Plus a wonderful guest article, The Fenland Riots, by Dr. Ann Swinfen!
©
2014 Christy K Robinson
This article is copyrighted. Copying, even to your genealogy pages, is prohibited by US and international law. You may "share" it with the URL link because it preserves the author's copyright notice and the source of the article.
All rights reserved. This book or blog article, or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Many of my readers do family history and
genealogy. If you're from Pilgrim or Puritan stock, chances are
great that you have ancestors who farmed, fished, hunted, and puddle-jumped in
the English fens before emigrating to America. I learned that 10% of Boston, Lincolnshire
population moved to Boston,
Mass., following their minister,
Rev. John Cotton. He had preached at St. Botolphs for
about 20 years when King Charles I’s republication of The Book of Sports forced Puritan ministers to comply or be
silenced. Rev. Cotton hid for about a year (avoiding prison), then sailed to the new Boston in 1633, where he
had a standing offer of employment.
William Dyer was born in 1609 in Kirkby
LaThorpe, a village between Sleaford and Boston
in Lincolnshire.
His father, William Dyer, was a yeoman farmer (owned his property, not a
tenant) and church warden.
 |
Kirkby LaThorpe, Lincolnshire is built along
Church Lane. The Anglican church of St. Denis,
where William Dyer's father was church warden, is
the largest edifice, and is at the top left corner.
Some of the fields around the village would have
been fens before the draining corporations took over.
The ditches and banks may be from Saxon or early-medieval
house platforms, clay-lined drainage ditches, and pits. |
There's no record of why or when his family moved
out of the area, were taxed out of business by the king, or if they died there. If the Dyer clan remained in the area, William's siblings and nephews and nieces would have been affected by the events Ann Swinfen describes in her novel Flood.
In researching my novels, I read in 19th-century geographical surveys that the
villages and farmlands around Kirkby LaThorpe were laid out in Ice Age alluvial
strips of higher ground and the lower elevations were often seasonal
marshes and wetlands called fens. A look at a Kirkby map bears this out. Church Lane,
running north and south, is the only street, and the medieval church is at the
highest elevation.
I drove through the region one Friday, from Norwich to Lincoln,
and saw only a little of the area, because at the time, April, the fens were very
wet. Side roads were closed because of flooding. The main highway (it’s called
that because it’s elevated above the watery fields and ponds) was jammed with
noontime weekend getaway traffic trying to get around a roadworks blockage. I
was stuck for two hours with no escape. Isn’t that the way of construction?
Arrgh!
 |
The captivating scenery at Fosdyke,
where I was stuck in a miles-long traffic jam. |
Our William Dyer was sent to London in 1624 and
apprenticed with a haberdasher/milliner under the Worshipful Company of
Fishmongers. The Fishmongers had many alumni who were city leaders and London mayors. William
only practiced as a milliner for a few years, emigrated to the new Boston, then became a
farmer, trader, and held government court positions. Among his holdings were
marshland at Chelsea, Mass.,
and Portsmouth, Rhode
Island, some marsh on his Newport
farm, and a small island in Narragansett Bay (Dyer Island).
Both Chelsea and Dyer Island
are water bird sanctuaries today, so you see the fens were in his blood and he
was well aware of their value in agriculture, fishing, hunting, and ecological
management.
Recently, I read Flood, a new novel by Dr. Ann Swinfen, set in the English fens in
the 1640s, and was, um, "swept away" by her vivid and beautiful descriptions of
the area and the occupations of our ancestors and their near relatives. Ann has
graciously provided an article about the fens. I hope you’ll enjoy the article,
and trot off to her website or to Amazon
to buy her book (paperback or Kindle). I’m reviewing and rating it five stars
for the subject matter and the high
quality of the writing. See my blog, Editornado, for the review and an excerpt of Flood.
The Fenland Riots
Guest article © 2014 Ann Swinfen
 |
Kirkby LaThorpe is west of Boston,
in the Lindsey Level. |
My new novel Flood takes place in the seventeenth century in a very distinctive
area along the east coast of England,
known as the Fens. Once a remote, slightly
mysterious region of marshes and hidden villages, it attracted the attention of
men greedy to get their hands on land by fair means or foul, never mind the consequences
for the local inhabitants. They used the notorious method of ‘enclosure,’ but
in the Fens they were up against a formidable
people who could not easily be bullied into submitting. When I discovered their
story, I knew I had to write about it.
I had always known about enclosures, of
course. From roughly Tudor times to the nineteenth century in England, land
was stolen by large landowners or groups of speculators by semi-legal means.
This stolen land was ‘common land’, that is, land held in common by a group of
people, often the free villagers of a parish who were peasant farmers or
yeomen. They had ancient rights to cultivate arable land on a shared basis, to
graze their flocks and herds on local meadows, and to gather firewood and feed
their pigs in neighbouring woods.
The enclosers fenced off the commons,
expelled the commoners – sometimes even seizing their animals – and took
possession of the land for themselves. The local people rarely had any means of
redress or compensation. If they went to law, almost invariably they lost their
cases, at considerable financial cost, when opposed by those with influence and
deep pockets. The result is that there are very few common lands left today.
Port Meadow in Oxford
still has common grazing for a few Freemen who can claim ancient rights granted
by Alfred the Great. The New Forest has
privileges for those who are eligible.
This was a massive injustice, carried out
under the guise of land improvement, or in order to create large wool-producing
businesses. And in some cases it may have led to more efficient farming
methods, but nevertheless it resulted in poverty, starvation and dispossession
for many of its victims. The Highland Clearances in Scotland had a similar effect,
although in their case small tenants were cleared off land already owned by a
wealthy landowner in order to produce a larger income from sheep.
The Fens of East Anglia (stretching along
the east coast of England from
Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk
to Lincolnshire)
were from ancient times an area where land, water and marsh combined to form a
rich tapestry with unique problems and rewards. The natural phenomenon of the
area is the annual deposit by winter rains of rich silt from higher ground
inland on to the lower arable fields of the fenlands. This produced some of the
richest soil in England.
Floods would cover these fields in winter, then drain away, leaving land ready
for cultivation. Between these arable fields lay a network of ancient peat bogs
and waterways – some natural, some man-made over the centuries by local people
who understood their special environment and the behaviour of their annual
floods. They lived by arable farming, stock-rearing, fishing and water-fowling.
The peat bogs provided fuel as well as absorbing excess water, and the rushes
and willows growing along the waterways furnished materials for everything from
thatch to sheep hurdles and eel-traps.
Then, in the early seventeenth century, the
‘adventurers’ came – adventurers because they invested their money in a
speculative venture. They would drain this boggy land, which they mistakenly
believed to be poor and unprofitable, seize control of it, and install settlers
from Holland and France as rent-paying small
farmers. The return on their money would be phenomenal – it was a fool-proof
investment. There were plenty of Protestant refugees from Catholic persecution
on the Continent who would be only too glad of a chance to start a new life on
the reclaimed lands.
And what of the local people? Many held
charters of ancient rights. These were ignored in the law courts. Some tried to
obtain compensation, but often found themselves imprisoned or fined instead,
for attempting to oppose the speculators.
But they were a tough people, the
fenlanders. They fought for their rights, destroying the drainage ditches and
pumping mills, attacking the drainage workers and settlers. The unrest spread
throughout the Fens and was one of the
underlying causes of the English Civil War (1642-46 and 1648-51). The war
itself brought a temporary halt to the drainage, but in the lull between the
two phases of the war, it began again. And whereas the first period of drainage
and enclosure had been financed by the aristocracy and the king, the new
speculators were the men who had risen to power under the new government, and
included Oliver Cromwell himself, who, in the past, had declared that he would
protect the fenlanders.
I was drawn to the period and the events in
the Fens by the persistent courage of the
local people in defending their land and their customary way of life. I was
also fascinated by discovering that the women fought alongside their men, some
of them even being accused of being witches because of their unwomanly
behaviour. Yes, this was the very period when the infamous ‘witch-finder
general’, Matthew Hopkins (c.1620-1647), was roaming over this same area,
instigating witch-hunts and hounding hundreds of innocent men and women to
their deaths. Mostly women. But some men too. Because of the imposition of
strict and unforgiving Puritan rules by Cromwell’s government, clergymen who
continued to practice the established ceremonies of the Anglican church – such
as baptism and church weddings – were attacked and in some cases tried and
executed for witchcraft.
The more I read about the Fenland Riots, as
they came to be known, the more I wanted to tell the story of these persecuted
people. In my novel Flood, Mercy
Bennington and her family and friends provided the voices of those forgotten
seventeenth century forebears of ours.
And the irony of it all? Because the
engineers brought in to drain the Fens did not
understand the local terrain, their works resulted in uncontrollable floods. Water
which would once have been absorbed by the marshland was pumped out into new
ditches which overflowed and flooded villages and homes. Not until the
nineteenth century was efficient drainage carried out, and it destroyed the
peat bogs which by the present day have withered and shrunk, so that in many
places the rivers are now higher than the surrounding lands, a dangerous and
unsustainable situation. In recent years it has come to be realised that the
marshes along the sea coast of the Fens in the
past used to provide a buffer against that other source of floods – floods from
the sea. As a result, some coastal farmlands are now being allowed to revert to
salt marsh, to protect the land.
I wonder what Mercy Bennington would have
had to say about that?
__________________________
Dr. Ann Swinfen (http://www.annswinfen.com) published
three novels with Random House, but her three latest – The Testament of Mariam, Flood,
and The Secret World of Christoval
Alvarez – she has published herself under the imprint Shakenoak Press.
Loving the whole independent publishing process, and the control it offers to
authors, she thinks it unlikely she would ever return to conventional
publishing. Some of her short stories which previously appeared in magazines
and on BBC radio are now published on Kindle. She has also reissued her
backlist titles as paperbacks and Kindles.
