part of the adventurers, nor after any well-devised plan. Indeed, so long as the river outfalls were neglected, the drainage of one district only had the effect of drowning some other; and hence arose perpetual quarrels amongst the fen-owners, with constant appeals to the law. The England of that day was very weak in engineering ability; and it was natural that the King, in this emergency, should bethink him of resorting for help to the skilled drainers of Holland, then the great country of water engineers. Out of this necessity arose the employment of Cornelius Vermuyden, the Dutchman, whose career in England will form the subject of succeeding chapters. The need of skilled engineering for the rescue of the drowned lands in the Fens was at this time certainly most imminent. It would be difficult to imagine anything more dismal than the aspect which they presented. In winter, a sea without waves; in summer, a dreary mud-swamp. The atmosphere was heavy with pestilential vapours, and swarmed with insects. The meres and pools were, however, rich in fish and wildfowl. The Welland was noted for sticklebacks, a little fish about two inches long, which appeared in dense shoals near Spalding, every seventh or eighth year, and used to be sold during the season at a halfpenny a bushel, for field manure. Pikes were plentiful near Lincoln; hence the proverb, Witham pike, England hath none like." Fen-nightingales, or frogs, especially abounded. The birds-proper were of all kinds; wildgeese, herons, teal, widgeons, mallards, grebes, coots, godwits, whimbrels, knots, dottrels, yelpers, ruffs, and reeves, many of which have long since been banished from England. Mallards were so plentiful that 3000 of them, with other birds in addition, have been known to be taken at one draught. Round the borders of the fens there lived a thin and haggard population of "Fen-slodgers," called "yellow-bellies" in other VOL. I. Ꭰ districts, who derived a precarious subsistence from fowling and fishing. They were described by writers of the time as "a rude and almost barbarous sort of lazy and beggarly people." Disease always hung over the district, ready to pounce upon the half-starved fenmen. Camden spoke of the country between Lincoln and Cambridge as "a vast morass, inhabited by fenmen, a kind of people, according to the nature of the place where they dwell, who, walking high upon stilts, apply their minds to grazing, fishing, or fowling." The proverb of "Cambridgeshire camels" doubtless originated in this old practice of stilt-walking in the Fens; the fenmen, like the inhabitants of the Landes, mounting upon high stilts to spy out their flocks across the dead level. But the flocks of the fenmen consisted principally of geese, which were called the "fenmen's treasure;" the fenman's dowry being "three-score geese and a pelt," or sheep-skin used as an outer garment. The geese throve where nothing else could exist, being equally proof against rheumatism and ague, though lodging with the natives in their sleeping-places. Even of this poor property, however, the slodgers were liable at any time to be stripped by sudden inundations. In the oldest reclaimed district of Holland, containing many old village churches, the inhabitants, in wet seasons, were under the necessity of rowing to church in their boats. In the other less reclaimed parts of the Fens the inhabitants were much worse off. "In the winter time," said Dugdale, "when the ice is only strong enough to hinder the passage of boats, and yet not able to bear a man, the inhabitants upon the hards and banks within the Fens can have no help of food, nor comfort for body or soul; no woman aid in her travail, no means to baptize a child or partake of the Communion, nor supply of any necessity saving what these poor desolate places do afford. And what expectation of health can there be to the bodies of men, where there is no element good? the air being for the most part cloudy, gross, and full of rotten harrs; the water putrid and muddy, yea, full of loathsome vermin; the earth spungy and boggy, and the fire noisome by the stink of smoaky hassocks."1 The wet character of the soil at Ely may be inferred from the circumstance that the chief crop grown in the neighbourhood was willows; and it was a common saying there, that "the profit of willows will buy the owner a horse before that by any other crop he can pay for his saddle." There was so much water constantly lying above Ely, that in olden times the Bishop of Ely was accustomed to go in his boat to Cambridge. When the outfalls of the Ouse became choked up by neglect, the surrounding districts were subject to severe inundations; and after a heavy fall of rain, or after a thaw in winter, when the river swelled suddenly, the alarm spread abroad, "the bailiff of Bedford is coming!" the Ouse passing by that town. But there was even a more terrible bailiff than he of Bedford; for when a man was stricken down by the ague, it was said of him, “he is arrested by the bailiff of Marsh-land;" this disease extensively prevailing all over the district when the poisoned air of the marshes began to work. 1 Dugdale, History of Imbanking and Draining.' In this curious old book a great deal of interesting matter is to be found relating to the drainage works of early times, though overlaid with considerable 'Dryasdust' citation. Dugdale seems to have ransacked all literature for any information bearing, however remotely, on his subject. He was employed under The Adventurers' when a young man, as early as 1643, and afterwards published his book at the request of Lord Georges, for some time SurveyorGeneral of the Great Bedford Level. 2 Anglorum Speculum; or, the Worthies of England in Church and State:' London, 1684. CHAPTER III. DRAINAGE OF HATFIELD CHASE-SIR CORNELIUS VERMUYDEN. CORNELIUS VERMUYDEN, the Dutch engineer, was invited over to England, about the year 1621, to stem a breach in the embankment of the Thames near Dagenham, which had been burst through by the tide. He was a person of good birth and education, the son of Giles Vermuyden, by Sarah his wife, who was the daughter of Sir Cornelius Wordendyke, a gentleman of some importance in his time. His birthplace was at St. Martin's Dyke, in the isle of Tholen, in Zeeland. He had been trained as an engineer, and having been brought up in a country where embanking was studied as an art and afforded employment to a considerable proportion of its inhabitants, he was familiar with the most approved methods of defending land against the encroachments of the sea. He was so successful in his operations at Dagenham, that when it was found necessary to drain the royal park at Windsor, he was employed to direct the labourers in that work, by which he became known to James I., who took a peculiar interest in works of internal improvement. Among the several public undertakings promoted by that monarch, were the reclamation of Canvey Island, at the mouth of the Thames; Sedgemoor, in Somersetshire; Brading Haven, in the Isle of Wight; and the drainage of Hatfield Level and the Great Bedford Level; as well as the construction of the New River, hereafter to be described. 1 From an order on the Exchequer, dated 13th Feb., 1623, it appears that the trenching and drainage of Windsor Great Park were executed under the direction of Vermuyden, at an expense of 3007.― State Paper Office-Issues of the Exchequer.' The extensive district of Axholme, of which the Level of Hatfield Chase formed only a part, resembled the Great Level of the Fens in many respects, being a large fresh-water bay formed by the confluence of the rivers Don, Went, Ouse, and Trent, which brought down into the Humber almost the entire rainfall of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottingham, and North Lincoln, and into which the sea also washed. The uplands of Yorkshire bounded this watery tract on the west, and those of Lincolnshire on the east. Rising up about midway between them was a single hill, or rather elevated ground, formerly an island, and still known as the Isle of Axholme. There was a ferry between Sandtoft and that island in times not very remote, and the farmers of Axholme were accustomed to attend market at Doncaster in their boats, though the bottom of the sea over which they then rowed is now amongst the most productive corn-land in England. The waters extended to Hatfield, which lies along the Yorkshire edge of the level on the west; and it is recorded in the ecclesiastical history of that place that a company of mourners, with the corpse they carried, were once lost when proceeding by boat from Thorne to Hatfield. When Leland visited the county in 1607, he went by boat from Thorne to Tudworth, over what at this day is rich ploughed land. The district was marked by numerous merestones, and many fisheries are still traceable in local history as having existed at places now far inland. The Isle of Axholme was in former times a stronghold of the Mowbrays, being unapproachable save by water. In the reign of Henry II., when Lord Mowbray held it against the King, it was taken by the Lincolnshire men, who attacked it in boats; and, down to the reign of James I., the only green spot which rose above the wide waste of waters was this solitary isle. In early times the whole of the south-eastern part of the county of York, from Conisborough Castle to the sea, belonged |