HERITAGE
TROUBLED WATERS
John Blæu’s Map of the undrained Fens (1648). Thomas Moules’ Map [1843] showing Oldborough
>> to provide pasture for cattle and, to a lesser extent, for growing cereals. By the seventh century, climate change and a lack of maintenance of the Roman catchwater channels caused much of the cultivated land to be submerged again. Felix, St Guthlac of Crowland’s biographer (writing c.735), describes the province as ‘a dismal fen’ with ‘black waters overhung with fog, studded with wooded islands and traversed by tortuous streams’. Worse still, the British-speaking locals were exceedingly-unwelcoming and made Guthlac’s life a misery. Since he had adopted a Bronze-Age barrow for his cell, he probably was regarded as an intruder who was desecrating their ancestral restingplace. Eventually (from Felix’s view-point), good triumphed over evil, Guthlac beat off these early ‘fen tigers’ and stoically settled into his life of starvation and solitude with his disciples, one of whom may have been his sister, Pega, who gave her name to Peakirk. Hugh Candidus (c.1100-c.1175), a monk of Medeshamstede (Peterborough) Abbey, paints contrasting pictures of AngloSaxon Tribland. He eulogises about his monastery’s location ‘in the land of the Gyrwe’, adding that ‘Gyrwe’ was the Old-English word for ‘swamp dwellers’. To the west 42
vil agetribune
lay the rich pastures, meadows, woods and fertile ploughlands (of present-day Castor, Sutton, Upton, Ashton, Bainton, Barnack, Pilsgate, Southorpe and Ufford and the fen-edge settlements of Etton, Glinton, Helpston and Peakirk). To the east was ‘a deep marsh extending 60 miles or more’, fed by several rivers and only accessible by boat. It was completely unfit for human habitation except, of course, by the monks of Crowland, Ramsey and Thorney, over whom Peterborough claimed seniority. However, Hugh was writing in midtwelfth century, by which time the abbey estates had been cultivated for 500 years. When the first brethren arrived on site in 655, the area would have been less inviting. Like Guthlac, the pioneering monks of Medeshamstede must have found life extremely challenging. There again, the earliest religious houses and hermits’ cells were never intended to be in salubrious places and the density of these establishments earned the Fens the moniker, ‘England’s Holy Land’.
Living off the Fen Contrary to Hugh Candidus’ description, not everyone found the Fens so inhospitable. Archaeology testifies that its high-ground continued to be occupied throughout the centuries
The grey areas were fenland.
following the evacuation of the Roman legions by small-holders, who sustained themselves through eel-trapping, fishing, wild-fowling (ducks and geese) and animal husbandry. A late eight-century document, known as the ‘Tribal Hidage’ tells us that the North and South Gyrwe folk, whose lands possibly reached from the Isle of Ely to the Welland and as far west as Werrington (the Wiðeringa tribe’s domain), supported roughly 1,200 families. There is scant evidence of land reclamation before the Norman Conquest. Although the late tenthcentury monks of Peterborough and Crowland constructed the Bolhithe and Twandam Dyke, they were primarily for the transportation of Barnack stone to restore and erect their monasteries. A pre-Conquest abbot of Peterborough also sanctioned the Catswater Drain, which formed a boundary between Peterborough and Thorney Abbeys and the erstwhile county line between Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire. He recouped, his expenses by levying tolls on vessels by-passing the hazardous route across the fluctuating Borough Fen. Rather than attempting to reclaim fenland for agriculture, the Peterborough monks concentrated on acquiring and cutting down woodland, as at Ailsworth, Castor,