WHEN Maud Montagu became abbess of England’s great Benedictine abbey at Barking in 1377, she inherited a serious problem. The abbey was struggling to recover from a series of great floods, the result of tidal surges driven up the Thames by terrible storms in the North Sea. The abbey relied on revenues from its land along the Thames, much of which was reclaimed marsh drained by ditches and protected by embankments, but this was now under threat. The climate was changing: after centuries of relative warmth, the North Atlantic region was cooling, a change that was accompanied by increasingly stormy weather. When storms at sea coincided with high tides, water came flooding upriver with a vengeance.
North Sea storms had battered England’s east coast and devastated the Low Countries in three successive years: the autumns of 1374 and 1375 and the winter of 1376-77. Barking, 10 kilometres east of London, had been hit hard. Water overtopped the abbey’s embankments, drowning the land behind. During one of these floods, the ebbing tide did still more damage: as the debris-laden water retreated it ripped a gaping hole in the river wall, leaving the land exposed to every tide.
What the Abbess of Barking did next has come to light thanks to the efforts of medieval historian Jim Galloway. As part of a collaboration between the UK’s Crown Estate and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, Galloway is investigating the effects of storms and tidal surges on the people who lived near the Thames and its estuary between 1250 and 1450, a time of climate cooling that presaged the Little Ice Age. As the climate deteriorated, it generated bigger and more frequent tidal surges and the floods grew ever more disastrous. Some people fought back, some gave up and left. Others, like Maud Montagu, found a way to profit from disaster, abandoning costly attempts to hold back the water and exploiting their new environment in new ways.
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There are no scientific records of these events, but there are plenty of clues buried in the vast amount of paperwork left by medieval bureaucrats. They record everything from losses to floods and amounts spent rebuilding embankments, to grumbles about landowners who didn’t make the necessary repairs and requests to be excused taxes.
Barking’s troubles started long before Montagu became abbess. Records from countries around the North Sea show that damaging sea surges had been on the increase since the early years of the 13th century. Different places were inundated at different times, depending on the state of their flood defences. “Much of the river was embanked by the early 13th century,” Galloway says. “Mud banks were heaped around a timber frame and faced with brushwood and often thatched on top.” The land behind the walls was very fertile and was good for both grazing and arable farming. Landowners and their tenants shared responsibility for keeping the walls in good repair. But as the climate grew stormier, the system began to creak.
There are records of breaches close to London in 1295, 1309 and 1311. In the 1320s, sea surges punched holes in several places, causing extensive flooding. Sometimes disputes arose over who should make the repairs and who should pay. “When that happened special commissions for walliis et fossatis – walls and ditches – were set up to knock people’s heads together and get it done,” says Galloway.
As people wearied of mending walls, and costs mounted, the number of commissions soared. There was a peak in the 1320s after some particularly disastrous floods, but the numbers really rocketed after 1350, in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death. The plague reached England in 1348, and within two years between 30 and 40 per cent of the population was dead. Labour was scarce and wages high. The shortage of willing workmen was not the only reason for so many commissions, however. As landowners grew more reluctant to fulfil their obligations, complaints mounted and the authorities were obliged to step in and enforce repairs.
In 1375, a commission was sent to Barking Abbey to ensure repair work was carried out. The next year, when the abbey’s land was flooded again, the abbess ordered work to be done to “thrust back the water”. But the land had changed. During one flood, the river had scoured out land behind the wall to form a lake, and now every time the walls were breached water swept in and filled it. Whatever work the abbey had done, it was not enough. In 1380, another commission sent a workforce onto abbey land to mend a breach. “This seems to have had little effect because they had to do the same again in 1384,” says Galloway. By this stage, the marsh “which in past years had yielded great profit” was “now at the point of becoming a total loss”.
With her revenues dwindling, Montagu sent a series of begging letters to the king, asking to be excused her taxes and other financial obligations. She won her concessions, but was in no mind to spend any more on repairs. “She had finally accepted that her lands would be flooded long term,” Galloway says. “And even as she petitioned the king, she was cashing in on the catastrophe. Instead of renting her land to farmers she rented it to fishermen.”
In 1386, Nicholas Brembre, the mayor of London, ordered an inquiry to find out why the fish stocks in the Thames had collapsed. On 13 January, one Roger Gromet and 11 fellow fishermen “of the country eastwards of London Bridge” were summoned to appear before the inquiry. Could they explain “how and by whom the fish in the Thames were so destroyed that hardly a seasonable fish could be found in it”? They could.
“They shopped a lot of fishermen who were using nets with illegally small mesh or banned contraptions such as fish weirs,” says Galloway. “Then they dropped their bombshell.” The “principal maintainers of the destruction of the fish”, they said, were none other than the Abbess of Barking and her neighbour the Abbot of Stratford. Fish swimming upriver on the incoming tide “entered at the breche” in the abbess’s wall and swam into the lake beyond “in order to feed on the land there and to be more at ease and more swef [comfortable] than in the current of the Thames and there they stayed until the tide ebbed and they could not pass back to the river but betook themselves to the ditches which remained full of water which ditches the abbot and abbess hired out to people who put weirs and other engines in them whereby all fish great and small being unable to pass were destroyed.”
“The fish entered the breach to feed on the land there and be more at ease and more swef”
The abbess was making the best of a bad job. She couldn’t afford to repair the breach so she decided to exploit it to make some money. “We don’t know the outcome of the inquiry or whether she was punished in some way. But abandoning attempts to defend the marshland may have been a sensible response to the changing environment,” says Galloway.
The abbess was not the only landowner to adopt a strategy of what we would now call managed retreat. After the 1380s, the number of commissions of walls and ditches dropped dramatically – not because there were fewer floods, and not because communities were making more effort to mend the walls themselves, Galloway says. “There’s no evidence they had become more self-sufficient and made more effective repairs.” The only conclusion, he says, is that by now people accepted the land was a lost cause and didn’t bother to complain when repairs went undone. Much of the marshland along the Thames was abandoned for the next century.
Today, as global warming takes hold, people living on the flood plains of tidal rivers face the prospect of more frequent and larger sea surges – and there’s only so much technology can do to hold back the floods. The Abbess of Barking may have had the right idea.
