A Family Of The Fens

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Title:     A Family Of The Fens
Author: Hilaire Belloc [More Titles by Belloc]

Upon the very limit of the Fens, not a hundred feet in height, but very sharp against the level, there is a lonely little hill. From the edge of that hill the land seems very vague; the flat line of the horizon is the only boundary, and that horizon mixes into watery clouds. No countryside is so formless until one has seen the plan of it set down in a map, but on studying such a map one understands the scheme of the Fens.

The Wash is in the shape of a keystone with the narrow side towards the sea and the broad side towards the land. Imagine the Wash prolonged for twenty or thirty miles inland and broadened considerably as it proceeded as would a curving fan, or better still, a horseshoe, and you have the Fens: a horseshoe whose points, as Dugdale says, are the corners of Lincolnshire and Norfolk.

All around them is land of some little height, and quite dry. It is ooelitic on the east, chalky on the south, and the old towns and the old roads look from all round this amphitheatre of dry land down upon the alluvial flats beneath. Peterboro', Cambridge, Lynn, are all just off the Fens, and the Ermine street runs on the bank which forms their eastern frontier.

This plain has suffered very various fortunes. How good the land was and how well inhabited before the ruin of the monasteries is not yet completely grasped, even by these who love these marshes and who have written their history. Yet there is physical evidence of what was once here: masses of trees but just buried, grass lying mown in swathes beneath the moss-land, the implements of men where now no men can live, the great buried causeway running right across from east to west.

Beyond such proofs there are the writers who, rare as are the descriptions of medieval scenery, manage to speak of this. For Henry of Huntingdon it was a kind of garden. There were many meres in it, but there were also islands and woods and orchards. William of Malmesbury writes of it with delight, and mentions even its vines. The meres were not impassable marshes; for instance, in _Domesday_ you find the Abbot of Ramsay owning a vessel upon Whittlesea Mere. The whole impression one gets from the earlier time is that of something like the upper waters of the rivers in the Broads: much draining and a good many ponds, but most of the land firm with good deep pastures and a great diversity of woods.

Great catastrophes have certainly overcome this countryside. The greatest was the anarchy of the sixteenth century; but it is probable that, coincidently with every grave lesion in the continuity of our civilisation, the Fens suffered, for they always needed the perpetual attention of man to keep them (as they so long were, and may be again if ever our people get back their land and restore a communal life) fully inhabited, afforested, and cultured.

It is probable that the break-up of the ninth century saw the Fens partly drowned, and that after the Black Death something of the same sort happened again, for it is in the latter fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that you begin to hear of a necessity for reclaiming them. John of Gaunt had a scheme, and Morton dug a ditch which is still called "Morton's Leam." I say, every defeat of our civilisation was inflicted here in the Fens, but it is certain that the principal disaster followed the suppression of the monasteries.

These great foundations--nourishing hundreds and governing thousands, based upon the populace, drawn from the populace, and living by the common life--were scattered throughout the Fens. They were founded on the "islands" nearest the good land: Thorney, Ramsay, Croyland, Ely--the nuns of Chatteris.

They dated from the very beginning. Ely was founded within sight of our conversion, 672. Croyland came even before that, before civilisation and religion were truly re-established in Britain; Penda's great-nephew gave it its charter; St Augustine had been dead for little more than a century when the charter was signed. Even as the monks came to claim their land they discovered hermits long settled there. Thorney--Ancarig it was then--was even fifty years older than Croyland. The roots of all these go back to the beginning of the nation.

Ramsay and Charteris cannot be traced beyond the gulf of the Danish invasion, but they are members of the group or ring of houses which clustered round the edge of the dry land and sent out its industry towards the Wash, making new land; for this ring sent out feelers eastward, draining the land and recovering it every way, founding cells, establishing villages. Holbeach, Spalding, Freiston, Holland, and I know not how much more was their land.

When the monasteries were destroyed their lordship fell into the hands of that high class--now old, then new--the Cromwells and Russells and the rest, upon whom has since depended the greatness of the country. The intensive spirit proper to a teeming but humble population was forgotten. The extensive economics of the great owners, their love of distances and of isolation took the place of the old agriculture. Within a generation the whole land was drowned.

The isolated villages forgot the general civilisation of England; they came to depend for their living upon the wildfowl of the marshes; here and there was a little summer pasturing, more rarely a little ploughing of the rare patches of dry land; but the whole place soon ran wild, and there Englishmen soon grew to cause an endless trouble to the new landlords. These, all the while on from the death of Henry to that of Elizabeth, pursued their vigilance and their accumulations. Their power rose above the marshes like a slow sun and dried them up at last.

In every inch of England you can find the history of England. You find it very typically here. The growth of that leisured class which we still enjoy--the class that in the seventeenth century destroyed the central government of the Crown, penetrated and refreshed the universities, acquired for its use and reformed the endowed primary education of the English, and began a thorough occupation of our public land--the growth of that leisured class is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in the history of the Fens, since the Fens had their faith removed from them.

Here is the story of one such family, a family without whose privileges and public services it would be difficult to conceive modern England. Their wealth is rooted in the Fens; the growth of that wealth is parallel to the growth of every fortune by which we are governed.

When the monasteries were despoiled and their farms thrown open to a gamble, when the water ran in again, the countryside and all its generations of human effort were drowned, there was raised up for the restoration of this land the family of Russell.

The Abbey of Thorney had been given to these little squires. They were in possession when, towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, in 1600, was passed the General Draining Act. It was a generous and a broad Act: it was to apply not only to the Great Level, but to all the marshes of the realm. It was soon bent to apply to the family.

Seven years later a Dutchman of the name of Cornelius Vermuyden was sent for, that the work might be begun. For fifty years this man dug and intrigued. He was called in to be the engineer; he had the temerity to compete with the new landlords; he boasted a desire--less legitimate in an alien than in a courtier--to make a great fortune rapidly. He was ruined.

All the adventurers who first attempted the draining of the Fens were ruined--but not that permanent Russell-Francis, the Earl of Bedford, surnamed "the Incomparable."

The story of Vermuyden by him is intricate, but every Englishman now living on another man's land should study it. Vermuyden was to drain the Great Level and to have 95,000 acres for his pains. These acres were in the occupation--for the matter of that, in great part the ownership--of a number of English families. It is true the land had lain derelict for seventy years, bereft of capital since the Reformation, and swamped. It is true that the occupiers (and owners) were very poor. It is true, therefore, that they could not properly comprehend a policy that was designed for the general advantage of the country. They only understood that the hunting and fishing by which they lived were to stop; that their land was to be very considerably improved and taken from them. In their ignorance of ultimate political good they began to show some considerable impatience.

The cry of the multitude has a way of taking on the forms of stupidity. The multitude in this case cried out against Vermuyden. They objected to a foreigner being given so much freehold. "In an anguish of despair"--to use one chronicler's words--they threw themselves under the protection of a leader. "That leader was, of course, Francis, Earl of Bedford, surnamed 'the Incomparable.' He could not hear unmoved the cry of his fellow-citizens. He yielded to their petition, took means to oust the Dutchmen, and immediately obtained for himself the grant of the 95,000 acres, by a royal order of 13 January, 1630/1, known as 'the Lynn Law.'"

When he saw the extent of the land and of the water upon it, even his tenacious spirit was alarmed. He therefore associated with himself in the expenses thirteen others, all persons of rank and fortune, as was fitting: alone of the fourteen he preserved his fortune.

The fourteen, then, began the digging of nine drains (if we include the repair of Morton's Leam); the largest was that fine twenty-one miles called the old Bedford River, and Charles I, though all in favour of so great a work, was all in dread of the power it might give to the class which--as his prophetic conscience told him--was destined to be his ruin.

There was a contract that the work should be finished in six years: when the six years were ended it was very far from finished. The King grumbled; but Francis, Earl of Bedford, belonged to a clique already half as powerful as the Crown. He threatened, and a new royal order gave him an extension of time. It was the second of his many victories.

The King refused to forget his defeat, and Francis, Earl of Bedford, began to show that hatred of absolute government which has made of his kind the leaders of a happy England. The King did a Stuart thing--he lost his temper. He said, "You may keep your 95,000 acres, but I shall tax them"; and he did. Francis, Earl of Bedford, felt in him a growing passion for just government. He already spoke of freedom; but he had no leisure wherein to enjoy it, for within two years he departed this life, of the smallpox, leaving to his son William the legacy of the great battle for liberty and for the public land.

This change in the Bedford dynasty coincided with the Civil Wars. William Russell, having led some of the Parliamentary forces at Edge Hill, was so uncertain which side might ultimately be victorious as to open secret negotiations with the King. Nothing happened to him, nor even to his brother, who intrigued later against Cromwell's life. He was at liberty to return once more and to survey from the walls of the old abbey the drowned land upon which he had set his heart.

The work of digging could not be carried on during the turmoil of the time; William, Earl of Bedford, filled his leisure in the framing of an elaborate bill of costs. It was dated 20 May, 1646, and showed the sums which he had spent and which had been wasted in the failure to reclaim the Fens. He stated them at over L90,000, and to this he added, like a good business man, interest at the rate of 8 per cent, for so many years as to amount to more than another L30,000.

As against the King, the trick was a good one; but, like many another financier, William, Earl of Bedford, was shortsighted. The more anxious the King grew to pay out public money to the Russells, the less able he grew to do so, till at last he lost not only the shadow of power over the treasury, but life itself; and William, Earl of Bedford, brought in his bill to the Commonwealth.

Cromwell was of the same class, and knew the trick too well. He gave the family leave to prosecute their digging to forget their demand for money. The Act was passed at noon. Bedford was sent for at seven o'clock the next morning and ordered to attend upon Cromwell, "and make thankful acknowledgments." He did so.

The works began once more. The common people, in their simplicity, rose as they had so often risen before, against a benefit they could not comprehend; but they no longer had a Stuart to deal with. To their extreme surprise they were put down "with the aid of the military." Then, for all the world as in the promotion of a modern company, the consulting engineer of the original promotors reappears. The Russells had patched it up with Vermuyden, and the work was resumed a third time.

There was, however, this difficulty, that though Englishmen might properly be constrained at this moment to love an orderly and godly life, and to relinquish their property when it was to the public good that they should do so, yet it would have been abhorrent to the whole spirit of the Commonwealth to enslave them even for a work of national advantage. A labour difficulty arose, and the works were in grave peril.

Those whose petty envy may be pleased at the entanglement of William, Earl of Bedford, have forgotten the destiny which maintains our great families. In the worst of the crisis the battle of Dunbar was fought; 166 Scotch prisoners (and later 500 more) were indentured out to dig the ditches, and it was printed and posted in the end of 1651 that it was "death without mercy" for any to attempt to escape.

The respite was not for long. Heaven, as though to try the patience of its chosen agent, raised up a new obstacle before the great patriot. Peace was made, and the Scotch prisoners were sent home. It was but the passing frown which makes the succeeding smiles of the Deity more gracious. At that very moment Blake was defeating the Dutch upon the seas, and these excellent prisoners, laborious, and (by an accident which clearly shows the finger of Divine providence) especially acquainted with the digging of ditches, arrived in considerable numbers, chained, and were handed over to the Premier House. At the same time it was ordered by the Lord Protector that when the 95,000 acres should at last be dry, any Protestant, even though he were a foreigner, might buy. Two years later an unfortunate peace compelled the return of the Dutch prisoners; but the work was done, and the Earl of Bedford returned thanks in his cathedral.

Restored to the leisure which is necessary for political action, the Russells actively intrigued for the return of the Stuarts, and pointed out (when Charles II was well upon his throne) how necessary it was for the Fens that their old, if irregular, privileges should be confirmed. It was argued for the Crown that 10,000 acres of land had been quietly absorbed by the Family while there was no king in England: but there happened in this case what happened in every other since the upper class, the natural leaders of the people, had curbed the tyranny of the King--Charles capitulated. Then followed (of course) popular rising; it was quelled. Before their long struggle for freedom against the Stuart dynasty was ended, the peasants had been taught their place, Vermuyden was out of the way, the ditches were all dug, the land acquired.

All the world knows the great part played by the House in the emancipation of England from the yoke of James II. The martyrdom of Lord William may have cast upon the Family a passing cloud; but whatever compensation the perishable things of this world can afford, they received and accepted. In 1694, having assisted at the destruction of yet another form of government, the Earl of Bedford was made Duke, and on 7 September, 1700, his great work now entirely accomplished, he departed this life peacefully in his eighty-seventh year. It was once more in their cathedral that the funeral service was preached by a Dr. Freeman, chaplain of no less than the King himself. I have read the sermon in its entirety. It closes with the fine phrase that William the fifth Earl and the first Duke of Bedford had sought throughout the whole of a laborious and patriotic life a crown not corruptible but incorruptible.

It was precisely a century since the Family had set out in its quest for that hundred square miles of land. Through four reigns, a bloody civil war, three revolutions and innumerable treasons, it had maintained its purpose, and at last it reached its goal.

"_Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem_."

[The end]
Hilaire Belloc's essay: A Family Of The Fens

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