DESTRUCTION OF THE DRAINAGE WORKS 119 



Wherefore let us entreat our ancient water nurses 



To show their power so great as t'help to drain their purses, 



And send us good old Captain Flood to lead us out to battle, 



Then Twopenny Jack with skales on's back will drive out all the cattle. 



The Civil Wars gave the fenmen their opportunity. Vermuyden 

 seems to have been personally unpopular : he was a Zealander ; 

 most of his workmen were foreigners ; the adventurers who settled 

 on the lands which they had reclaimed were French or Dutch 

 Protestants. The commoners, moving swiftly and silently in their 

 boats, broke down the embankments, fired the mills, filled up the 

 drains, levelled the enclosures, turned their cattle into the standing 

 corn. They attacked the workmen, threw some of them into the 

 river, held them under the water with poles, and burnt their tools. 

 The perpetrators of the outrages worked so secretly that they could 

 rarely be identified. Sometimes their action was bold and open. 

 In the neighbourhood of Hatfield Chase, near the Isle of Axholme, 

 every day for seven weeks, gangs of commoners, armed with mus- 

 kets, drew up the flood-gates so as to let in the flowing tide, and at 

 every ebb shut the sluices, threatening that they " would stay till 

 the whole level was well drowned, and the inhabitants forced to 

 swim away like ducks." Even the religion of the French and 

 Dutch Protestants was not respected. From Epworth in 1656 

 comes their petition that the fenmen had made their church a 

 slaughter-house and a burying-place for carrion. Major-General 

 Whalley was entrusted by Parliament with the task of protecting 

 the adventurers. But agitators like Lilburne and Noddel were at 

 work among his soldiers, and the commoners showed no respect 

 for the authority of Parliament. " They could make as good a 

 Parliament themselves ; it was a Parliament of clouts." In some 

 cases the resistance of the fenmen secured them further concessions ; 

 in others they succeeded in destroying the works of the under- 

 takers. It was not till after 1714 that the riots caused by the 

 reclamation ceased to disturb the peace of the country. By that 

 time the object was partially achieved, and many of the swamps 

 and marshes of the fen districts were restored to the ague-shivering, 

 fever-stricken inhabitants in their primitive unproductiveness. 



The struggle for the reclamation of the waste-lands of the water- 

 drowned fens is another aspect of the older land-battle between 

 enclosers and commoners. Men like Robert Child in his Large 

 Letter in Hartlib's Legacie, or Walter Blith, championed reclamation 



