in lingering awhile over the past, and telling of what the Great Fen was, and how it came to be that great flat which reaches (roughly speaking) from Cambridge to Peterborough on the south-west side, to Lynn and Tattershall on the north-east, some forty miles and more each way. To do that rightly, and describe how the Fen came to be, one must go back, it seems to me, to an age before all history; an age which cannot be measured by years or centuries; an age shrouded in mystery, and to be spoken of only in guesses. To assert anything positively concerning that age, or ages, would be to show the rashness of ignorance. 'I think that I believe,' 'I have good reason to suspect,' 'I seem to see,' are the strongest forms of speech which ought to be used over a matter so vast and as yet so little elaborated. 'I seem to see,' then, an epoch after those strata were laid down with which geology generally deals; after the Kimmeridge clay, Oxford clay, and Gault clay, which form the impervious bedding of the fens, with their intermediate beds of coral-rag and green sand, had been deposited; after the chalk had been laid on the top of them, at the bottom of some ancient ocean; after (and what a gulf of time is implied in that last 'after!') the boulder-clay (coeval probably with the 'till' of Scotland) had been spread out in the 'age of ice' on top of all; after the whole had been upheaved out of the sea, and stood about the same level as it stands now: but before the great valley of the Cam had been scooped out, and the strata were still continuous, some 200 feet above Cambridge and its colleges, from the top of the Gog-magogs to the top of Madingley Rise. In those ages--while the valleys of the Cam, the Ouse, the Nene, the Welland, the Glen, and the Witham were sawing themselves out by no violent convulsions, but simply, as I believe, by the same slow action of rain and rivers by which they are sawing backward into the land even now--I 'seem to see' a time when the Straits of Dover did not exist--a time when a great part of the German Ocean was dry land. Through it, into a great estuary between North Britain and Norway, flowed together all the rivers of north-eastern Europe--Elbe, Weser, Rhine, Scheldt, Seine, Thames, and all the rivers of east England, as far north as the Humber. And if a reason be required for so daring a theory--first started, if I recollect right, by the late lamented Edward Forbes--a sufficient one may be found in one look over a bridge, in any river of the East of England. There we see various species of Cyprinidae, 'rough' or 'white' fish--roach, dace, chub, bream, and so forth, and with them their natural attendant and devourer, the pike. Now these fish belong almost exclusively to the same system of rivers--those of north-east Europe. They attain their highest development in the great lakes of Sweden. Westward of the Straits of Dover they are not indigenous. They may be found in the streams of south and western England; but in every case, I believe, they have been introduced either by birds or by men. From some now submerged 'centre of creation' (to use poor Edward Forbes's formula) they must have spread into the rivers where they are now found; and spread by fresh water, and not by salt, which would destroy them in a single tide. Again, there lingers in the Cam, and a few other rivers of north- eastern Europe, that curious fish the eel-pout or 'burbot' (Molva lota). Now he is utterly distinct from any other fresh-water fish of Europe. His nearest ally is the ling (Molva vulgaris); a deep-sea fish, even as his ancestors have been. Originally a deep-sea form, he has found his way up the rivers, even to Cambridge, and there remains. The rivers by which he came up, the land through which he passed, ages and ages since, have been all swept away; and he has never found his way back to his native salt-water, but lives on in a strange land, degraded in form, dwindling in numbers, and now fast dying out. The explanation may be strange: but it is the only one which I can offer to explain the fact--which is itself much more strange--of the burbot being found in the Fen rivers. Another proof may be found in the presence of the edible frog of the Continent at Foulmire, on the edge of the Cambridge Fans. It is a moot point still with some, whether he was not put there by man. It is a still stronger argument against his being indigenous, that he is never mentioned as an article of food by the mediaeval monks, who would have known--Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, as many of them were- -that he is as dainty as ever was a spring chicken. But if he be indigenous, his presence proves that once he could either hop across the Straits of Dover, or swim across the German Ocean. But there can be no doubt of the next proof--the presence in the Fens (where he is now probably extinct) and in certain spots in East Anglia, which I shall take care not to mention, of that exquisite little bird the 'Bearded Tit' (Calamophilus biarmicus). Tit he is none; rather, it is said, a finch, but connected with no other English bird. His central home is in the marshes of Russia and Prussia; his food the mollusks which swarm among the reed-beds where he builds; and feeding on those from reed-bed to reed bed, all across what was once the German Ocean, has come the beautiful little bird with long tail, orange tawny plumage, and black moustache, which might have been seen forty years ago in hundreds on ever reed-rond of the Fen. One more proof--for it is the heaping up of facts, each minute by itself, which issues often in a sound and great result. In draining Wretham Mere, in Norfolk, not so very far from the Fens, in the year 1856 there were found embedded in the peat moss (which is not the Scotch and Western Sphagnum palustre, but an altogether different moss, Hypnum fluitans), remains of an ancient lake-dwelling, supported on piles. A dwelling like those which have lately attracted so much notice in the lakes of Switzerland: like those which the Dyaks make about the ports and rivers of Borneo; dwellings invented, it seems to me, to enable the inhabitants to escape not wild beasts only, but malaria and night frosts; and, perched above the cold and poisonous fogs, to sleep, if not high and dry, at least high and healthy. In the bottom of this mere were found two shells of the fresh-water tortoise, Emys lutaria, till then unknown in England. These little animals, who may be seen in hundreds in the meres of eastern Europe, sunning their backs on fallen logs, and diving into the water at the sound of a footstep, are eaten largely in continental capitals (as is their cousin the terrapin, Emys picta, in the Southern States). They may be bought at Paris, at fashionable restaurants. Thither they may have been sent from Vienna or Berlin; for in north France, Holland, and north-west Germany they are unknown. A few specimens have been found buried in peat in Sweden and Denmark; and there is a tale of a live one having been found in the extreme south part of Sweden, some twenty years ago. {103} Into Sweden, then, as into England, the little fresh-water tortoise had wandered, as to an extreme limit, beyond which the change of climate, and probably of food, killed him off. But the emys which came to the Wretham bog must have had a long journey; and a journey by fresh water too. Down Elbe or Weser he must have floated, ice-packed, or swept away by flood, till somewhere off the Doggerbank, in that great network of rivers which is now open sea, he or his descendants turned up Ouse and Little Ouse, till they found a mere like their old Prussian one, and there founded a tiny colony for a few generations, till they were eaten up by the savages of the table dwelling; or died out--as many a human family has died out--because they found the world too hard. And lastly, my friend Mr. Brady, well known to naturalists, has found that many forms of Entomastraca are common to the estuaries of the east of England and to those of Holland. It was thus necessary, in order to account for the presence of some of the common animals of the fen, to go back to an epoch of immense remoteness. And how was that great lowland swept away? Who can tell? Probably by no violent convulsion. Slow upheavals, slow depressions, there may have been--indeed must have been--as the sunken fir-forests of Brancaster, and the raised beach of Hunstanton, on the extreme north- east corner of the Wash, testify to this day. But the main agent of destruction has been, doubtless, that same ever-gnawing sea-wash which devours still the soft strata of the whole east coast of England, as far as Flamborough Head; and that great scavenger, the tide-wave, which sweeps the fallen rubbish out to sea twice in every twenty-four hours. Wave and tide by sea, rain and river by land; these are God's mighty mills in which He makes the old world new. And as Longfellow says of moral things, so may we of physical:- The lighter and more soluble particles, during that slow but vast destruction which is going on still to this day, have been carried far out to sea, and deposited as ooze. The heavier and coarser have been left along the shores, as the gravels which fill the old estuaries of the east of England. From these gravels we can judge of the larger animals which dwelt in that old world. About these lost lowlands wandered herds of the woolly mammoth. Elephas primigenius, whose bones are common in certain Cambridge gravels, whose teeth are brought up by dredgers, far out in the German Ocean, off certain parts of the Norfolk coast. With them wandered the woolly rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), the hippopotamus, the lion--not (according to some) to be distinguished from the recent lion of Africa--the hyaena, the bear, the horse, the reindeer, and the musk ox; the great Irish elk, whose vast horns are so well known in every museum of northern Europe; and that mighty ox, the Bos primigenius, which still lingered on the Continent in Caesar's time, as the urus, in magnitude less only than the elephant,--and not to be confounded with the bison, a relation of, if not identical with, the buffalo of North America,--which still lingers, carefully preserved by the Czar, in the forests of Lithuania. The remains of this gigantic ox, be it remembered, are found throughout Britain, and even into the Shetland Isles. Would that any gentleman who may see these pages would take notice of the fact, that we have not (so I am informed) in these islands a single perfect skeleton of Bos primigenius; while the Museum of Copenhagen, to its honour, possesses five or six from a much smaller field than is open to us; and be public-spirited enough, the next time he hears of ox- bones, whether in gravel or in peat (as he may in the draining of any northern moss), to preserve them for the museum of his neighbourhood- -or send them to Cambridge. But did all these animals exist at the same time? It is difficult to say. The study of the different gravels is most intricate--almost a special science in itself--in which but two or three men are adepts. It is hard, at first sight, to believe that the hippopotamus could have been the neighbour of the Arctic reindeer and musk ox: but that the woolly mammoth not only may have been such, but was such, there can be no doubt. His remains, imbedded in ice at the mouth of the great Siberian rivers, with the wool, skin, and flesh (in some cases) still remaining on the bones, prove him to have been fitted for a cold climate, and to have browsed upon the scanty shrubs of Northern Asia. But, indeed, there is no reason, a priori, why these huge mammals, now confined to hotter countries, should not have once inhabited a colder region, or at least have wandered northwards in whole herds in summer, to escape insects, and find fresh food, and above all, water. The same is the case with the lion, and other huge beasts of prey. The tiger of Hindostan ranges, at least in summer, across the snows of the Himalaya, and throughout China. Even at the river Amoor, where the winters are as severe as at St. Petersburg, the tiger is an ordinary resident at all seasons. The lion was, undoubtedly, an inhabitant of Thrace as late as the expedition of Xerxes, whose camels they attacked; and the 'Nemaean lion,' and the other lions which stand out in Grecian myth, as having been killed by Hercules and the heroes, may have been the last remaining specimens of that Felis spelaea (undistinguishable, according to some, from the African lion), whose bones are found in the gravels and the caverns of these isles. And how long ago were those days of mammoths and reindeer, lions and hyaenas? We must talk not of days, but of ages; we know nothing of days or years. As the late lamented Professor Sedgwick has well said:- 'We allow that the great European oscillation, which ended in the production of the drift (the boulder clay, or till), was effected during a time of vast, but unknown length. And if we limit our inquiries, and ask what was the interval of time between the newest bed of gravel near Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bogland or silt in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, we are utterly at a loss for a definite answer. The interval of time may have been very great. But we have no scale on which to measure it.' Let us suppose, then, the era of 'gravels' past; the valleys which open into the fen sawn out by rivers to about their present depth. What was the special cause of the fen itself? why did not the great lowland become a fertile 'carse' of firm alluvial soil, like that of Stirling? One reason is, that the carse of Stirling has been upheaved some twenty feet, and thereby more or less drained, since the time of the Romans. A fact patent and provable from Cramond (the old Roman port of Alaterna) up to Blair Drummond above Stirling, where whales' skeletons, and bone tools by them, have been found in loam and peat, twenty feet above high-water mark. The alluvium of the fens, on the other hand, has very probably suffered a slight depression. But the main reason is, that the silt brought down by the fen rivers cannot, like that of the Forth and its neighbouring streams, get safe away to sea. From Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, all down the Lincolnshire coast, the land is falling, falling for ever into the waves; and swept southward by tide and current, the debris turns into the Wash between Lincolnshire and Norfolk, there to repose, as in a quiet haven. Hence that vast labyrinth of banks between Lynn and Wisbeach, of mud inside, brought down by the fen rivers; but outside (contrary to the usual rule) of shifting sand, which has come inward from the sea, and prevents the mud's escape--banks parted by narrow gullies, the delight of the gunner with his punt, haunted by million wild-fowl in winter, and in summer hazy steaming flats, beyond which the trees of Lincolnshire loom up, raised by refraction far above the horizon, while the masts and sails of distant vessels quiver, fantastically distorted and lengthened, sometimes even inverted, by a refraction like that which plays such tricks with ships and coasts in the Arctic seas. Along the top of the mud banks lounge the long black rows of seals, undistinguishable from their reflection in the still water below; distorted too, and magnified to the size of elephants. Long lines of sea-pies wing their way along at regular tide-hours, from or to the ocean. Now and then a skein of geese paddle hastily out of sight round a mud-cape; or a brown robber gull (generally Richardson's Skua) raises a tumult of screams, by making a raid upon a party of honest white gulls, to frighten them into vomiting up their prey for his benefit; or a single cormorant flaps along, close to the water, towards his fishing ground. Even the fish are shy of haunting a bottom which shifts with every storm; and innumerable shrimps are almost the only product of the shallow barren sea: beside, all is silence and desolation, as of a world waiting to be made. So strong is the barrier which these sea-borne sands oppose to the river-borne ooze, that as soon as a seabank is built--as the projectors of the 'Victoria County' have built them--across any part of the estuary, the mud caught by it soon 'warps' the space within into firm and rich dry land. But that same barrier, ere the fen was drained, backed up for ages not only the silt, but the very water of the fens; and spread it inland into a labyrinth of shifting streams, shallow meres, and vast peat bogs, on those impervious clays which floor the fen. Each river contributed to the formation of those bogs and meres, instead of draining them away; repeating on a huge scale the process which may be seen in many a highland strath, where the ground at the edge of the stream is firm and high; the meadows near the hillfoot, a few hundred yards away, bogland lower than the bank of the stream. For each flood deposits its silt upon the immediate bank of the river, raising it year by year; till--as in the case of the 'Levee' of the Mississippi, and probably of every one of the old fen rivers--the stream runs at last between two natural dykes, at a level considerably higher than that of the now swamped and undrainable lands right and left of it. If we add to this, a slope in the fen rivers so extraordinarily slight, that the river at Cambridge is only thirteen and a half feet above the mean sea level, five-and-thirty miles away, and that if the great sea-sluice of Denver, the key of all the eastern fen, were washed away, the tide would back up the Cam to within ten miles of Cambridge; if we add again the rainfall upon that vast flat area, utterly unable to escape through rivers which have enough to do to drain the hills around; it is easy to understand how peat, the certain product of standing water, has slowly overwhelmed the rich alluvium, fattened by the washing of those phosphatic greensand beds, which (discovered by the science of the lamented Professor Henslow) are now yielding round Cambridge supplies of manure seemingly inexhaustible. Easy it is to understand how the all-devouring, yet all-preserving peat-moss swallowed up gradually the stately forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once grew on that rank land; how trees, torn down by flood or storm, floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back still more; how streams, bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand with the peat-moss; how Nature, left to herself, ran into wild riot and chaos more and more; till the whole fen became one 'Dismal Swamp,' in which the 'Last of the English' (like Dred in Mrs. Stowe's tale) took refuge from their tyrants, and lived, like him, a free and joyous life awhile. For there were islands, and are still, in that wide fen, which have escaped the destroying deluge of peat-moss; outcrops of firm land, which even in the Middle Age preserved the Fauna and Flora of the primaeval forest, haunted by the descendants of some at least of those wild beasts which roamed on the older continent of the 'gravel age.' The all-preserving peat, as well as the monkish records of the early Middle Age, enable us to repeople, tolerably well, the primaeval fen. The gigantic ox, Bos primigenius, was still there, though there is no record of him in monkish tales. But with him had appeared (not unknown toward the end of the gravel age) another ox, smaller and with shorter horns, Bos longifrons; which is held to be the ancestor of our own domestic short-horns, and of the wild cattle still preserved at Chillingham and at Cadzow. The reindeer had disappeared, almost or altogether. The red deer, of a size beside which the largest Scotch stag is puny, and even the great Carpathian stag inferior, abound; so does the roe, so does the goat, which one is accustomed to look on as a mountain animal. In the Woodwardian Museum there is a portion of a skull of an ibex--probably Capra sibirica--which was found in the drift gravel at Fulbourne. Wild sheep are unknown. The horse occurs in the peat; but whether wild or tame, who can tell? Horses enough have been mired and drowned since the Romans set foot on this island, to account for the presence of horses' skulls, without the hypothesis of wild herds, such as doubtless existed in the gravel times. The wolf, of course, is common; wild cat, marten, badger, and otter all would expect; but not so the beaver, which nevertheless is abundant in the peat; and damage enough the busy fellows must have done, cutting trees, damming streams, flooding marshes, and like selfish speculators in all ages, sacrificing freely the public interest to their own. Here and there are found the skulls of bears, in one case that of a polar bear, ice- drifted; and one of a walrus, probably washed in dead after a storm. Beautiful, after their kind, were these fen-isles, in the eyes of the monks who were the first settlers in the wilderness. The author of the History of Ramsey grows enthusiastic, and, after the manner of old monks, somewhat bombastic also, as he describes the lonely isle which got its name from the solitary ram who had wandered thither, either in some extreme drought or over the winter ice, and never able to return, was found, fat beyond the wont of rams, feeding among the wild deer. He tells of the stately ashes--most of them cut in his time, to furnish mighty beams for the church roof; of the rich pastures painted with all gay flowers in spring; of the 'green crown' of reed and alder which girdled round the isle; of the fair wide mere with its 'sandy beach' along the forest side: 'a delight,' he says, 'to all who look thereon.' In like humour, William of Malmesbury, writing in the first half of the twelfth century, speaks of Thorney Abbey and isle. 'It represents,' he says, 'a very Paradise, for that in pleasure and delight it resembles heaven itself. These marshes abound in trees, whose length without a knot doth emulate the stars. The plain there is as level as the sea, which with green grass allures the eye, and so smooth that there is nought to hinder him who runs through it. Neither is therein any waste place for in some parts are apple trees, in other vines, which are either spread on the ground or raised on poles. A mutual strife is there between nature and art; so that what one produces not, the other supplies. What shall I say of those fair buildings, which 'tis so wonderful to see the ground among those fens upbear?' But the most detailed picture of a fen-isle is that in the second part of the Book of Ely; wherein a single knight of all the French army forces his way into the isle of St. Etheldreda, and, hospitably entertained there by Hereward and his English, is sent back safe to William the Conqueror, to tell him of the strength of Ely isle. He cannot praise enough--his speech may be mythical; but as written by Richard of Ely, only one generation after, it must describe faithfully what the place was like--the wonders of the isle: its soil the richest in England, its pleasant pastures, its noble hunting-grounds, its store of sheep and cattle (though its vines, he says, as a Frenchman had good right to say, were not equally to be praised), its wide meres and bogs, about it like a wall. In it was, to quote roughly, 'abundance of tame beasts and of wild stag, roe, and goat, in grove and marsh; martens, and ermines, and fitchets, which in hard winter were caught in snares or gins. But of the kind of fish and fowl which bred therein, what can I say? In the pools around are netted eels innumerable, great water wolves, and pickerel, perch, roach, burbot, lampreys, which the French called sea-serpents; smelts, too; and the royal fish, the turbot [surely a mistake for sturgeon], are said often to be taken. But of the birds which haunt around, if you be not tired, as of the rest, we will expound. Innumerable geese, gulls, coots, divers, water-crows, herons, ducks, of which, when there is most plenty, in winter, or at moulting time, I have seen hundreds taken at a time, by nets, springes, or birdlime,' and so forth till, as he assures William, the Frenchman may sit on Haddenham field blockading Ely for seven years more, 'ere they will make one ploughman stop short in his furrow, one hunter cease to set his nets, or one fowler to deceive the birds with springe and snare.' And yet there was another side to the picture. Man lived hard in those days, under dark skies, in houses--even the most luxurious of them--which we should think, from draughts and darkness, unfit for felons' cells. Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased, and thankful to God for the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of green, after the terrible and long winters of the Middle Age. And ugly enough those winters must have been, what with snow-storm and darkness, flood and ice, ague and rheumatism; while through the long drear winter nights the whistle of the wind and the wild cries of the water-fowl were translated into the howls of witches and demons; and (as in St. Guthlac's case) the delirious fancies of marsh fever made fiends take hideous shapes before the inner eye, and act fantastic horrors round the old fen-man's bed of sedge. The Romans seem to have done something toward the draining and embanking of this dismal swamp. To them is attributed the car-dyke, or catch-water drain, which runs for many miles from Peterborough northward into Lincolnshire, cutting off the land waters which flow down from the wolds above. To them, too, is to be attributed the old Roman bank, or 'vallum,' along the sea-face of the marshlands, marked to this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. But the English invaders were incapable of following out, even of preserving, any public works. Each village was isolated by its own 'march' of forest; each yeoman all but isolated by the 'eaves-drip,' or green lane round his farm. Each 'cared for his own things, and none for those of others;' and gradually, during the early Middle Age, the fen--save those old Roman villages--returned to its primaeval jungle, under the neglect of a race which caricatured local self-government into public anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an alien enemy, who might be lawfully slain, if he came through the forest without calling aloud or blowing a horn. Till late years, the English feeling against the stranger lasted harsh and strong. The farmer, strong in his laws of settlement, tried at once to pass him into the next parish. The labourer, not being versed in law, hove half a brick at him, or hooted him through the town. It was in the fens, perhaps, that the necessity of combined effort for fighting the brute powers of nature first awakened public spirit, and associate labour, and the sense of a common interest between men of different countries and races. But the progress was very slow; and the first civilizers of the fen were men who had nothing less in their minds than to conquer nature, or call together round them communities of men. Hermits, driven by that passion for isolated independence which is the mark of the Teutonic mind, fled into the wilderness, where they might, if possible, be alone with God and their own souls. Like St. Guthlac of Crowland, after wild fighting for five-and-twenty years, they longed for peace and solitude; and from their longing, carried out with that iron will which marked the mediaeval man for good or for evil, sprang a civilization of which they never dreamed. Those who wish to understand the old fen life, should read Ingulf's 'History of Crowland' (Mr. Bohn has published a good and cheap translation), and initiate themselves into a state of society, a form of thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to be reading of the inhabitants of another planet. Most amusing and most human is old Ingulf and his continuator, 'Peter of Blois;' and though their facts are not to be depended on as having actually happened, they are still instructive, as showing what might, or ought to have happened, in the opinion of the men of old. Even more naive is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. Guthlac, written possibly as early as the eighth century, and literally translated by Mr. Goodwin, of Cambridge. There we may read how the young warrior-noble, Guthlac ('The Battle- Play,' the 'Sport of War'), tired of slaying and sinning, bethought him to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered into the fen, where one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) took him in his canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in reeds and alders; and among the trees, nought but an old 'law,' as the Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into seeking for treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit's cell thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him, as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his servant; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint one day, there fell on him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac's throat, and install himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of sainthood? But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is told with the naive honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked the offender into confession, and all went well to the end. There we may read, too, a detailed account of a Fauna now happily extinct in the fens: of the creatures who used to hale St. Guthlac out of his hut, drag him through the bogs, carry him aloft through frost and fire--'Develen and luther gostes'--such as tormented likewise St. Botolph (from whom Botulfston=Boston, has its name), and who were supposed to haunt the meres and fens, and to have an especial fondness for old heathen barrows with their fancied treasure hoards; how they 'filled the house with their coming, and poured in on every side, from above, and from beneath, and everywhere. They were in countenance horrible, and they had great heads, and a long neck, and a lean visage; they were filthy and squalid in their beards, and they had rough ears, and crooked nebs, and fierce eyes, and foul mouths; and their teeth were like horses' tusks; and their throats were filled with flame, and they were grating in their voice; they had crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind, and twisted toes, and cried hoarsely with their voices; and they came with such immoderate noise and immense horror, that him thought all between heaven and earth resounded with their voices. And they tugged and led him out of the cot, and led him to the swart fen, and threw and sunk him in the muddy waters. After that they brought him into the wild places of the wilderness, among the thick beds of brambles, that all his body was torn. After that they took him and beat him with iron whips; and after that they brought him on their creaking wings between the cold regions of the air.' But there are gentler and more human touches in that old legend. You may read in it, how all the wild birds of the fen came to St. Guthlac, and he fed them after their kind. How the ravens tormented him, stealing letters, gloves, and what not, from his visitors; and then, seized with compunction at his reproofs, brought them back, or hanged them on the reeds; and how, as Wilfrid, a holy visitant, was sitting with him, discoursing of the contemplative life, two swallows came flying in, and lifted up their song, sitting now on the saint's hand, now on his shoulder, now on his knee. And how, when Wilfrid wondered thereat, Guthlac made answer, 'Know you not that he who hath led his life according to God's will, to him the wild beasts and the wild birds draw the more near.' After fifteen years of such a life, in fever, agues, and starvation, no wonder if St. Guthlac died. They buried him in a leaden coffin (a grand and expensive luxury in the seventh century) which had been sent to him during his life by a Saxon princess; and then, over his sacred and wonder-working corpse, as over that of a Buddhist saint, there rose a chapel, with a community of monks, companies of pilgrims who came to worship, sick who came to be healed; till, at last, founded on great piles driven into the bog, arose the lofty wooden Abbey of Crowland; in its sanctuary of the four rivers, its dykes, parks, vineyards, orchards, rich ploughlands, from which, in time of famine, the monks of Crowland fed all people of the neighbouring fens; with its tower with seven bells, which had not their like in England; its twelve altars rich with the gifts of Danish Vikings and princes, and even with twelve white bear-skins, the gift of Canute's self; while all around were the cottages of the corrodiers, or folk who, for a corrody, or life pittance from the abbey, had given away their lands, to the wrong and detriment of their heirs. But within these four rivers, at least, was neither tyranny nor slavery. Those who took refuge in St. Guthlac's peace from cruel lords must keep his peace toward each other, and earn their living like honest men, safe while they did so; for between those four rivers St. Guthlac and his abbot were the only lords, and neither summoner, nor sheriff of the king, nor armed force of knight or earl, could enter 'the inheritance of the Lord, the soil of St. Mary and St. Bartholomew, the most holy sanctuary of St. Guthlac and his monks; the minster free from worldly servitude; the special almshouse of most illustrious kings; the sole refuge of anyone in worldly tribulation; the perpetual abode of the saints; the possession of religious men, specially set apart by the common council of the realm; by reason of the frequent miracles of the holy confessor St. Guthlac, an ever-fruitful mother of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi; and by reason of the privileges granted by the kings, a city of grace and safety to all who repent.' Does not all this sound--as I said just now--like a voice from another planet? It is all gone; and it was good and right that it should go when it had done its work, and that the civilization of the fen should be taken up and carried out by men like the good knight, Richard of Rulos, who, two generations after the Conquest, marrying Hereward's granddaughter, and becoming Lord of Deeping (the deep meadow), thought that he could do the same work from the hall of Bourne as the monks did from their cloisters; got permission from the Crowland monks, for twenty marks of silver, to drain as much as he could of the common marshes; and then shut out the Welland by strong dykes, built cottages, marked out gardens, and tilled fields, till 'out of slough and bogs accursed, he made a garden of pleasure.' Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland did, besides those firm dykes and rich corn lands of the Porsand, which endure unto this day. For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the old wooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noble pile of stone whose ruins are still standing, the French abbot of Crowland sent French monks to open a school under the new French donjon, in the little Roman town of Grante-brigge; whereby--so does all earnest work, however mistaken, grow and spread in this world, infinitely and for ever--St. Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage into Crowland Island, became the spiritual father of the University of Cambridge in the old world; and therefore of her noble daughter, the University of Cambridge, in the new world which fen-men, sailing from Boston deeps, colonized and Christianized, 800 years after St. Guthlac's death. The drainage of the fens struggled on for these same 800 years slowly, and often disastrously. Great mistakes were made; as when a certain bishop, some 700 years ago, bethought him to make a cut from Littleport drain to Rebeck (or Priests'-houses), and found, to his horror and that of the fen-men, that he had let down upon Lynn the pent-up waters of the whole higher bogs; that rivers were running backwards, brooks swelling to estuaries, and the whole north-eastern fen ruinate, to be yet more ruinate by banks confusedly thrown up in self-defence, till some order was restored in 1332, and the fens prospered--such little of them as could be drained at all--for nigh two hundred years. Honour, meanwhile, to another prelate, good Bishop Morton, who cut the great learn from Guyhirn--the last place at which one could see a standing gallows, and two Irish reapers hanging in chains, having murdered the old witch of Guyhirn for the sake of hidden treasure, which proved to be some thirty shillings and a few silver spoons. The belief is more general than well-founded that the drainage of the fens retrograded on account of the dissolution of the monasteries. The state of decay into which those institutions had already fallen, and which alone made their dissolution possible, must have extended itself to these fen-lands. No one can read the account of their debts, neglect, malversation of funds, in the time of Henry VIII., without seeing that the expensive works necessary to keep fen-lands dry must have suffered, as did everything else belonging to the convents. It was not till the middle or end of Elizabeth's reign that the recovery of these 'drowned lands' was proceeded with once more; and during the first half of the seventeenth century there went on, more and more rapidly, that great series of artificial works which, though often faulty in principle, often unexpectedly disastrous in effect, have got the work done, as all work is done in this world, not as well as it should have been done, but at least done. To comprehend those works would be impossible without maps and plans; to take a lively interest in them impossible, likewise, save to an engineer or a fen-man. Suffice it to say, that in the early part of the seventeenth century we find a great company of adventurers--more than one Cromwell among them, and Francis, the great and good Earl of Bedford, at their head--trying to start a great scheme for draining the drowned 'middle level' east of the Isle of Ely. How they sent for Vermuyden, the Dutchman, who had been draining in North Lincolnshire, about Goole and Axholme Isle; how they got into his hands, and were ruined by him; how Francis of Bedford had to sell valuable estates to pay his share; how the fen-men looked on Francis of Bedford as their champion; how Charles I. persecuted him meanly, though indeed Bedford had, in the matter of the 'Lynn Law' of 1630, given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to something like sharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work into his hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and the fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to avenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times; how Oliver St. John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up the so-called 'Pretended Ordinance' of 1649, which was a compromise between Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful that Charles II.'s Government were content to call it 'pretended' and let it stand, because it was actually draining the fens; and how Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, after doing mighty works, and taking mighty moneys, died a beggar, writing petitions which never got answered; how William, Earl of Bedford, added, in 1649, to his father's 'old Bedford River' that noble parallel river, the Hundred foot, both rising high above the land between dykes and 'washes,' i.e. waste spaces right and left, to allow for flood water; how the Great Bedford Rivers silted up the mouth of the Ouse, and backed the floods up the Cam; how Denver sluice was built to keep them back; and so forth,--all is written, or rather only half or quarter written, in the histories of the fens. Another matter equally, or even more important, is but half written-- indeed, only hinted at--the mixed population of the fens. The sturdy old 'Girvii,' 'Gyrwas,' men of the 'gyras' or marshes, who in Hereward's time sang their three-man glees, 'More Girviorum tripliciter canentes,' had been crossed with the blood of Scandinavian Vikings in Canute's conquest; crossed again with English refugees from all quarters during the French conquest under William. After the St. Bartholomew they received a fresh cross of Huguenot, fleeing from France--dark-haired, fiery, earnest folk, whose names and physiognomies are said still to remain about Wisbeach, Whittlesea, and Thorney. Then came Vermuyden's Dutchmen, leaving some of their blood behind them. After the battle of Dunbar another cross came among them, of Scotch prisoners, who, employed by Cromwell's Government on the dykes, settled down among the fen-men to this day. Within the memory of man, Scotchmen used to come down into the fens every year, not merely for harvest, but to visit their expatriated kinsmen. To these successive immigrations of strong Puritan blood, more than even the influence of the Cromwells and other Puritan gentlemen, we may attribute that strong Calvinist element which has endured for now nigh three centuries in the fen; and attribute, too, that sturdy independence and self-help which drove them of old out of Boston town, to seek their fortunes first in Holland, then in Massachusetts over sea. And that sturdy independence and self-help is not gone. There still lives in them some of the spirit of their mythic giant Hickafrid (the Hickathrift of nursery rhymes), who, when the Marshland men (possibly the Romanized inhabitants of the wall villages) quarrelled with him in the field, took up the cart-axle for a club, smote them hip and thigh, and pastured his cattle in their despite in the green cheese-fens of the Smeeth. No one has ever seen a fen-bank break, without honouring the stern quiet temper which there is in these men, when the north-easter is howling above, the spring-tide roaring outside, the brimming tide-way lapping up to the dyke-top, or flying over in sheets of spray; when round the one fatal thread which is trickling over the dyke--or worse, through some forgotten rat's hole in its side--hundreds of men are clustered, without tumult, without complaint, marshalled under their employers, fighting the brute powers of nature, not for their employer's sake alone, but for the sake of their own year's labour and their own year's bread. The sheep have been driven off the land below; the cattle stand ranged shivering on high dykes inland; they will be saved in punts, if the worst befall. But a hundred spades, wielded by practised hands, cannot stop that tiny rat-hole. The trickle becomes a rush--the rush a roaring waterfall. The dyke-top trembles- -gives. The men make efforts, desperate, dangerous, as of sailors in a wreck, with faggots, hurdles, sedge, turf: but the bank will break; and slowly they draw off; sullen, but uncomplaining; beaten, but not conquered. A new cry rises among them. Up, to save yonder sluice; that will save yonder lode; that again yonder farm; that again some other lode, some other farm, far back inland, but guessed at instantly by men who have studied from their youth, as the necessity of their existence, the labyrinthine drainage of lands which are all below the water level, and where the inner lands, in many cases, are lower still than those outside. So they hurry away to the nearest farms; the teams are harnessed, the waggons filled, and drawn down and emptied; the beer-cans go round cheerily, and the men work with a sort of savage joy at being able to do something, if not all, and stop the sluice on which so much depends. As for the outer land, it is gone past hope; through the breach pours a roaring salt cataract, digging out a hole on the inside of the bank, which remains as a deep sullen pond for years to come. Hundreds, thousands of pounds are lost already, past all hope. Be it so, then. At the next neap, perhaps, they will be able to mend the dyke, and pump the water out; and begin again, beaten but not conquered, the same everlasting fight with wind and wave which their forefathers have waged for now 800 years. He who sees--as I have seen--a sight like that, will repine no more that the primaeval forest is cut down, the fair mere drained. For instead of mammoth and urus, stag and goat, that fen feeds cattle many times more numerous than all the wild venison of the primaeval jungle; and produces crops capable of nourishing a hundred times as many human beings; and more--it produces men a hundred times as numerous as ever it produced before; more healthy and long-lived--and if they will, more virtuous and more happy--than ever was Girvian in his log-canoe, or holy hermit in his cell. So we, who knew the deep fen, will breathe one sigh over the last scrap of wilderness, and say no more; content to know that - [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |