The draining of the Great Fen in eastern England was one of the most celebrated erarly achievements of Europe’s drainage engineers. The dug whole new rivers to turn swamp into fine agricultural land. They ditched an economy based on reeds and eels and replaced it with one based on arable field that helped feed the great cities of the industrial era. Now 21st-century engineers want to block the drains, still the pumps and bring back the reeds and eels. But they will be disturbing some impressive ghosts. At the height of the rush to drain the Fens, King Charles I hatched plans for a new city, a “Venice of the Fens” on drained marsh. Oliver Cormwell, England’s only successful revolutionary, first took up arms here, in pitched battles with the drainage engineers. But the most of all they will disturb the ghost of this man – the great project’s chief architect, a Dutch chancer called Cornelius Vermuyden.
THE Fens were fecund places before the drainage men came. In the 12th century, chroniclers wrote that there were salmon, sturgeon and eels there in quantities “as to cause astonishment in strangers while the natives laugh at their surprise”. Fenlanders paid their rent in eels, and lived on salmon. But they were also plagued by mosquitoes from the marshes and died in huge numbers from malaria.
To outsiders the Fens were an alien wasteland. Worse, they were common lands, and the eels and fish and wet pastures a common resource. By the early 17th century – an age of enclosure and privatisation of common lands – this had become an affront to the landed gentry.
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Local landowners such as the Earl of Bedford wanted to drain the Fens to grow grain for sale in London. They wanted to break the Fenlanders’ grip on this dank, mysterious and dangerous place. And after disastrous floods in the 1630s, Bedford and 13 other “adventurers” formed the Bedford Level Corporation and concocted a scheme to drain the Fens and divide the land between them. The engineer they chose for the job was Cornelius Vermuyden, a man who had successfully promoted himself in England as the éminence grise of Dutch drainage engineers, though why he’d had to leave Holland if that was the case was never explained.
In any event, since arriving in England in 1621, Vermuyden had caused havoc across the country. He had rebuilt flood defences on the Thames, but according to an inquiry in 1623 had left them “in a worse condition than before”. And he had spent a brief stretch in jail after failing to pay for repairs to his botched drainage plan for Hatfield Chase on the River Trent.
His plans for the Fens were as big as anything ever attempted in England or Holland. He proposed digging six cuts – giant ditches the size of rivers – which would drain water from the sodden ground. Water from smaller ditches would be baled into the larger cuts by thousands of buckets strung from wheels powered by windmills. The meandering River Ouse was to be replaced by the largest of the cuts, named the Bedford River after the Earl.
The commoners fought back against this ill-disguised land-grab. They “fell upon the Adventurers, broke their sluices, laid waste their lands, threw down their fences and forcibly retained possession of the land”, as one local report put it. This was guerrilla warfare in the Fens, fought with pitchforks and shovels, and it went on for years.
The first scheme was nonetheless completed, after a fashion. Some 40,000 hectares of fenland were annexed by the Earl of Bedford and Vermuyden was paid. But the windmills and sluices failed to do the job. And with natural drainage disrupted, floods were often worse than ever. Both Fenlanders and their lords and masters were now up in arms against Vermuyden.
Then the King stepped in. In 1638, Charles I bizarrely reappointed Vermuyden to put things right by supplementing the barely completed Bedford River with a New Bedford River. Charles named his terms for investing in the scheme: 20,000 hectares of drained land and a promise from Vermuyden to build for him an “eminent town” on a hill south of the village of Manea, overlooking the two Bedford rivers. According to a contemporary chronicler, William Dugdale, it was to be called Charlemont. It would be a Venice of the Fens.
After endless delays and sabotage, the New Bedford River was finally finished in 1653, with the work completed by a team of Dutch prisoners who had been captured in a naval battle the year before. In all, Vermuyden had drained more than 1400 square kilometres of the Fens. But Charlemont was never built. Resentment towards the drainage schemes soon fused with wider resentment towards the King and in 1642 civil war broke out.
And here enters perhaps the Fens’ most famous and notorious citizen. Oliver Cromwell, leader of the revolution against the king, had as a young man inherited land in the Fens and through the 1630s fought on the side of the Fenlanders against the King’s drainage schemes. His first taste of armed rebellion was here, when “armed with scythes and pitchforks” he battled against Vermuyden’s men.
But by the time the people’s champion had vanquished Charles and chopped off his head, he had also changed sides. In 1649 Cromwell returned to the Fens in the company of his old foe the Earl of Bedford as a commissioner overseeing further drainage. And in 1653, three days after Cromwell dissolved Parliament and assumed dictatorial power, he sent in the army to suppress his former friends, the commoners battling against the New Bedford River.
History had the last laugh on Cromwell. He died in 1658 from malaria, caught not in the Fens but while fighting the Irish in the bogs of their land. And Vermuyden – rogue, charlatan and sometime engineer – left for Somerset where he tried and failed to set up a scheme for draining the Somerset Levels. He then watched as more and more of his embankments and drains across England failed, and aggrieved landowners demanded their money back. There is some mystery about his final days, but they seem to have been spent in poverty under the assumed and somewhat ironic name of Cornelius Fairmeadow.
What of the Fens? Much of the “drained” farmland reverted to swamp in the late 18th century as the peaty soils dried out and shrank, lowering the land until it was beneath the level of the new rivers that were supposed to drain it. Vermuyden had not anticipated this, and his methods, once seen as state-of-the-art drainage engineering, fell into disrepute. Indeed, the total failure of Vermuyden’s works was only prevented by the arrival of the steam pump to replace windmills in the 1820s.
But despite the failures, the land of eastern England proved extremely fertile and the drainage of the Fens contributed substantially to a green revolution that increased the country’s arable land by a tenth, banished famine and turned England into a grain exporter. And the two giant Bedford Rivers still run, dead straight, across the Fens towards the sea.
But today these waterworks are uneconomic. Despite repeated requests, successive governments have never revealed how much it costs to keep the pumps going to drain the Fens and maintain their arable farmland – land that the country doesn’t need, thanks to overproduction. But slowly the truth is dawning. The descendants of the Adventurers are leaving and English Nature, the government conservation agency, is buying farms in the hope of eventually creating a new wilderness of reed beds and eels.
What next? Might malaria again rise from the Fenland miasma? Is the germ of civil war still lurking there? Or maybe town planners will conjure up a new Charlemont.