Highways and Byways in Cambridge and Ely

The citizens of Ely throughout the Middle Ages were well provided with churches, having for their devotions both St. Mary's and also St. Cross, of which we have spoken before. The name St. Cross has an interesting history. When first the abbey was built, there stood against the stone rood-screen thrown across the nave an altar known as the Altar of the Holy Cross; here the inhabitants of the city were invited to worship, while the monks said their office quite apart within the screen. But, as time went on, the monks found that this twofold worship was not convenient, and, wishing to have the Abbey to themselves, they built, immediately outside it on the north, a church for their lay neighbours, "for doing such things as should be done in a parish church," and named it St. Cross, after the altar within the Minster which was thus superseded. With the dispersion of the monks the nave came again into public use, and the church of St. Cross was permitted to decay, and was finally removed.

Adjoining the churchyard of St. Mary's stands the vicarage. It is a rambling house of moderate size, quaintly made of rough hewn beams with reed-stiffened clay in between, and opening on to the street. This house has a notable history. It was first built as a tithe house, and was within the same ring-fence as the great barn or granary for the storing of the tithe sheaves belonging to the monastery. In this house lived the farmer of the tithes, who bore the title of Steward, and collected tithe, first for the monks, later for the Dean and Chapter of Ely; and as this office became hereditary the name of Steward was taken as a family surname. The last of these Stewards was Sir Thomas, who died in 1636, leaving no son to succeed him; but his daughter Elizabeth was the mother of Oliver Cromwell, and Oliver by a very natural arrangement stepped into his grandfather's office. He accordingly left his home at St. Ives, sixteen miles distant, bringing his wife, his mother, and several children, to live in the tithe house at Ely; the older lady thus returning to the home of her childhood.

For ten years the Cromwell family occupied this very house, which still remains pretty much what it was in their time. Here two children were born, and one died. Mrs. Cromwell was an excellent housewife, being we are told "as capable of descending to the kitchen with propriety as she was of acting in her exalted position with dignity." To Cromwell's duties as tithe farmer were added, in the course of time, those of Governor of the Isle of Ely. On St. Mary's Green, in front of this house, he used to drill and instruct the levies of his newly-formed "Eastern Counties' Association," which by and by developed into his formidable "Ironsides." The result of his drilling speaks for itself in the history of the Civil War; of his precepts, one at least, commonly attributed to him, was good, "Say your prayers, and keep your powder dry."

The same house served as the residence of the tithe farmers till the passing of the Tithe Commutation Acts, when, after the death of the last of the officials in 1840, the Dean and Chapter sold it. Only in 1905 was it purchased by the Vicar of St. Mary's, to become the vicarage of his church; appropriate in every way from size and position and association for this purpose. The Tithe Barn was a massive structure of stone thatched with reeds, but no trace of it is left; for it was pulled down about the middle of the nineteenth century, when tithe having ceased to be paid in kind[230] it no longer served any useful purpose; and on its site were built the almshouses and national schools, now to be seen quite close to the vicarage.

Cromwell was no friend to the cathedral services, nor did his residence near at hand tend to make him love them. He at the tithe house, and Bishop Wren at the Palace, must have lived in avowed antagonism; but they ceased to be neighbours in 1642, when the Bishop was sent to the Tower by warrant of Parliament for his persistent effort to restore reverent ceremonial in public worship. The services in the Minster were conducted at this time by Canon Hitch, Vicar of Holy Trinity, to whom Cromwell wrote as follows from his house hard by:

Canon Hitch took no notice of this letter, and the "Choir Service" went on as before; wherefore Cromwell, sword in hand, his hat on his head, attended by a party of soldiers, went to the cathedral at the time of Divine Service, and spoke aloud these words: "I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me, and am commanded to dismiss this assembly." Canon Hitch, who was conducting the Service at the Communion Table, paid no attention, and went on without stopping; whereupon Cromwell, followed by soldiers and rabble, went up to the clergyman, laid his hand on his sword, and, bidding him "leave off his fooling and come down," drove the congregation out of the cathedral.

Five years after this scene took place, an order was made by the House of Commons to the effect "that the Cathedral Church in the Isle of Ely, being in a ruinous condition, should be examined with a view to its being pulled down and its material used to make provision for sick and maimed soldiers and their families." Providentially this order was not carried into effect, Cromwell's own influence being presumably used against it.

If we continue our walk for a few minutes further westward along the street, we come to a quaint and picturesque building now known as St. John's Farm. It was built by Bishop Northwold, in order to unite the two Hostels of St. John the Baptist and St. Mary Magdalene. These Hostels had been founded for the use of monks who, though residing in Ely, wished to be independent of the greater monastery; Bishop Northwold put an end to this undesirable state of things by erecting one Hostel for the use of the two communities, and placing it under the direct supervision of the Sacrist of Ely. The Hostel is now an unpretending homestead, much rebuilt, yet retaining bits of thirteenth century work still untouched and therefore of interest.

Those who approach Ely from the south must notice two prominent buildings standing quite apart from the cathedral. One is the Theological College, a structure of red brick well placed on rising ground, where twenty students can reside while preparing to take Holy Orders in the Church of England; it was founded by Bishop Woodford, who filled the See for twelve years from 1873. The College has its own private chapel for daily use, but by its constitution the students are bound to attend many services in the cathedral; the founder having insisted on this proviso as tending to maintain the link between the new foundation and the ancient Minster, a link which he foresaw might otherwise dwindle away. As a rule students have one year of special training and study; and during this time they take part in the parochial work of the cathedral city.

The other conspicuous building is a round castellated structure that might well pass for a Norman keep, but is, in fact, the water tower of Ely, supporting a huge tank into which water is forced from springs at Isleham some seven miles distant.[231] The inhabitants of the city have good reason to be thankful for this water supply; not a hundred years ago the natural springs on the spot were so inadequate for their use that most of the water for brewing and washing had to be brought up from the river, slung in a pair of leather bags on horseback, an arrangement manifestly inconvenient, "though providing," as the historian adds, "a comfortable subsistence for many industrious poor." Let us hope that these poor folk did not bear a grudge against Dean Peacock, to whose zeal the waterworks of Ely are mainly due.

One of the chief industries of Ely is the making of jam, for which the rich fruit-growing fields in the neighbourhood supply the material. And if we follow the main street down to the wharf on the river Ouse we shall see in the piles of willow wands that lie ready stripped on its banks, evidence of a much older industry still carried on here. This is the basket-making, for the which the fenland districts of Britain were famed even before the Romans reached the country. Posidonius, the Rhodian geographer under whom Cicero studied, and who himself visited our island about 100 B.C., mentions "British baskets" as exported for use on the Continent. A century later Strabo tells us of their extensive home use, for storing corn, and Martial, in the next generation, gives us the very word, which was adopted into the Latin from the Celtic original (still used in Welsh), as it has since been adopted into English. In sending a present to a lady he alludes to it as:

"A basket rude, from painted Britons come."
("Barbara de pictis venio bascauda Britannis.")

The withies of which the baskets are made were at first, doubtless, the shoots of the willows found growing wild along the streams. Now they are cut from carefully tended osier-beds, small enclosed areas which are periodically flooded, where the willows are regularly cultivated with a view to the production of long shoots suitable for this industry. "They are regularly cut, peeled, and seasoned and afford employment to large numbers of people."[232] Nor is the making of baskets the only purpose for which willows may be profitably cultivated; for, as Fuller says:—"This tree delighteth in moist places and is triumphant in the Isle of Ely, where the roots strengthen the banks and the lop affords fuel for the fire. It groweth incredibly fast; it being a by-word in this county that the profit by willows will buy the owner a horse before other trees will pay for his saddle."

Having thus come to know something of Ely Minster, we shall feel the greater interest in all our further explorations through those highways and byways of the surrounding district over which she presides with the air of a Mother, and a Queen.

CHAPTER XVIII

Boundary of Fens.—Roman Works, Car Dyke, Sea Wall, Causeway.—Archipelago.—Littleport, Agrarian Riots.—Denver Sluice.—Roslyn Pit.—Fenland Abbeys, Chatteris, Ramsey, Peterborough, Thorney, Crowland.

The vast Fenland district of which the Isle of Ely is the core consisted, until the fens were drained, of an archipelago of scattered islets rising out of a morass, through which the rivers from the uplands around stagnated in a complex system of waterways, constantly changing, as one branch or another got silted up and the streams had to make themselves new channels.

The foreshore of the uplands may still be traced on a contour map, and is seen to be deeply indented, with bays running in from the fen and capes running out into it. The southernmost point of the morass was at Fen Ditton on the Cam, two miles below Cambridge. Its western boundary went by, Waterbeach, Cottenham, and Willingham, to Earith; thence through Huntingdonshire to Ramsey and Peterborough; thence, by Deeping, Holbeach, and Spalding, to the Witham, a few miles below Lincoln. Throughout all this length ran a Roman earthwork, the Car Dyke, still existing at many points, evidently thrown up by these mighty civilisers to keep the floods in check. A like Roman embankment, of much larger dimensions, is to be seen on either shore of the great estuary which of old brought the sea-shore as far south as Wisbech. The eastern boundary of the Fenland needs no such defence, as on this side the higher ground sinks much more abruptly to the fen level. It passes from Fen Ditton by Horningsea, Bottisham, Swaffham, and Reach to Burwell. Here a peninsula projects to Soham, followed by a deep inlet to Isleham and Mildenhall. Then it runs north and west to Downham, in Norfolk, and thence due north to the sea by Lynn.

We must not, however, suppose that the whole of this immense tract was always morass. Oscillations in the land level have more than once raised it high enough and long enough for great forests to clothe it; the trees of which, frequently of giant size, are constantly exhumed from the peat which the later depressions have formed over them.[233] The last of these forests seems to have lingered on into Roman times. A Roman roadway may still be traced, running east and west across the whole breadth of the district, from Denver, at the south-western point of the Norfolk uplands, to Stanground, near Peterborough, on the Huntingdonshire mainland. The Fens must have been very different from what they afterwards became for such a road to be in use. But before the collapse of Roman Britain in the fifth century of our era all seems to have gone to fen once more; and the islets in it served as a refuge for the remnant of the British population when the flood of the Anglo-Saxon Conquest burst over the land.[234]

These islets number some thirty and more, and vary considerably in size. Far the largest is that on which Ely stands, the southern part of which has been spoken of in Chapter XII. At its extreme northern point, on a subsidiary islet of its own, is the large village of Littleport, chiefly memorable as having been the focus of a most serious agrarian outbreak, which in the year 1816 convulsed the district. Widespread agricultural distress marked the first decades of the nineteenth century. The wholesale enclosure of the common fields and the waste lands brought with it no small suffering to the peasantry; who everywhere lost, by the Enclosure Acts, the advantages which the waste lands had afforded them, receiving in exchange a scanty portion of "town land" in each parish, the rent of which is applied to local charities. And in many instances the policy of the Government placed these "town lands" in the least accessible corner of the parish; for the express purpose of preventing labourers from acquiring allotments in them and thus becoming less dependent on their wages. The draining of the fens, moreover, which was then in full progress, by exterminating the old abundance of fish and wildfowl deprived the marsh-men at once of their chief recreation and their most savoury food. Wages were only nine shillings a week, while wheat was no less than five guineas a quarter. These grievances actually drove the peasantry to arms, not without countenance from sympathisers of a superior class, who felt that the demand of the rioters for wages enough to purchase a stone of flour a week, which was all they asked, could not be called unreasonable.

"Assembling by sound of horn at Littleport, they sacked some of the houses of the most prosperous, levied contributions on others, and then marched on Ely in formidable force, armed with guns, pistols, scythes, etc., and under cover of a waggon, on which they had mounted four punt-guns. These formidable weapons, used for wild-fowl shooting, with barrels eight feet long, whose charge was no less than a pound of gunpowder, projected over the front of the vehicle to clear the way if needful. But though the leading inhabitants of Ely had hastily armed themselves, and been sworn in as special constables they were not prepared to face this artillery, and the town passed without resistance into the power of the mob, who repeated their Littleport doings on a larger scale, though with little bodily hurt to anyone. Unhappily the mob soon got out of hand, and the movement rapidly degenerated into a mere drunken riot, the chief sufferers in which were, as usual, those who had done most for the relief of the poor—the local shopkeepers, who had aided them by credit, and the local clergy, who had organised soup-kitchens for them.

"At the first approach of the military force sent for to suppress them, the rioters retreated in good order, still under cover of their armed waggon, to Littleport, where, however, only a handful made any sort of stand when the soldiers actually arrived."[235] The rest dispersed in panic, and not a blow was struck in defence of those, some eighty in number, who were selected to be made an example of. A special commission was held for the trial of these unhappy men. "In spite of strong testimony to character, five were hanged, and five more transported for life, the rest undergoing various terms of imprisonment; all to the accompaniment of ecclesiastical rejoicings, the Bishop entering the cathedral in solemn procession, to the strains of the triumphal anthem, "Why do the heathen rage?", with his Sword of State borne before him (by his butler!), and escorted by fifty of the principal inhabitants, carrying white wands. No fewer than three hundred of these wand-bearers guarded the execution of the five rioters; yet the sympathy for them was so strong that the bishop could not get a cart to carry them to the gallows under five guineas for the trip."

Such was the last serious exercise of the Bishop's long-descended secular jurisdiction over the Isle. From the Girvian Princes to the Abbesses of Ely, from the Abbesses to the Abbots, from the Abbots to the Bishops that Palatinate jurisdiction had been handed on for twelve hundred years;—and this was its sordid close. It died none too soon.

Littleport is now quite a thriving and prosperous place, with a shirt-factory employing over 300 hands and a most effective system of agriculture in the reclaimed fens around. It has a fine Early English church, and a grand tower, through the basement of which goes the footway of the street. Until the nineteenth century the place was so inaccessible by land that the Cambridgeshire annalist Carter (1752) tells us that "it is as rare to see a coach at Littleport as a ship at Newmarket."

From Littleport the road pursues its level way for seven miles across the fen, till, after crossing the small islet of Hilgay, it strikes the Norfolk uplands at their south-western corner, hard by Denver Sluice; the present boundary of the North Sea tide, which once ran up almost to Cambridge. This magnificent Sluice is the keystone of the whole drainage scheme of the fenland. Here the New and the Old Bedford Rivers, whose start we saw at Earith (p. 280), once more rejoin the Ouse, having conveyed in twenty-two miles the waters which by the old channel would have taken thirty-three. This, of course, gives them a better fall, and renders them less liable to silt themselves up.

Practically the New River does all the work, very little water being in the Old except what the tide brings up. It is a striking sight to be on the Sluice at high water and gaze at the sea waves ridging up this old river with force that seems illimitable. And yet not enough pass in, before the ebb calls them back, ever (or hardly ever) to reach Earith, as a glance at the channel there instantly shows. Still more striking is it to be on the Sluice when the spring tides are on, and see the sea on the north of the Sluice standing fifteen or twenty feet higher than the fresh waters on the south. One realises what widespread disaster would ensue if the Sluice were to give way. Small wonder that during the Fenian dynamite scare of 1867 the place was watched day and night by a guard of soldiers. The Sluice itself is a massive dam of stonework; having a big lock with two sets of gates, one against the stream of the river, the other against the tideway of the sea, which reaches this point by a broad cut from the important seaport of King's Lynn.

This present erection was built 1752. Its earlier predecessor was set up 1651 by the Dutch engineer Vermuyden, the maker of the Bedford Rivers, to whose genius the whole present scheme of drainage owes its existence. He carried through his plan in face of most determined opposition, especially from the towns of Lynn and Cambridge, who complained that "whereas of old ships from Newcastle were wont to make eighteen voyages in the year to Cambridge with sea coal, now, since the blocking of the stream at Denver and the diversion of its waters at Earith, they can make but ten or twelve, whereby the price of fuel hath increased by half." When this first sluice was "blown up" by the tide in 1713 there were loud rejoicings. The consequences, however, proved so serious, that the next generation was fain to see it replaced.

Lynn is the point to which the road we have been following ultimately leads. On leaving Ely by this road, the first turn to the right will bring us down to the famous Roslyn (or Roswell) Pit, beloved of geologists and botanists. It is a large water-filled excavation by the side of the railway, nurturing various rare water plants, and presenting the wonderful spectacle of chalk lying above boulder-clay, a phenomenon now attributed to ice action.[236]

The western declivity of the Island plunges down to the fen at Mepal, on the New Bedford River. After crossing this, the road leads straight across the fen to Chatteris, and is called Ireton's Way; the causeway on which it runs having been made by that great Puritan general, for strategic purposes, during the Civil War. Chatteris was the first of the wonderful chain of Abbeys which swept round the Fenland from Ely into Lincolnshire. The others are Ramsey and Peterborough on the last verge of the mainland; with Thorney and Crowland, rising, like Chatteris, on islands in the morass.[237] Of these, Chatteris and Thorney alone are in Cambridgeshire; though Peterborough is within half a mile of the county boundary. The former, a nunnery, was founded by the Lady Alwyn, foster-mother to Edgar the Peacemaker. It was never a large House, and no remains of it survive; but Chatteris is now the seat of another Benedictine community, exiled from France in 1901. The place possesses some curious wells of warm water, not of any great depth, as such usually are, but penetrating only some ten or twelve feet into the fen deposits. Local chemical decomposition is supposed to account for the phenomenon. The fen hereabouts is rich in geological and archæological remains. And within sight of his mother's convent, only six miles away across the fen, her son (also an Alwyn), the Alderman or Earl of the district, founded, on the projecting cape of the Huntingdonshire mainland, the much larger abbey of Ramsey, whose abbot was one of the higher or "mitred" class, privileged to give the "Minor" Orders (i.e. those beneath the grade of Deacon).

Thorney was of earlier date; coeval, indeed, with Peterborough. Of its foundation a graphic description is given by the chronicler. After telling how King Wulfhere of Mercia (whose wife was sister to St. Etheldreda), endowed Peterborough and its abbot Sexwulf with broad possessions, he continues:

Thorney, however, was long in rising to abbatial dignity, and remained the abode of anchorites, so humble and so sequestered that in the great Danish raid of 870, when Ely and every other Religious House throughout the Fenland was destroyed, the plunderers did not take the trouble to seek it out, and it became a haven of refuge for the survivors of the sack of Crowland. The story is graphically told in the "Chronicle of Crowland"; in its present form probably a thirteenth century work, but obviously compiled from earlier sources.

After describing vividly the utter overthrow, at a great battle in Kesteven (West Lincolnshire), of the local forces hastily called out to meet the Danish host, he tells how a few poor fugitives got them to the Church of Crowland, and interrupted the Midnight Service with their crushing tidings.

The Abbot of Thorney was also "mitred," and the House ranked as second only to Ely in the county. William of Malmesbury (A.D. 1135) describes it as "a little paradise, delightsome as heaven itself may be deemed, fen-circled, yet rich in loftiest trees, where water-meadows delight the eye with rich green, where streamlets glide unchecked through each field. Scarce a spot of ground lies there waste; here are orchards, there vineyards. Nature vies with culture, and what is unknown to the one is produced by the other. And what of the glorious buildings, whose very size it is a wonder that the ground can support amid such marshes? A vast solitude is here the monks' lot, that they may the more closely cling to things above. If a woman is there seen, she is counted a monster, but strangers, if men, are greeted as angels unawares. Yet there none speaketh, save for the moment; all is holy silence.... Truly I may call that island a hostel of chastity, a tavern of honesty, a gymnasium of divine philosophy. From its dense thickets it is called Thorney."

At the draining of the Fens, in the seventeenth century, Thorney was assigned to the Earls (now Dukes) of Bedford, who, during the nineteenth century alone, have expended on their Thorney estates nearly £2,000,000. Yet the Thorney property does not even pay its way. The noble owners have, however, their reward in the genuine success which has crowned the experiment from a philanthropic point of view. Thanks to their efforts, Thorney is again, as in the old days of the Benedictines, a smiling, well-wooded oasis amid the dreary Fenland; where the welfare of the tenantry is, as of old, the chief object of the landlord, and where, in consequence, pauperism, drunkenness, and crime are alike practically unknown. The remains of the Abbey Church are still used for parochial worship, but only 117 of its original 290 feet of length have survived Henry the Eighth's demolitions.

CHAPTER XIX

Draining of Fens.—Monastic Works, Morton's Leam.—Diversion of Ouse.—Local Government, Jurats, Discontent.—Jacobean polemics.—First Drainage Company.—Rising of Fen-men.—Second Company, Huguenot Labourers.—Third Company, Earl of Bedford, Vermuyden.—Old River.—Cromwell.—Fourth Company, Prisoner Slaves, New River, Denver Sluice.—Later Developments.

The thought of the Fenland Abbeys leads on to the fascinating story of the draining of the fens. For the monks were the first to reclaim from the morass such little patches of ground as each Abbey could bank in, and to discover how very fertile such reclaimed soil is. Their early chronicles speak with rapture of the hay that could be mown three times a year, and the amazing fecundity of the corn-land. Thus it was their interest constantly to be enclosing fresh acres. They discovered, too, that by judiciously letting in the flood water on to a field they could get a fresh deposit of silt, and gradually raise the level of the soil. And the first attempt at drainage work on a large scale was also due to a monk, Bishop Morton, Abbot of Ely, who in 1480 cut the twelve mile long "Leam," or channel, which still bears his name, to divert the River Nene from its long meandering course through Whittlesea Mere and Outwell, and to bring it straight to Wisbech.

Thus it came about that the reclamation of the fens went hand in hand with the prosperity of the Abbeys around them. When these were prosperous, the whole district prospered; when misfortune befell them, the fens likewise suffered; and it often took many years for the marks of the ruin to be effaced. After the wholesale destruction wrought by the great Danish raid of 870, centuries did not suffice for this. The story we have just told of the sack of Crowland clearly shows that the place was then accessible by land. But in the hundred and fifty years of desolation that followed, such works as the brethren had effected fell into decay, and the land once more became waterlogged. Even when William of Malmesbury wrote, in the twelfth century, he tells us that Crowland could still only be reached by boat. And the yet more wholesale destruction wrought by Henry the Eighth was followed by a like period of reversion to waste.

The zeal, however, of these early civilisers was not always according to knowledge; and at quite an early date a grievous mistake was made, which caused endless difficulties ever after, and still affects the whole drainage system of the district. This was the cutting, at some date between 1215 and 1270, of a leam, not two miles long, from the Great Ouse at Littleport to the Little Ouse,[241] thereby diverting the waters of the former into the channel of the latter, and bringing their united volume into the sea at Lynn. Before that date the Great Ouse ran from Littleport to Outwell, where it was met by the Nene, and by a branch of the Little Ouse. The joint river was called the Well Stream, and poured into the sea at Wisbech.

That this had been the age-long course of the Fenland waters is shown by the existence of a huge Roman sea wall running round the old coast line from Lynn to Wisbech, and from Wisbech to Sutton in Lincolnshire. This wall traces for us the outline of a great tidal estuary running up to Wisbech, which continued an estuary even to the eighteenth century. But the diversion of the greater part of its river water to Lynn proved fatal to it. Such stream as was left, scarcely more than that of the Nene, could not, at the ebb, scour out the channel through the sands which the flood-tide continually tended to silt up. Wisbech became more and more shut off from the sea, and is now ten miles away from it. And further, the inability to escape quickly enough through these choking sands drove the river water at Wisbech back upon itself and forced it to "drown" the neighbouring fens; while at Lynn the same disastrous effect was produced by the new volume of water being too great for the narrow bed of the Little Ouse and flooding over the banks all round. The Marshland, as the Norfolk district protected by the Roman wall was called, suffered especially from this result of interfering with Nature.

Nor did it prove possible to undo the mischief. When once a short cut has been made for a great river, it is no easy matter to turn the stream back into its old tortuous course; and, when once an estuary has got thoroughly silted up, it is yet more difficult to restore it to its old condition. Throughout the Middle Ages constant complaints were made, and occasional attempts; but these were always brought to nought by some conflicting interest or other which got the ear of the Government. The fen problem was early recognised as a matter of national concern, and, from the time of Edward the First onwards, the Crown tried to grapple with it, but by hopelessly futile methods.

To begin with, the system of Local Government already established for the regulation of Romney Marsh in Kent was extended to the Fenland. The Sheriff was bound to summon twenty-four "jurats" from the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, to deal with each difficulty as it arose. But a plan which worked well enough for a district only some ten miles by fifteen, and with no river to speak of, was wholly inadequate to deal with the huge area and mighty forces of the Fenland, even when this was divided (as it still is for drainage purposes) into three "Levels," "North," "Middle," and "South." The jurats hated their invidious office, and were themselves hated by the inhabitants; each man always declaring that they had saddled him with repairs which ought to have been laid upon some neighbour, and each man ready to see his own land "drown" rather than put in a single spadeful of work which, in his view, should have been someone else's job.

Besides, the drain or the dam or the embankment which was good for one set of interests was bad for another. We have seen how Cambridge complained of the erection of Denver Sluice; and like grievances fill page after page of the Plantagenet Rolls. The men of Lynn complain that whereas they were of old able to sail straight to Peterborough, only thirty miles, they now have to go round by Littleport, over fifty miles, owing to the erection of a dam by the jurats. And, again, that a new cut has so diverted the waters that they can no longer take "navigable" (i.e. sea-going) vessels to Yaxley and Holme in Huntingdonshire, "whereby our trade is greatly decayed." Loud and incessant are the cries from all quarters (except Lynn alone) to "bring back the waters into their natural outfall" at Wisbech. But this, as we have said, had become beyond the power of man; and, despite the well-meant efforts of the unhappy jurats, and of such philanthropists as Bishop Morton, things kept getting worse decade by decade; till the suppression of the Abbeys completed the ruin, and the fens became the dismal tangle of decayed waterways, small and great, new and old, artificial and natural, usable and unusable, the unravelling of which occupied the next three centuries.

Feeble efforts were locally made here and there to control the waters; but, as the historian Carter puts it, the next wet and windy winter "down comes the bailiff of Bedford (for so the country people call the overflowing of the river Ouse), attended, like a person of quality, with many servants (the accession of tributary brooks), and breaks down all their paper banks as not waterproof, reducing all to their former condition." He goes on to give a vivid description of the puzzle-headed conservatism with which the reformers had to contend: