Eric H. Ash. The Draining of the Fens

The draining of the Fens retains a fascination for British historians, not because of the interest of the landscapes it produced, but because of the legal, political, and logistical problems that drainage encountered. Drainage was politically charged. In The Draining of the Fens, Eric H. Ash writes, “Currents of early modern England’s political, social, economic and environmental history all intersect within the Great Level,” a region of the Fens (24). Indeed they do. There were two deeply opposed ways of looking at the Fens. They might be seen as sophisticated economies that were well adapted to the landscape. Or they might be seen as wastes, unproductive, unimproved land, an opportunity to be exploited. Drainage brought conflict. The inhabitants attempted a legal defense of their rights, and when that failed, they resorted to violence to defend their commons, their livelihoods, and their way of life. Ash offers a narrative of the projects to drain the Fens and Hatfield Chase. He traces the state’s developing involvement in the drainage, as unsuccessful project succeeded unsuccessful project. The law underpinning drainage was uncertain. Responsibility for the maintenance of drainage rested with the commissioners of sewers, and the first part of the narrative traces the ways in which government tried to make this venerable institution undertake tasks for which it was not suited and in which, collectively, it did not believe. Ultimately government abandoned the idea of licensing projectors who needed to cooperate with the commissioners of sewers and took the project into its own hands, appointing its own drainage engineers. The chief difference between the pre–Civil War years and those following is that Parliament placed the drainage of the Fens (strictly construed) on a statutory basis in 1649. But this is a long, tangled, and predominantly shabby story, of private gain being placed above public good, backed by state power. The continuities between the behavior of the Privy Council in repressing disorder in the 1630s and the Council of State in the 1650s make the point that drainage had become a question of reputation: it could not be allowed to fail. Ash describes all of this in detail, switching between developments in Hatfield Chase and those in the Fenland.

Archaeology · Art history · New england · Political science · Politics · State (computer science) · Chinese history and philosophy · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies