12 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



of each locality, while bridges, roads, dykes, havens and 

 light-houses were erected wherever their possessions or in- 

 fluence extended. The half at least of broad Northumber- 

 land, covering an area of about two thousand square miles, 

 was lost in sandy plains and barren heaths ; the half at least 

 of East Anglia and a considerable part of Mercia were cov- 

 ered with marshes, difficult of access. Yet in both these 

 regions the monks substituted for these uninhabitable des- 

 erts fat pasturage and abundant harvests. The latter dis- 

 trict, the present name of which (the Fens) alone recalls 

 the marshy and unwholesome nature of the soil, became the 

 principal theatre of the triumphs of agricultural industry, 

 performed by the monks. Medehampstead (now Peter- 

 borough), Ely, Croyland, Thorney (now Southampton), 

 Ramsay, were the first battle-fields of these conquerors of 

 nature, these monks who made of themselves plowmen, 

 breeders and keepers of stock, and who were the true fath- 

 ers of English agriculture, which, thanks to their traditions 

 and example, has become the first agriculture in the world. 



Perhaps in no better way can I more graphically bring 

 before you the immense work of the monks than by giving 

 you a picture of the fen district of Southampton before Thor- 

 ney Abbey was founded, and then reading you the descrip- 

 tion of this abbey by the great bishop of Tyre, William of 

 Malmesbury. Southampton is a peninsula making down 

 between the mouths of the Itchen and the Test or Anton 

 into the tide-swept channel that separates it from the Isle 

 of Wight. It was nothing but a vast morass.* The fens in 

 the seventh century were probably like the forests at the 

 mouth of the Mississippi or the swamp shores of the Caro- 

 linas. It was a lab} r rinth of black, wandering streams ; broad 

 lagoons, morasses submerged every spring-tide ; vast beds of 

 reed and sedge and fern ; vast copses of w r illow, alder and 

 gray poplar, rooted in the floating peat, which was swallow- 

 ing up slowly, all-devouring, yet all-preserving, the forests 

 of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which had 

 once grown in that low, rank soil. Trees torn down by 

 flood and storm floated and lodged in rafts, damming the 



* Kingsley, "Hermits." 



