James Boyce - Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens

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I t is appropriate that there is no precise border for what constitutes the Fens, given that the creeks, rivers and waterways that framed the near-vanished wetlands of eastern England were themselves an ever-changing phenomenon. But even today the people who live around places such as Ely, Wisbech, Kings Lynn, Spalding and Boston share a regional identity. Some live in Cambridgeshire, others in Lincolnshire and Norfolk; some reside adjacent to the Wash where the soil is silt, others on the famously rich peat inland; but all have made home in the Fens. The nomenclature is less clear for the wetland of northern Lincolnshire and East and South Yorkshire, where the rivers Ouse and Trent used to meander into marsh as they met the Humber. These northern fens, especially the country around the Isle of Axholme, shared a common history with the southern fens once the move to drain them commenced, and so I have followed the recent example of Ian Rotherham and Eric Ash, and included the celebrated Isle in this book. xviii

While people from the Fens shared a regional identity, there is wide divergence of practice in how to describe them. A twelfth-century chronicler of Ely mentions the Gyrwe, who were all the southern Angles that inhabit the great marsh. William Camden in Britannia (1586) said those that inhabit the fennish country were even in the Saxon times called Girvij, that is Fen-men or Fen-dwellers. Samuel Pepys and Thomas Macaulay opted for breedlings; Thomas Fuller and W.H. Wheeler for slodgers. The term fen tiger (from the Welsh word tioga for peasant) recurs but is most often used only for resistance fighters. Fenmen was widely employed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but presumably in response to its now obvious limitations, Eric Ash has opted for the rarely used fenlanders. This is preferable to the cumbersome people from the Fens, but while it describes the geographical identity, it doesnt describe the distinctive way of life that emerged in the wetlands. Impertinently, I have therefore created the term Fennish. I do so provisionally, respecting that the people of the Fens, like us all, have always enjoyed a variety of identities, including those based on nation, county, manor, parish and village. While it was accepted that they were different from the surrounding uplanders, like most pre-industrial peoples, the Fennish primarily identified with their local community. As with indigenous people in colonised countries, a sense of unity was strengthened once the process of dispossession began. Resisting imperialism helped create a shared identity for diverse groups of Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians as it did for the people of the Fens. xix

Whatever name is preferred, while those who lived in the Fens from the time of the wetlands formation to the time of its destruction remain without a name, the continuity of their culture will be obscured. It is a nostalgic myth of modernity that the culture of real indigenous people was fixed in prehistoric time. All cultures undergo times of upheaval as well as long periods of evolution. What characterises an indigenous culture is neither its uniformity nor immutability, but that it remains rooted in country as it experiences continuity