THE DRAINING OF THE FENS 115 



English rivers navigable, or available for water-carriage in inland 

 districts. The great French " Canal du Midi " was completed in 

 1681, nearly a century before the example was followed in England. 

 In this connection it may be also noticed that a colony of Walloon 

 emigrants, settled at Thorney towards the middle of the seventeenth 

 century, introduced into the district the practice of paring and 

 burning the coarse tussocks of grass, and the paring plough was 

 long known as the French plough. 



Robert Child in his " Large Letter " on the most notable 

 deficiencies of English agriculture, printed in Hartlib's Legacie(lQ5l), 

 suggests that the drainage of marshes was not begun till the reign of 

 Elizabeth. " In Qu. Elizabeth's dayes," he writes, " Ingenuities, 

 Curiosities, and Good Husbandry began to take place, and then 

 Salt Marshes began to be fenced from the Seas." In this he is 

 mistaken. Some progress had been made at an earlier date. A 

 number of Acts were passed in the reign of Henry VIII. for the 

 reclamation of marshes and fens by undertakers, who were usually 

 rewarded with hah* the reclaimed land. Thus Wapping Marsh was 

 reclaimed by Cornelius Vanderdelf in 1544, and the embankment of 

 Plumstead and Greenwich Marshes was begun in the same reign. 

 Isolated marshes had been drained in the eastern counties during 

 the reign of Elizabeth. Norden (Surveyor's Dialogue, 1607) says : 

 " much of the Fennes is made lately firme ground, by the skill of 

 one Captaine Lovell, and by M. William Englebert, an excellent 

 Ingenor." But it was not till the reign of Charles I. that any 

 serious attempt was made to deal with the Great Level of the Fens, 

 which extended into the six counties of Cambridge, Lincoln, Hunting- 

 don, Northampton, Suffolk, and Norfolk. 



Seventy miles in length, and varying in breadth from ten to 

 thirty miles, the fens comprised an area of nearly 700,000 acres. 

 Now a richly fertile, highly cultivated district, it was, in the seven- 

 teenth century, a wilderness of bogs, pools, and reed-shoals a 

 vast morass, from which, here and there, emerged a few islands of 

 solid earth. Here dwelt an amphibious population, travelling in 

 punts, walking on stilts, and living mainly by fishing, cutting willows, 

 keeping geese, and wild-fowling. " H. C." who, in 1629, urged upon 

 the Government the Drayning of Fennes, paints an unattractive 

 picture of the country : " The Aer Nebulous, Grosse, and full of 

 rotten Harres ; the Water putred and muddy, yea, full of loath- 

 some Vermine ; the Earth spuing, unfast, and boggie ; the Fire 



