THE EFFECTS OF THE CHANGES
I guess that is my great great great grandfather John Ascough or Ayscough who saw the most dramatic changes to life on the border of East Fen and the Wolds. He was born on 20th October 1758 and little had changed to the area for the last hundred years. He died in 1844 at the grand old age of 85. This is what he saw in his lifetime:
Enclosure of the Open Fields in 1773 around the two villages of Toynton St Peter and Toynton All Saints.
The drainage and enclosure of the East Fen from 1801 to 1820.
The complete transition from life as a fen commoner to an employed agricultural labourer. And it all happened in the space of fifty years.
By the time John’s son James was of working age around 1825, he was already adapted to a new kind of life. But it was his son George who was mainly affected by the tyranny of labour gangs, coupled with the onset of the Great Depression for British Agriculture.
I D Rotherham, in his book The Lost Fens: England’s Greatest Ecological Disaster, is highly critical of the process that led to the “improvement” of the fen landscape.
Over the centuries we witness repeatedly the imperative of financial gain that has driven the inexorable process of reclamation. This often led to conflicts over resource use between local peasants and others who subsisted on the fen, and farmers and bigger landowners looking for economic benefit.
Another incentive to “improve” these lands was to control often independently minded and non-conforming communities. Wetlands were regarded by governments and by land owners as areas to which ne’er do wells, troublemakers and outlaws retreated from the long arm of authority.
Most, though not all, writers through time have regarded the process of reclamation and improvement for agriculture as an inherently “good thing”. During periods of intensive drainage, and of major enclosure and improvement, there were dissenting voices, but many of these were illiterate.
There were a few individuals, such as John Clare, who wrote with passion about the impacts of improvement, but these are the exceptions. When the spectre of famine and starvation hung in the air, there was good reason to improve.
The process of individual Acts of Parliament to facilitate improvement applied a massive steamroller to the impetus for change. Some areas were already in part enclosed and to a degree improved, and others had not and could not be, because of the difficult terrain or conditions as the wetness of the Fens.
Advances in farming practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought new lands into cultivation and the keeping of large numbers of sheep.
In the fens, the lands were drained and enclosed for the production of “all sorts of corn and grasses”. It was the great drainage schemes that brought about the most obvious changes, however as we note later on, the celebrations were often premature and reclamation was followed by disastrous floods and by other consequences too.
Indeed, the transformation of these wetlands generated unexpected consequences. The most obvious effects were the silting up of major rivers and other minor watercourses, with the result that the water, instead of draining to the sea, began to be impounded and ponded back into the land.
Also, shrinkage of the peat caused a lowering of the land surface across large areas of the fens. This was a recipe for total disaster.
Along with further programmes of drainage and embanking, the solution at the time was the construction of hundreds of windmills across the fenlands, with the objective of removing water into the rivers and drains. The mills were able to pump water from the lower fens and marshes up and into the drainage channels and rivers that now stood considerably higher than the surrounding lands.
However, the draining and drying of the peat produced a positive feedback loop with a lowering of the land surface which ultimately made the problems worse and the lands more vulnerable to catastrophic flooding. Not only this, but the windmills were weather dependent in order to operate. This meant the pre-industrial drainage of the fens had reached the limits of its capability.
The development of steam powered pumps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moved the drainage and reclamation towards the ultimate removal of the wetlands from the landscape.
The process of improvement affected the whole community as well as the environment in which they loved and worked. The independent commoners who eked a living from the fens often lived in basic and very poor accommodation. Cottages were not built to last but put together with materials easily and freely available. (Mud and stud walls) the roofs were thatched with reed and turf and the heating would be peat and wood. There was generally no chimney, just a hole in the roof and the smoke went out of the door and any windows. The acrid peat smoke had the benefit of keeping out biting insects, particularly midges and mosquitoes, in the summer.
The impact of improvement was mixed. For some it might mean the provision of better housing annexed to a larger farm, for others it would be paid employment, but often seasonal and part-time. Free commons were becoming a thing of the past.
The march of progress had swept aside most of the physical connections to the past and its people. The poor, themselves, displaced from their lands, drifted to regional market towns and then to the great cities that grew out of the industrial revolution.
(That is so true, as George Askew is the first for many generations to leave rural Lincolnshire to work in the coalfields of South Yorkshire).
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF THE FENS
The fenlands had long been sanctuaries for the independently minded and the resourceful. Living by the water’s edge can provide rich pickings if you are prepared to work with nature and adapt to her vagaries. The people here may have been poor in the view of outsiders, but they were rarely hungry. The fen provided fowl, fish, grazing and hay for livestock, and plentiful supplies of fuels and building materials. These were all free for the taking. My medieval times, the areas were carefully divided up between communities organised into discrete villages, each with jealously guarded common rights. Therefore, by then, anyone coming into the land without existing common rights would struggle and meet resentment.
Those such as landowners who might wish to change the land use, and therefore diminish the common benefits, for personal gain would also get a very frosty reception. Thus, by the time of the would-be improvers, these extensive lands of apparent wilderness, but in reality, managed cultural landscapes, were set to be disputed spaces of the first order. The loss or even diminishment of common rights spelt the extinction of established communities, and those dour but resourceful and independent people could be counted on to resist all imposed change.
Politically too, wetlands provided a refuge for outlaws and for violent resistance to government, a breeding ground for anti-drainage violence of the seventeenth century “fen tigers”. However, in England, the main source of social and political in the wetlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was land rights. This habitually manifested in peasants challenging attempts to appropriate, clear and drain areas traditionally considered common land. This “wasteland” provided grazing for small numbers of livestock but was also a source of water, fuel (often as peat), or bedding in the form of rushes or reeds.
Dugdale in the 1700’s, described the Fen country as: “For the space of many years until of late years, a vast and deep Fen affording little benefit to the realm other than fish and fowl, with over much harbour to a rude and beggarly people.”
THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
One of the most striking observations about the local communities is that despite the huge difficulties in literally living on the edge, the locals were passionately possessive of their landscape. For the most part, they were absolutely opposed to change. It does really depend on your perspective. On the one hand, these areas were seen as vast and rich lands to provide fish, fowl and the hunt. But on the other they were desolate wastes ripe for improvement.
As regions of sanctuary and independence for some, they were sources of dissent and unrest for others. From the viewpoint of the locals whose independence and livelihoods depended on the fenscape, these were rich environments. For the agriculturalists and landowners, they were wastelands over which human power and influence should be applied, and nature made to yield.
Finally, not everyone likes the fenscape and the wetland, and not everyone feels comfortable in the big sky fenscape of the modern fens. But stand there on a sunny summer evening, and you step back into a primeval world of ancient fen.
THE CHALLENGE OF DRAINING THE ENGLISH FENS
To understand the process of drainage and reclamation or “improvement” of the fenland, it is necessary to bear in mind the fluctuation levels of land and sea over the time period, and the changing human pressures, aspirations and applications of technology. To effectively drain land in a flat, expansive landscape requires knowledge of water and land management and suitable engineering technology to undertake and maintain the process.
In part, therefore, drainage follows the evolution and availability of necessary pumping, dyking and drainage technologies. However, in a flat land you also need political control and will, so that everyone drains. To drain one area and not another cannot succeed. Finally, economic and social pressures must drive along the process.
There must be capital available and a financial incentive to undertake the work and often at great risk. These were not easy or certain ventures, and there was the need to maintain the system once it was in place. This all happens over a long period, a backcloth of rising and falling sea levels (and different seasonal flooding from the rivers bringing water from higher ground).
Dugdale, writing about the floods of the time, felt that freshwater flooding was more damaging than the transient impact of coastal inundations. But the regular freshening of the waters of East Fen deeps were certainly of value, if not to the surrounding fenland.
On one hand, local people benefitted from unfettered use of the wetland resources (and common land) and therefore resisted enclosure and drainage. On the other they may have welcomed some protection against flooding.
CONCLUSION
These landscapes were once dark, dangerous unpredictable black waters, but at the same time productive, rich and a sanctuary from oppression and persecution. The Fens were contested spaces.
In essence through enclosure and improvement, the commons were stolen from the commoner.
Joan Thirsk in her book English Peasant Farming – The Agrarian History of Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times summarises the changes that affected those who lived and worked on the fen:
In the fenlands of Lincolnshire, more perhaps than in any of part of the country, the agricultural revolution transformed the landscape and began a complete re-orientation of the fen economy. The original inhabitants of the fen villages had specialised in rearing livestock and catching fish and wildfowl, but it was their children and grandchildren who gained their living as labourers on the newly rich corn lands.
New parishes were carved out of East West and Wildmore Fens such as Eastville. The fenlander, who had been accustomed to making many journeys by water, now became a land lubber.
THE COMMONERS AND WAGE LABOURERS
The Agricultural Labourer found new kinds of work at the end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. There was first the job of bringing the fen into cultivation and then of keeping it under plough. In 1793 and 1796, wages were very good in the busy season. People deplored the casual nature of labour in the fens – full employment in the summer but short time and lower rates of pay in the winter – but all in all that they agreed that the fen labourer was far better off than his neighbours outside the county.
However, there were labour problems due to a lack of manpower. This resulted in public gangs of temporary farm workers. These gangs of thirty or forty, often women and children, were hired by a gang master to a farmer at a daily rate, admirably suited for seasonal operations. They could be employed for a few days or weeks at a time and could be stood off at a day’s notice.
In short, the system of gang labour grew up first of all in the 1820’s and 30’s. But the evils of gang labour were never envisaged at the time. The mixing of both men, women and children, up to sixteen hours a day, the long walk to and from work (the absence of villages in the fen), the rough conditions of labour out of doors in all weathers, the absence of shelter, the absence of privacy, the neglect of children’s education needed the Gangs Act of 1867 to put right these abuses.
But enough was enough for George Askew. He was the last of my Lincolnshire ancestors to live there. He left in 1872 at the age of nineteen or twenty to work in the coalfields of Rotherham, and so followed many others who joined the industrial evolution of northern England. It was only eleven years before in 1861 that his father James (then 52), Georges brothers John (25) and James (16) were agricultural labourers. James
George’s father James died in 1878 and is buried in the churchyard of Toynton St Peter along with John who died in 1895. George’s brother James had also left by the 1871 Census and had become a railway porter.
George married Jane Cuthbertson in 1873 and they had eleven children. The next to youngest was Ralph, the grandfather I never knew. George died in 1926 at the age of 74, a very good age for a miner which we know he still was at 57 in the 1901 Census. I wonder if he ever went back to Lincolnshire. I guess he never did.
I guess that is my great great great grandfather John Ascough or Ayscough who saw the most dramatic changes to life on the border of East Fen and the Wolds. He was born on 20th October 1758 and little had changed to the area for the last hundred years. He died in 1844 at the grand old age of 85. This is what he saw in his lifetime:
Enclosure of the Open Fields in 1773 around the two villages of Toynton St Peter and Toynton All Saints.
The drainage and enclosure of the East Fen from 1801 to 1820.
The complete transition from life as a fen commoner to an employed agricultural labourer. And it all happened in the space of fifty years.
By the time John’s son James was of working age around 1825, he was already adapted to a new kind of life. But it was his son George who was mainly affected by the tyranny of labour gangs, coupled with the onset of the Great Depression for British Agriculture.
I D Rotherham, in his book The Lost Fens: England’s Greatest Ecological Disaster, is highly critical of the process that led to the “improvement” of the fen landscape.
Over the centuries we witness repeatedly the imperative of financial gain that has driven the inexorable process of reclamation. This often led to conflicts over resource use between local peasants and others who subsisted on the fen, and farmers and bigger landowners looking for economic benefit.
Another incentive to “improve” these lands was to control often independently minded and non-conforming communities. Wetlands were regarded by governments and by land owners as areas to which ne’er do wells, troublemakers and outlaws retreated from the long arm of authority.
Most, though not all, writers through time have regarded the process of reclamation and improvement for agriculture as an inherently “good thing”. During periods of intensive drainage, and of major enclosure and improvement, there were dissenting voices, but many of these were illiterate.
There were a few individuals, such as John Clare, who wrote with passion about the impacts of improvement, but these are the exceptions. When the spectre of famine and starvation hung in the air, there was good reason to improve.
The process of individual Acts of Parliament to facilitate improvement applied a massive steamroller to the impetus for change. Some areas were already in part enclosed and to a degree improved, and others had not and could not be, because of the difficult terrain or conditions as the wetness of the Fens.
Advances in farming practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought new lands into cultivation and the keeping of large numbers of sheep.
In the fens, the lands were drained and enclosed for the production of “all sorts of corn and grasses”. It was the great drainage schemes that brought about the most obvious changes, however as we note later on, the celebrations were often premature and reclamation was followed by disastrous floods and by other consequences too.
Indeed, the transformation of these wetlands generated unexpected consequences. The most obvious effects were the silting up of major rivers and other minor watercourses, with the result that the water, instead of draining to the sea, began to be impounded and ponded back into the land.
Also, shrinkage of the peat caused a lowering of the land surface across large areas of the fens. This was a recipe for total disaster.
Along with further programmes of drainage and embanking, the solution at the time was the construction of hundreds of windmills across the fenlands, with the objective of removing water into the rivers and drains. The mills were able to pump water from the lower fens and marshes up and into the drainage channels and rivers that now stood considerably higher than the surrounding lands.
However, the draining and drying of the peat produced a positive feedback loop with a lowering of the land surface which ultimately made the problems worse and the lands more vulnerable to catastrophic flooding. Not only this, but the windmills were weather dependent in order to operate. This meant the pre-industrial drainage of the fens had reached the limits of its capability.
The development of steam powered pumps in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries moved the drainage and reclamation towards the ultimate removal of the wetlands from the landscape.
The process of improvement affected the whole community as well as the environment in which they loved and worked. The independent commoners who eked a living from the fens often lived in basic and very poor accommodation. Cottages were not built to last but put together with materials easily and freely available. (Mud and stud walls) the roofs were thatched with reed and turf and the heating would be peat and wood. There was generally no chimney, just a hole in the roof and the smoke went out of the door and any windows. The acrid peat smoke had the benefit of keeping out biting insects, particularly midges and mosquitoes, in the summer.
The impact of improvement was mixed. For some it might mean the provision of better housing annexed to a larger farm, for others it would be paid employment, but often seasonal and part-time. Free commons were becoming a thing of the past.
The march of progress had swept aside most of the physical connections to the past and its people. The poor, themselves, displaced from their lands, drifted to regional market towns and then to the great cities that grew out of the industrial revolution.
(That is so true, as George Askew is the first for many generations to leave rural Lincolnshire to work in the coalfields of South Yorkshire).
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF THE FENS
The fenlands had long been sanctuaries for the independently minded and the resourceful. Living by the water’s edge can provide rich pickings if you are prepared to work with nature and adapt to her vagaries. The people here may have been poor in the view of outsiders, but they were rarely hungry. The fen provided fowl, fish, grazing and hay for livestock, and plentiful supplies of fuels and building materials. These were all free for the taking. My medieval times, the areas were carefully divided up between communities organised into discrete villages, each with jealously guarded common rights. Therefore, by then, anyone coming into the land without existing common rights would struggle and meet resentment.
Those such as landowners who might wish to change the land use, and therefore diminish the common benefits, for personal gain would also get a very frosty reception. Thus, by the time of the would-be improvers, these extensive lands of apparent wilderness, but in reality, managed cultural landscapes, were set to be disputed spaces of the first order. The loss or even diminishment of common rights spelt the extinction of established communities, and those dour but resourceful and independent people could be counted on to resist all imposed change.
Politically too, wetlands provided a refuge for outlaws and for violent resistance to government, a breeding ground for anti-drainage violence of the seventeenth century “fen tigers”. However, in England, the main source of social and political in the wetlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was land rights. This habitually manifested in peasants challenging attempts to appropriate, clear and drain areas traditionally considered common land. This “wasteland” provided grazing for small numbers of livestock but was also a source of water, fuel (often as peat), or bedding in the form of rushes or reeds.
Dugdale in the 1700’s, described the Fen country as: “For the space of many years until of late years, a vast and deep Fen affording little benefit to the realm other than fish and fowl, with over much harbour to a rude and beggarly people.”
THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
One of the most striking observations about the local communities is that despite the huge difficulties in literally living on the edge, the locals were passionately possessive of their landscape. For the most part, they were absolutely opposed to change. It does really depend on your perspective. On the one hand, these areas were seen as vast and rich lands to provide fish, fowl and the hunt. But on the other they were desolate wastes ripe for improvement.
As regions of sanctuary and independence for some, they were sources of dissent and unrest for others. From the viewpoint of the locals whose independence and livelihoods depended on the fenscape, these were rich environments. For the agriculturalists and landowners, they were wastelands over which human power and influence should be applied, and nature made to yield.
Finally, not everyone likes the fenscape and the wetland, and not everyone feels comfortable in the big sky fenscape of the modern fens. But stand there on a sunny summer evening, and you step back into a primeval world of ancient fen.
THE CHALLENGE OF DRAINING THE ENGLISH FENS
To understand the process of drainage and reclamation or “improvement” of the fenland, it is necessary to bear in mind the fluctuation levels of land and sea over the time period, and the changing human pressures, aspirations and applications of technology. To effectively drain land in a flat, expansive landscape requires knowledge of water and land management and suitable engineering technology to undertake and maintain the process.
In part, therefore, drainage follows the evolution and availability of necessary pumping, dyking and drainage technologies. However, in a flat land you also need political control and will, so that everyone drains. To drain one area and not another cannot succeed. Finally, economic and social pressures must drive along the process.
There must be capital available and a financial incentive to undertake the work and often at great risk. These were not easy or certain ventures, and there was the need to maintain the system once it was in place. This all happens over a long period, a backcloth of rising and falling sea levels (and different seasonal flooding from the rivers bringing water from higher ground).
Dugdale, writing about the floods of the time, felt that freshwater flooding was more damaging than the transient impact of coastal inundations. But the regular freshening of the waters of East Fen deeps were certainly of value, if not to the surrounding fenland.
On one hand, local people benefitted from unfettered use of the wetland resources (and common land) and therefore resisted enclosure and drainage. On the other they may have welcomed some protection against flooding.
CONCLUSION
These landscapes were once dark, dangerous unpredictable black waters, but at the same time productive, rich and a sanctuary from oppression and persecution. The Fens were contested spaces.
In essence through enclosure and improvement, the commons were stolen from the commoner.
Joan Thirsk in her book English Peasant Farming – The Agrarian History of Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times summarises the changes that affected those who lived and worked on the fen:
In the fenlands of Lincolnshire, more perhaps than in any of part of the country, the agricultural revolution transformed the landscape and began a complete re-orientation of the fen economy. The original inhabitants of the fen villages had specialised in rearing livestock and catching fish and wildfowl, but it was their children and grandchildren who gained their living as labourers on the newly rich corn lands.
New parishes were carved out of East West and Wildmore Fens such as Eastville. The fenlander, who had been accustomed to making many journeys by water, now became a land lubber.
THE COMMONERS AND WAGE LABOURERS
The Agricultural Labourer found new kinds of work at the end of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. There was first the job of bringing the fen into cultivation and then of keeping it under plough. In 1793 and 1796, wages were very good in the busy season. People deplored the casual nature of labour in the fens – full employment in the summer but short time and lower rates of pay in the winter – but all in all that they agreed that the fen labourer was far better off than his neighbours outside the county.
However, there were labour problems due to a lack of manpower. This resulted in public gangs of temporary farm workers. These gangs of thirty or forty, often women and children, were hired by a gang master to a farmer at a daily rate, admirably suited for seasonal operations. They could be employed for a few days or weeks at a time and could be stood off at a day’s notice.
In short, the system of gang labour grew up first of all in the 1820’s and 30’s. But the evils of gang labour were never envisaged at the time. The mixing of both men, women and children, up to sixteen hours a day, the long walk to and from work (the absence of villages in the fen), the rough conditions of labour out of doors in all weathers, the absence of shelter, the absence of privacy, the neglect of children’s education needed the Gangs Act of 1867 to put right these abuses.
But enough was enough for George Askew. He was the last of my Lincolnshire ancestors to live there. He left in 1872 at the age of nineteen or twenty to work in the coalfields of Rotherham, and so followed many others who joined the industrial evolution of northern England. It was only eleven years before in 1861 that his father James (then 52), Georges brothers John (25) and James (16) were agricultural labourers. James
George’s father James died in 1878 and is buried in the churchyard of Toynton St Peter along with John who died in 1895. George’s brother James had also left by the 1871 Census and had become a railway porter.
George married Jane Cuthbertson in 1873 and they had eleven children. The next to youngest was Ralph, the grandfather I never knew. George died in 1926 at the age of 74, a very good age for a miner which we know he still was at 57 in the 1901 Census. I wonder if he ever went back to Lincolnshire. I guess he never did.