A cautionary tale from an unfamiliar landscape

Cornelius Vermuyden and the draining of the Fens

There is such abundance of fish as to cause astonishment to strangers, while natives laugh at their surprise. Water-fowl are so plentiful that persons may not assuage their hunger with both sorts of food but can eat to satisfy for a penny.¹

This was how William of Malmesbury described the Fens, that great expanse of low-lying land at the watery edge of eastern England, in the early twelfth century.

The Fens had long been a landscape both admired and feared. The biographer of Saint Guthlac, writing in the eighth century, spoke of “a most dismal fen of immense size” with “black waters overhung by fog, sometimes studded with wooded islands and traversed by the windings of tortuous streams”.² (This did not deter the Mercian Guthlac from becoming a hermit on one of these very islands, at Crowland, where he was indeed reportedly visited by various demons and strange beasts).

Guthlac sailing to Crowland (British Library, Harley Roll, Y 6, roundel 4)

By the Stuart Age, the Fens had become an attractive proposition to rapacious kings. In 1620, King James I announced that, “for the honour of his kingdom”, he could no longer suffer “these countries to be abandoned to the will of the waters”, in the Crown’s view, wasted and unprofitable.³ All that fertile land, once drained, could be farmed to feed a growing population, increase food security and boost the revenues of those fortunate enough to own the land — which in many areas included the King himself.

And so plans were made to reclaim great swathes of the Fens’ marshy mires. This was Early Modern Europe and, when embarking on such a project, there was only one thing to do: call in the Dutch and their renowned, state-of-the-art hydrological expertise.

Cornelius Vermuyden (1590-1677) had himself grown up amidst the brackish waters of Zeeland, on the island of Tholen, which sat in the estuary of no less than three rivers — the Scheldt, the Meuse and the mighty Rhine. With drainage experts in the family on both his mother’s and father’s side, Vermuyden had learned his trade early, and very much on the job. There was plenty of work to be done locally, and various reclamation projects had sprang up in the twelve year truce between the Dutch Republic and Spain, which coincided with the young Vermuyden’s impressionable twenties.

When war resumed in 1621, more pressing issues again came to the fore and domestic Dutch drainage work dried up, so to speak. Like many of his peers, Vermuyden looked abroad for his next career opportunity, and migrated that year to England.

In his new home across the sea, Vermuyden was soon entrusted with various projects to keep water at bay: 500 acres of flooded marshes near Erith in Kent, a breached embankment of the Thames near Dagenham, and the drainage of Windsor Great Park at the request of James I himself. (Vermuyden’s cousin had also made the journey across the sea to England, and was conveniently by this point ambassador to the royal court.)⁴

But all this was mere tinkering around the edges compared to what was on the horizon for the ambitious Dutchman. Vermuyden was still in royal favour by the reign of Charles I who, in 1626, granted him the right to reclaim 70,000 acres of low-lying, flood-prone land in Hatfield Chase, at the border between Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Work began almost immediately, but local opposition was virtually just as quick off the mark.

Unlike in Vermuyden’s homeland, much of the English wetlands were managed as common land, with ordinary people holding customary rights to the abundant natural products of the fen, rights which recognised the fen-dwellers tight bond to the land. Crown-sanctioned land reclamation posed an obvious threat to the Fenland commons, as expressed in this early seventeenth-century protest ballad, attributed to Penny of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire:

Come, Brethren of the water, and let us all assemble,
To treat upon this matter, which makes us quake and tremble;
For we shall rue it if’t be true that Fenns be undertaken,
And where we feed in Fen and Reed thei’le feed both Beef and Bacon.

…

The fethered Foules have wings, to fly to other Nations;
But we have no such things to help our transportations;
We must give place (oh grievous case) to horned Beasts and Cattell,
Except that we can all agree to drive them out by Battell.⁵

Local commoner opposition to Vermuyden’s work in Hatfield manifested itself in huge riots, which were ultimately repressed with violence and harsh fines. Work on the Hatfield Level nevertheless proceeded, no doubt in part thanks to Vermuyden’s own ruthlessness — as his biographer described, this was ‘a man who knew what he wanted, and was prepared to sacrifice anything, except his own interests, to get it’.⁶

The Dutch River at Rawcliffe Bridge in December 2019, named after the homeland of Cornelius Vermuyden, who diverted it to join the River Ouse at Goole in his work on the Hatfield Level (Neil Theasby, CC BY-SA 2.0)

When Vermuyden was later engaged to drain the Great Level — a vast 344,000 acres spanning Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk — the initial stages of the project had already been similarly plagued by commoner protests. But there was another problem, this one much quieter, and less obvious at first.

Unlike the Hatfield Level and indeed Vermuyden’s native Zeeland, the Great Level sat on an extensive layer of peat. A key part of the commoning custom in this area had, after all, been the right of turbary — the cutting of peat for fuel. While useful for getting through the long damp Fennish winters, the critical thing about peat is that it shrinks when drained, rather like a squeezed sponge. The disastrous consequence is that the land’s surface level sinks, rendering it even more prone to flooding than before. By the end of the seventeenth century, this was indeed the sorry result of Vermuyden and his fellow engineers’ efforts in the Great Level.⁷

For those wading into unfamiliar landscapes, Vermuyden’s fenland exploits provide a cautionary tale.

Holme Fen in Cambridgeshire, where measuring posts show how far the land has fallen due to peat shrinkage following the draining of Whittelsey Mere in the nineteenth century (Amanda Slater, CC BY-SA 2.0)

1. W. H. Wheeler, The History of the Fens of South Lincolnshire, second edition (Boston: J. M. Newcomb, 1896), p. 24.

2. Bertram Colgrave (ed.), Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac (Cambridge: CUP, 1956), p. 87.

3. Pauline Gregg, King Charles I. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 223.

4. Piet van Cruijningen, Dutch investors and the drainage of Hatfield Chase, 1626 to 1656. Agricultural History Review 64(1), 2016, pp. 17-37.

5. The Powtes Complaynte vppon drayninge of the ffenes in Cambridgeshire, Elye, and Wisbiche, as cited here.

6. Elly Robson, The edges of governance: contesting practices and principles of justice in seventeenth-century fen petitions. In Brodie Waddell & Jason Peacey (eds.) The power of petitioning in Early Modern Britain. (London: UCL Press, 2024), pp. 169-200. Piet van Cruijningen, Dutch investors and the drainage of Hatfield Chase, 1626 to 1656. Agricultural History Review 64(1), 2016, pp. 17-37.

7. Piet van Cruyningen, Technology in a hostile environment: the case of Cornelius Vermuyden. In Sjoerd Levelt, Esther van Raamsdonk & Michael D. Rose (eds.), Anglo-Dutch connections in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2023), pp. 272-278.