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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
**WINNER OF THE HISTORY AND TRADITION CATEGORY, EAST ANGLIAN BOOK AWARDS 2020** **LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2021** 'A real page-turner ... a warning about what happens when the rich and powerful dress up their avarice as "progress" - a lesson we could do with learning today.' Dixe Wills, BBC Countryfile magazine FROM A MULTI-AWARD-WINNING HISTORIAN, AN ARRESTING NEW HISTORY OF THE BATTLE FOR THE FENS. Between the English Civil Wars and the mid-Victorian period, the proud indigenous population of the Fens of eastern England fought to preserve their homeland against an expanding empire. After centuries of resistance, their culture and community were destroyed, along with their wetland home - England's last lowland wilderness. But this was no simple triumph of technology over nature - it was the consequence of a newly centralised and militarised state, which enriched the few while impoverishing the many. In this colourful and evocative history, James Boyce brings to life not only colonial masters such as Oliver Cromwell and the Dukes of Bedford but also the defiant 'Fennish' them- selves and their dangerous and often bloody resistance to the enclosing landowners. We learn of the eels so plentiful they became a kind of medieval currency; the games of 'Fen football' that were often a cover for sabotage of the drainage works; and the destruction of a bountiful ecosystem that had sustained the Fennish for thousands of years and which meant that they did not have to submit in order to survive. Masterfully argued and imbued with a keen sense of place, Imperial Mud reimagines not just the history of the Fens, but the history and identity of the English people.
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xi
To William: Whose ancestors made home in the Fens.
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Boyce is a multi-award-winning Australian historian. His first book, Van Diemen’s Land, was described by Richard Flanagan as ‘the most significant colonial history since The Fatal Shore’. 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia was The Age’s Book of the Year, while Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World was hailed by The Washington Post as ‘an exhilarating work of popular scholarship’.x
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
St Guthlac sailing to Crowland.
Crowland Abbey.
Ely Cathedral.
St Botolph’s Church, Boston.
The rescue of the young John Wesley.
A windmill with Ely Cathedral.
Francis, 4th Earl of Bedford.
William, 5th Earl of Bedford.
A skeleton pump.
Drainage of Whittlesey Mere.
Holme Lode before it was drained.
Skating match at Littleport.
Snowden Slights with punt gun.
‘Throwing the hood’, Haxey.
Stacking reed, Wicken Fen.
Wetlands at Wicken Fen.
MAPS
The Cambridgeshire & Norfolk Fens
The Lincolnshire Fens
The Isle of Axholme
xiv
A NOTE ON DESCRIBINGTHE FENS AND THE FENNISH
It is appropriate that there is no precise border for what constitutes ‘the Fens’, given that the creeks, rivers and waterways that framed the near-vanished wetlands of eastern England were themselves an ever-changing phenomenon. But even today the people who live around places such as Ely, Wisbech, King’s Lynn, Spalding and Boston share a regional identity. Some live in Cambridgeshire, others in Lincolnshire and Norfolk; some reside adjacent to the Wash where the soil is silt, others on the famously rich peat inland; but all have made home in ‘the Fens’. The nomenclature is less clear for the wetland of northern Lincolnshire and East and South Yorkshire, where the rivers Ouse and Trent used to meander into marsh as they met the Humber. These ‘northern fens’, especially the country around the Isle of Axholme, shared a common history with the southern fens once the move to drain them commenced, and so I have followed the recent example of Ian Rotherham and Eric Ash, and included the celebrated Isle in this book. xviii
While people from the Fens shared a regional identity, there is wide divergence of practice in how to describe them. A twelfth-century chronicler of Ely mentions the ‘Gyrwe’, who were ‘all the southern Angles that inhabit the great marsh’.1 William Camden in Britannia (1586) said those that ‘inhabit the fennish country … were even in the Saxon times called Girvij, that is … Fen-men or Fen-dwellers’. Samuel Pepys and Thomas Macaulay opted for ‘breedlings’; Thomas Fuller and W.H. Wheeler for ‘slodgers’. The term ‘fen tiger’ (from the Welsh word ‘tioga’ for peasant) recurs but is most often used only for resistance fighters. ‘Fenmen’ was widely employed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but presumably in response to its now obvious limitations, Eric Ash has opted for the rarely used ‘fenlanders’. This is preferable to the cumbersome ‘people from the Fens’, but while it describes the geographical identity, it doesn’t describe the distinctive way of life that emerged in the wetlands. Impertinently, I have therefore created the term ‘Fennish’. I do so provisionally, respecting that the people of the Fens, like us all, have always enjoyed a variety of identities, including those based on nation, county, manor, parish and village. While it was accepted that they were different from the surrounding uplanders, like most pre-industrial peoples, the Fennish primarily identified with their local community. As with indigenous people in colonised countries, a sense of unity was strengthened once the process of dispossession began. Resisting imperialism helped create a shared identity for diverse groups of Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians as it did for the people of the Fens. xix
Whatever name is preferred, while those who lived in the Fens from the time of the wetland’s formation to the time of its destruction remain without a name, the continuity of their culture will be obscured. It is a nostalgic myth of modernity that the culture of ‘real’ indigenous people was fixed in prehistoric time. All cultures undergo times of upheaval as well as long periods of evolution. What characterises an indigenous culture is neither its uniformity nor immutability, but that it remains rooted in country as it experiences continuity and change.xx
Notes
1. D.J. Stewart, ed., Liber Eliensis, 1848, 4; cited in Dorothy Summers, The Great Level: A History of Drainage and Land Reclamation in the Fens, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, Devon, 1976, 30–1.
FOREWORD
Until a few hundred years ago, the rivers that flowed from central England to the North Sea metamorphosed into a wetland wilderness as they approached the Wash. Encouraged by low gradient and high sediment, they broke their banks to meander into countless and ever-changing channels, forming vast reed-covered fens, shallow bird-friendly lakes and nutrient-rich summer meadows more akin to the Amazonian delta than the ordered agricultural landscape that the Fens have now become.
The drainage of about a million wild acres of marshland from the early seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century largely destroyed this extraordinary ecosystem and the ancient culture of its custodians. It is now difficult to imagine what has been lost. The Fennish relationship with their muddy home is as foreign to the modern mind as the traditional connection to country of the Aboriginal people of Australia.
This book does not attempt to take an imaginative leap into a vanquished world but to convey a little of what the land meant to the people of the Fens by documenting their heroic defence of it. Even today, most history books present xxii Fenland history as one of technology overcoming the environment.1 This surprisingly resilient narrative is one of progress from an era of flooding, hardship, malaria, and poverty to the enlightened age of drainage, flood control and economic and social development. Those who resisted the wetland destruction are reduced in such histories to old-fashioned country folk hopelessly fighting the irresistible forces of history. What is taken for granted (even by those who lament what has been lost) is that market forces and technological progress inevitably win out in the end.
In recent decades, across the former British empire, scholars have been revisiting the history of contact and conflict between colonisers and indigenous peoples. The conquest of settler countries is now recognised to have involved accommodation, adaptation and multifarious forms of resistance. Local people are no longer presented as passive victims but human beings who, even during awful suffering, never surrender agency. Similarly, the invaders are never only servants of the imperial project. What has been highlighted is that although actions can never be understood without reference to cultural norms and power realities, nothing that happened in the past was pre-determined. I hope to show that this truth is equally applicable to the history of the conquest and colonisation of the Fens.
The history of Fennish resistance is as old as the wetland itself. Marshlands are such difficult places to conquer that the bloody arrival of Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans didn’t supplant those who already lived in the Fens. xxiii Although influenced by new technologies and trade (and not untouched by war or conquerors’ decrees) the Fennish were able to hold on to their land and culture as newcomers opted for nominal rule from the higher ground or assimilated with the environmentally-attuned locals. The changes produced by a new monarch or lord were generally not as significant as the continual adaptation required from climate change, sea level rise, or changes in bird and fish migrations. What evolved in the Fens was a distinctive indigenous way of life and outlook on the world that endured regardless of who formally ruled the marsh.
It was not until an altogether new type of invader arrived from around 1600, men who sought a total transformation of the wetland, that Fennish cultural and community life was seriously threatened. Drainage now meant ‘enclosure’ (the exclusive possession of land by those having title to it) and the extinguishment of common rights. But it took over 200 years to enclose the Fens because the local people fought back, and in some regions were able to successfully protect the common marshland for generations. This heroic defence of England’s last lowland wilderness should not only be defined by its ultimate defeat. As will be seen, the fight for the Fens was much more than a forlorn footnote to a triumphant imperial tale.xxiv
Notes
1. There are exceptions to this narrative of progress in Fens historiography. The most notable in recent years has been Ian D. Rotherham’s The Lost Fens: England’s Greatest Ecological Disaster, The History Press, Stroud, 2013.
CHAPTER 1
The Formation of the Fens and the Fennish
Across the planet, most famously in the Euphrates, Nile, Indus and Yangtze river deltas, human beings chose to settle down in the marsh. The twin ecosystems of coastal estuary and freshwater swamp provided a continual bounty of edible plants, fish, birds, shellfish and mammals for those who understood seasonal migrations.1 Moreover, marsh-dwellers had access to sediment-rich grazing and cropping grounds during the drier months to complement the wild food supply.2 Because waterways were the highways of the world, wetlands were also global centres of trade and innovation.
Given the advantages of marshland for sedentary human living, it is not surprising that when a particularly rich one emerged in the eastern lowland regions of the relatively new island of Britain about 4,000 years ago, it was soon well populated. 2
Much of eastern Britain became part of the North Sea as the climate warmed and sea levels rose. But other parts of the former forest, now decaying into peat, became a half-way country protruding barely above sea level, where incoming tidal salt water and outgoing fresh water met to form one of the most diverse environments in Europe. This stunning landscape boasted the largest lowland lakes (or ‘meres’) in England, vast areas of wet meadow (grassland flooded and fertilised in the winter months), and fertile dry islands where humans could base themselves year-round.
The Fens were full of fish, eels and waterbirds, with the wild foods multiplying at the same time that farming was also being successfully refined. Both forms of food collection became integral to Fennish life, further evidence that, as James C. Scott has explored, there is no ‘fateful line that separates hunting and foraging from agriculture’, nor any empirical basis to the assumed superiority of farming for economic and cultural development.3 A predictable and easily countable grain harvest was more efficient for collecting taxes and asserting centralised authority, but this should not be equated with human progress. The 1,300-year-old Saxon chronicle Beowulf depicts the swamp as the ‘vile abode’ of the evil demon named Grendel, but this is indicative of how hard it was to subdue those living in the ‘fell and the fen’, not a reflection on wetland fecundity.4
The richness of the ancient fen is illustrated by the fact that the remnants of the oldest construction in the UK can still be seen in the mud. Not far from Peterborough are the 3well-preserved remains of a 3,000-year-old section of an elevated mile-long timber road that provided access to a platform the size of Wembley stadium. The Flag Fen causeway was in regular use for over a thousand years. Two miles away at Must Farm near Whittlesey, nine log boats have recently been found. The archaeologist who led the excavation, Francis Pryor, has observed that ‘[these] boats represent compelling evidence of a mass colonisation of the recently formed wetlands and reveal just how [quickly] people learned to thrive in a submerged terrain’.5
Flag Fen was also a sacred site. An enormous variety of metalwork, from intricate swords and valuable jewellery to mundane domestic products, were ritually deposited there. Pryor has imagined that ‘some of the items must have been dropped into the waters with cheering crowds and much rejoicing; others might have marked the end of a long and distinguished life; still others were doubtless private acts of longing, regret or recrimination. All of human life is there, had we the power to see it.’ Perhaps what is most remarkable is that in the succeeding Iron Age (which refers to the period from about 700 BC to the coming of the Romans in AD 43), when the waters rose again and many areas, including Flag Fen, were inundated, ‘belief in the worth of throwing weapons into the water persisted’. Indeed, this practice would last another thousand years.6 There must have been scores of Excaliburs, royal and humble, sustaining such a sacred landscape.
By the late Iron Age, there was almost no fen creature that humans did not know how to capture or cook. At a settlement 4site not far from Flag Fen, now known as Cat’s Water, domestic refuse has been found that contains the bones of mallard, pelican, cormorant, heron, stork, mute swan, barnacle goose, teal, table duck, merganser, sea eagle, goshawk, buzzard, crane, coot and crow. Fish was also almost certainly widely eaten, although the archaeological record is inevitably limited.7 By 300 BC, midden deposits show that the Fennish were enjoying the same diverse protein-rich diet that would sustain their health and culture for the next 2,000 years.
While there is a gap between the abandonment of Flag Fen and the founding of Cat’s Water, this does not mean that there was an interruption in settlement. Similarly, the fact that many Iron Age hamlets were buried by mud in the fourth and fifth centuries AD is not evidence that the Fens were depopulated after this.8 The Fennish necessarily adapted to a changing climate by abandoning some areas and colonising others. Their way of life was attuned to periodic flooding and permanent inundation, with buildings relatively easily replaced when old sites became too wet. The round house unearthed at Flag Fen had oak posts with walls woven from willow and hazel that were covered with a clay and straw mixture. By the Iron Age, houses were thatched with local reed rather than the Bronze Age turf, but the basic wattle and daub technique that utilised easily accessible local materials remained the foundation of vernacular architecture until modern times.
The continuity of Fennish culture has been obscured by the prominence given to conquest. There is no question that the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 had a dramatic 5impact in the Fens. It led to the final abandonment of ritual practice at Flag Fen, with the new Roman causeway going directly through the area. (What better statement of imperial mastery over the old rulers and their gods could there be than to have legionaries trampling over a sacred site?) According to the Roman historian Tacitus, the legions marched on this road to put down the celebrated British rebellion led by Boudicca in AD 60/61. Other accounts suggest that the causeway was constructed to help maintain order once the victors found, as others would after them, that controlling the Fens was a formidable task. Venerable Bede observed of the Fennish warriors that ‘environed with fens and reed-plecks unpassable … they feared not the invasion of the enemy’. Dio Cassius recorded how the Romans ‘wandered into the pathless marshes and lost many of their soldiers’. He believed that the Britons were ‘capable of enduring hunger and thirst, and hardships of every description’ and ‘when hiding in the marshes they abide there many days with their heads only out of the water’.9
Tribal elites lost power after Boudicca’s defeat and most of the Fens came under at least nominal Roman rule. Boundaries between the Iceni, Corieltauvi and other tribes are no longer clear (and may never have been precise) but they seem to have been united in the uprising and would therefore have shared the consequences of defeat – villages burnt, stock taken, and captives abducted as slaves. No doubt many of the Fennish were used as forced labour to extend Roman roads, canals and fortresses, but their culture endured because a permanent 6Roman presence could not extend far into the marshland itself. There must have been many isolated refuges where traditions were maintained, and community life rebuilt. Once the armed conquest was concluded, there were also opportunities from the new political and economic order as centralised Roman rule and improved transport facilitated the sale of fish and game. The invaders also brought useful goods and technologies, none more transformative than the metal spade.
The Romans colonised parts of the Fens with retired legionaries, and some historians have argued that the intermittent archaeological record proves that the region was depopulated when this occurred.10 But as Garrick Fincham has observed, this interruption in the ‘ceramic sequence’ was most likely the result of communities losing access to imported goods once political turbulence broke down trade.11 It is highly unlikely that people ever abandoned a region so rich in resources. More probable is that such a bountiful and isolated country became a sought-after refuge during and after the Roman invasion. Simple self-sufficiency based on perishable local materials may leave few artefacts, but the Fens provided a rare level of material and physical security in turbulent times.12
Perhaps the most profound change to the Fennish way of life brought about by the Roman invasion was the arrival of malaria, which the legionaries brought with them from other regions of the empire. However, even this unwelcome ailment, like floods and storms, had its upside. For centuries outsiders would fear spending time in the fen because of ‘ague’, while local people generally built up a level of resistance to it. 7
The Romans made a more positive contribution to Fennish life through flood control. The conquerors were experienced drainers and two of their major constructions, both known as ‘Car Dyke’, can still be seen along the edge of the western Fenland (in the Fens a ‘dyke’ is not the bank adjacent to the ditch, as it is in the Netherlands, but the ditch itself). One dyke ran north from the River Nene near Water Newton, past Bourne, to the Witham valley near Lincoln. It consisted of a low central channel about six feet deep and 40 feet wide with even wider banks on either side (which survive to about three feet above ground level today). The other dyke seems to have linked the River Cam with the Great Ouse and Old West River. The function of the Car Dykes is not clear. They may have been drains preventing fresh water from flooding the fens or they might have been canals for trade and military transport.13
Controlling water flows and mitigating flooding was not a Roman agenda alone. Small localised works had an even bigger impact because they were progressively worked on by the Fennish for over a thousand years.14 Eventually it seemed that dykes had existed for so long that they predated human history. According to local mythology, the fen was originally populated by a race of giants whose chief, Hrothgar, had a daughter, Hayenna, who sacrificed two rams to the Water-God to save herself from the unwelcome advances of the Fire Spirit. Hrothgar then had a dream in which he was warned that the Tempest had formed an alliance with the Fire Spirit and that he should prepare for battle by constructing a 8seven-mile-long deep trench. The Tempest then sent fierce winds that blew down all the trees on the giants, and the Fire Spirit came with a mighty inferno; but Hrothgar, obedient to his dream, tore away the strip of earth separating the newly made dyke from the river, and the thundering water rendered the angry gods powerless. Hrothgar then swore a solemn oath to maintain for all time the rampart between his people and the forest.15
Another old legend also emphasises how the wetland protected the Fennish. After the Iceni had become slaves, they rose up and fled following a warning from the god Mandru, that a great flood was coming to sweep away the Romans. A giant wave then swept towards the hills, wiping all before it. After this tsunami (and all the tree trunks preserved in the peat, known as ‘bog oaks’, do face the same way), what had formerly been an impenetrable forest became a vast inland sea whose islands protected the people. Mandru then declared that ‘the sea, our great deliverer, shall always be present here, in token whereof … we shall be known henceforth as Gyrvii or marsh-men, in place of Iceni, the slaves of the Romans’. The Romans did eventually reconquer the country but not even their vigorous draining and skilled road-making could undo the work of the Sea God.16
Notes
1. James C. Scott has argued that ‘Sedentism and the first appearance of towns were typically seen to be the effect of irrigation and of states. It turns out both that both are, instead, usually the product of wetland abundance.’ James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2017, xi.
2. James C. Scott critiqued the ‘nearly indelible association of civilization with the major grains’ and observed that ‘within this perspective, swamps, marshes, fens and wetlands generally 204 have been seen as the mirror image of civilization – as a zone of untamed nature, a trackless waste, dangerous to health and safety.’ James C. Scott, Against the Grain, 55.
3. James C. Scott, Against the Grain, 68.
4.Beowulf, A Verse Translation by Michael Alexander, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1973, 54.
5. This quote is from the interpretation panel at English Heritage’s Flag Fen Prehistoric Fenland Centre where the boats are on display. For a fuller description of the history and archaeology of the Flag Fen site, including its discovery and excavation, see Francis Pryor, The Fens: Discovering England’s Ancient Depths, Head of Zeus, London, 2019.
6. Francis Pryor, English Heritage Book of Flag Fen Prehistoric Fenland Centre, B.T. Batsford, London, 1991, 120–21.
7. Because of the smell of rotting fish and its tendency to attract flies, remains were likely to be disposed of in water or some distance from camp. Fish bones are also small and do not survive well, especially in acid soils. Francis Pryor, English Heritage Book of Flag Fen Prehistoric Fenland Centre, B.T. Batsford, London 1991, 130.
8. H.E. Hallam, The New Lands of Elloe: A Study of Early Reclamation in Lincolnshire, Department of English Local History Occasional Papers No. 6, University College of Leicester, 1954, 3.
9. H. Petrie and J. Sharpe, eds, Monumenta Historica Brittanica, 1848; Jeremy Purseglove, Taming the Flood: A History and Natural History of Rivers and Wetlands, Oxford University Press, 1988, 35; Dorothy Summers, The Great Level: A History of Drainage and Land Reclamation in the Fens, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, Devon, 1976, 11. 205
10. Stephen Rippon, The Transformation of Coastal Wetlands: Exploitation and Management of Marshland Landscapes in North West Europe during the Roman and Medieval Periods, Oxford University Press, 2000, 127–8.
11. Garrick Fincham, Landscapes of Imperialism: Roman and Native Interaction in the East Anglian Fenland, Archeopress, Oxford, 2002, 7–8.
12. Fincham further suggests the interruption of the ceramic sequence might represent an explicit rejection of the Roman way of life. Garrick Fincham, Landscapes of Imperialism, 16, 83.
13. Stephen Rippon, The Transformation of Coastal Wetlands, 69–71; Jeremy Purseglove, Taming the Flood, 40.
14. Ian D. Rotherham, The Lost Fens, 28.
15. Christopher Marlowe, Legends of the Fenland People, E.P. Publishing, Wakefield, 1976 (first published Cecil Palmer, 1926), 3–6.
16.Ibid., 7–17.
CHAPTER 2
When the Saints Came Marching In: Early Medieval Fenland
The mythology that the Fens were an inhospitable and unpopulated land after the Roman withdrawal from Britain in AD 410 was created by the Church.1 Accounts of the men and women who founded the region’s great monasteries were focused on inspiring piety and pilgrimage, and this required that the saints moved into a harsh and empty wilderness. Nevertheless, there are sufficient clues within even the most fabulous fables to reveal that the new colonisers were not the pioneers penned by the scribes.
The best-known story is that of St Guthlac, the founder of what would become Crowland Abbey. Writing less than 50 years after Guthlac moved to Crowland in AD 699, his biographer and fellow monk, Felix, recorded that what was then an island in the fens had previously been uninhabited because ‘no man could endure’ its ‘manifold horrors and fears, 10and the loneliness of the wild wilderness’. Apparently this was a ‘pestilential’ region ‘oftimes clouded with moist and dark vapours’ whose only residents were the demons who threw Guthlac ‘into the muddy waters’.2 But the Life of St Guthlac also documents that the saint was led to Crowland by a local man called Tatwine and made use of existing structures for his dwelling: ‘There was in the said island a barrow … in the side of this there appeared to be a kind of tank; in which Guthlac … began to live, building a shanty over it.’
Was this ceremonial ground for the Fennish? That the island had spiritual significance would explain the reference to ‘devils’ and Tatwine’s reluctance to sleep there because of them. Across the British Isles, colonising monks often settled on existing sacred sites to demonstrate the power of the new religion over the old.
Felix also reveals that for a man living in a supposedly inaccessible wilderness, Guthlac had a remarkable number of visitors and no shortage of helpers to look after him.3 The reason Guthlac was so successful in his religious pursuits was because he received so much practical support. While the saint battled with devilish visions (probably exaggerated by malarial fever), knowledgeable locals got on with the job of providing him and his fellow-monks with food, shelter and clothing in their time-honoured ways.
Why did the Fennish support Guthlac? The resilience of Celtic Christianity in the British Isles after the Roman departure means that some locals might have already been Christian, so that the monk was not so much converting the 11people as providing them with resources, including a church. The warm reception St Guthlac received also reflected his family and political status. Guthlac was a noble relative of the Anglo-Saxon King Ethelbald, and the monarch soon became a regular visitor to Crowland. For the Fennish, the holy wanderer was therefore a representative of the royal house of Mercia, both claiming the right of protection and having the capacity to provide it. After Guthlac died, the King gave the island rent-free to his heirs and successors and encouraged a town to be built next to the monastery. Thus, the foundation of the eighth-century monastery seems to have arisen from what was effectively a treaty between the Saxons and the Fennish in which the continued rights of the people to access and control their land was recognised. For Ethelbald, the establishment of the monastery not only won him favour with God but extended the power of his kingdom through integrating the resource-rich Fens and its fiercely independent people into his kingdom’s legal, political and religious order.
This pattern of well-connected ecclesiastical colonisation was repeated elsewhere. Ely, which by the tenth century would be the second wealthiest abbey in England, was founded by Etheldreda, the daughter of the King of East Anglia, in AD 673. Although the flight of the princess into the marsh was reputedly undertaken to maintain her chastity (Etheldreda is said to have remained a virgin despite being married off twice for political purposes), her success was undoubtedly helped by having royal status. The fact that Ely was a double monastery, consisting of both nuns and monks under the authority of a woman, shows 12the continued influence of the indigenous Christianity that evolved in the British Isles during the centuries of comparative isolation after the withdrawal of the Roman legions. A woman, no matter how high in the earthly realm, could not rule over monks in the Roman-governed Church.
St Botolph was another religious leader who founded a monastery with the sanction of a king. Around the community he established in 654 grew Botolph’s Ton, eventually shortened to Boston. There were other important religious foundations established at Peterborough (c. 657), Thorney (662) and then Chatteris, Denny, Ramsey, Kyme, Bardney, Spalding and Sempringham. A succession of monarchs and lords granted abbeys large areas of land: both to prove their piety and to extend control over independent areas of their realm. Border tensions between Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia further fostered royal support for ecclesiastical colonisation. In the Domesday Book, the Abbey of Ramsey is recorded as being the single largest landowner in the nation, owning sixteen manors outright and portions of eight more.4
Village-building on the higher islands scattered throughout the Fens was encouraged as part of this process. New Anglo-Saxon settlements included Whaplode, the ‘eel-pout stream’, Holbeach, ‘the deep river’, Fleet, ‘the tidal stream’, and Gedney, ‘Gydda’s island’. The Spaldas, from which Spalding derived its name, appear in the Tribal Hidage (a list of Saxon tribes) of the seventh century – the name means ‘the dwellers by the gulf’. Quadring is the settlement of the ‘Haeferingas dwelling in the mud’.513
Royal patronage and local support does not mean that the risks and achievements of the saintly pioneers were not real. But monastic vulnerability dramatically declined as the abbeys grew into powerful religious houses under the authority of Rome. Once the abbots effectively became lords of manors, their relations with commoners could be typically medieval and exploitative. An old fen rhyme recalls that some were known to be more oppressive than others:
Ramsey, the rich of gold and of fee,
Thorney, the flower of many fair tree;
Crowland, the courteous, of their meat and their drink,
Spalding, the gluttons, as all men do think;
Peterborough, the Proud, as all men do say,
Sawtrey, by the way – that old Abbey
Gave more alms in one day – than all they.
Abbeys were places of emergency shelter, philanthropy and hospitality but the abbots could be hard masters and the monks a threat to the poor, particularly vulnerable women.6
However, the limits of ecclesiastical oversight and the geographical reality of the marsh ensured that the Fennish preserved an unusual level of economic and cultural independence throughout the feudal period. Over time, a reciprocal relationship developed between the monasteries and local communities which contributed to the resilience of indigenous culture. Tens of thousands of eels and game birds were provided in rents, tithes and sales to monastic houses with little 14impact on local supply. The men and women who spent much of the day in prayer were fed, sheltered and kept warm with the natural abundance of the fen. Nor were religious houses just the abodes of monks and nuns. Lay brothers and sisters, labourers and servants, provided a further market for food and resources. The size, reliability and nature of this demand, and the distribution of wealth it facilitated, was the foundation for the medieval prosperity of the Fens.
Hugh Candidus described the wealth surrounding his monastery in Peterborough:
the region of Gyrwas [the Fens] … begins there on the eastern side, extending for sixty miles or more. The same is very valuable to me because there are obtained there in abundance all things needful for them that dwell nearby, logs and stubble for kindling, hay for the feeding of their beasts, thatch for the roofing of their houses, and many other things of use and profit, and moreover it is very full of fish and fowl. There are diverse rivers and many other waters there, and moreover great fishponds. In all these things that district is very rich. So this [Abbey] is built in a fair spot …7
The downside of prosperity was that, from the late ninth century, it encouraged Viking raids. But the Danes, who achieved effective sovereignty over much of East Anglia, were also reluctant to fight in the marsh, and generally sought to pacify the Fens. King Canute and Queen Emma, early eleventh-century English monarchs who were also rulers of 15
