A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott
the whole area flooded. Charles I went further down the route of his own destruction by stepping in to take control of a new project and appointing Vermuyden as his agent. East Anglia was a staunchly Puritan area and Cromwell was among the local farmers vociferously protesting against the drainage scheme. The King then proceeded to antagonise his own supporters by announcing to Bedford and the investors that his cut was to increase from 5,000 hectares to 20,000, effectively halving their shares.
By the time they had all stopped arguing, the Civil War had started and the project was not completed until 1653. To everyone’s astonishment, the land unexpectedly started to shrink at an alarming rate as the peat soil dried out. As the level of the land dropped, water could no longer drain into the rivers, which were by now higher than the fields. Wind pumps were introduced to pump water off the land, but their reliance on adequate wind and continued shrinkage saw the task become increasingly difficult.
BY THE TIME THEY HAD ALL STOPPED ARGUING, THE CIVIL WAR HAD STARTED AND THE PROJECT WAS NOT COMPLETED UNTIL 1653. TO EVERYONE’S ASTONISHMENT, THE LAND UNEXPECTEDLY STARTED TO SHRINK AT AN ALARMING RATE AS THE PEAT SOIL DRIED OUT.
Until steam power was introduced in the 1820s and the Fens were successfully drained (a procedure which again resulted in fierce local rioting and sabotage) the landscape was dominated by around 700 windmills, which were built in timber or brick to facilitate draining the land or milling the corn. Many have since disappeared but some still survive, including Denver Mill, near Downham Market; Haddenham, Downfield, Stevens, Wicken and Swaffham windmills south of Ely; Sibsey Trader Mill, north of Boston; and the seven-storeys-high Maud Foster Windmill in Boston itself, the tallest working windmill in Britain.
Today the fens are drained by electric pumping stations and contain over 50 per cent of the most productive land in Britain, producing vegetables, wheat, bulbs and flowers, and they are the only place where English mustard continues to be grown for Colman’s of Norwich. There are still places, out on the mud flats and saltings, where a man can look out towards the grey sea, breathe the iodine-laden air and, as he listens to the cacophony of waterfowl, imagine what once it must have been.
The Restoration of King Charles II was greeted with unbridled jubilation and hope that a new era of peace and prosperity would follow the grim years of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. Royalist landowners who had gone into exile with their king returned with innovative ideas for British agriculture and a determination to make farming profitable. Many of them had taken refuge in Flanders and had studied Flemish farming methods. Flanders was a densely populated country where every yard of agricultural land was utilised; the Flemish were skilled cattle and heavy horse breeders and had perfected a four-field rotation based on growing crops of wheat, turnips, barley and clover in sequence. This innovative advance on the old three-field system, where one field lay fallow and therefore unproductive for twelve months, not only meant that all the land was used throughout they ear, but also that turnips and clover provided an essential product which would revolutionise British agriculture.
Legumes such as clover have nodules on their roots which contain nitrogen-fixing bacteria which replace nitrates leached out of the ground by cereal crops. They therefore provide the role of a natural fertiliser, solving one of the great problems that had beleaguered farming in Britain. Clover was also a highly nutritious fodder crop for winter feed, and this added to turnips, which ripen in the autumn and remain fresh in the ground until the spring. This meant that farmers could keep stock all year round and fatten beasts through the winter, as an alternative to the centuries-old practice of slaughtering the majority of livestock except breeding animals in the late autumn.
In addition to improving soil fertility, greater grain output simultaneously increased livestock production. Farmers could rear greater quantities of livestock because there was more food of higher quality and the manure provided during overwintering added to the productive cycle. Britain was at the dawn of agricultural enlightenment, and although tenant farmers were suspicious of change and reluctant to implement them for fear of incurring rent increases, the agricultural revolution was on its way.
‘He that havocs may sit He that improves must flit? Philosophy of seventeenth-century tenant farmers
‘Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders? Contemporary view of tenant farmers
THE DAWN OF INDUSTRY
By the late seventeenth century, Britain had colonies in the West Indies, the western seaboard of America and a large part of Canada. The Royal African Company had established trading posts in West Africa to trade slaves in exchange for British goods, which would become the major economic mainstay for such western British cities as Bristol and Liverpool, which formed the third corner of the so-called triangular trade with Africa and the Americas. The East India Company had been in existence since 1600 and Britain acquired Bombay and Tangier in 1661, on the marriage of Charles II to Catherine de Braganza. When William of Orange ascended the English throne in 1688, bringing peace between the Netherlands and England, a deal between the two nations left the spice trade of the Indonesian archipelago to the Netherlands and the textiles industry of India to England.
One of William’s first acts after his coronation was to declare war on his old enemy, France, and to impose a trade embargo on French goods which was to have a profound effect on British agriculture. In the seventeenth century very little distilling of spirits was known in Britain; the Company of Distillers made spirits under strict regulations, mainly for apothecaries who used it as a base for medicines. Some home-made alcohol was sold by street vendors, described by Daniel Defoe as ‘Foul and gross, but they mixed them up with such additions as they could get, to make them palatable’. The rich drank imported French brandy and the embargo with France left a gap in the booze market, which William promptly filled in 1690 by passing an Act of Parliament ‘for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn’.
This new industry would lead, the Act promised, to ‘the greater consumption of corn and the advantage of tillage in this Kingdom’. To help things along, he withdrew the monopoly on distilling from the Company of Distillers, removed virtually all regulations and, working on the theory that if spirits were cheap, more people would drink them, lowered the tax on spirits made from malted corn to a penny a gallon. British farmers now faced the challenge of demand created by colonisation and the new distilling industry; they had to improve production or go out of business.
The eighteenth century was a period of rapid change for every section of society, but none more so than for farmers, with landowners leading the way in agricultural improvements. The four-field rotation system was accepted as the new method of cultivation, the limitation being the hopelessly inefficient method of broadcasting seed by hand. It is obviously important that individual plants have sufficient space to grow and ripen, and there was an enormous amount of waste until Jethro Tull, a Berkshire landowner, invented a seed drill for sowing seed in rows. He also advocated the use of horses instead of oxen, which were still commonly used for farm work, and invented a horse-drawn hoe for clearing plant growth, particularly among turnip crops. The powerful Whig politician, Viscount Townsend, of Raynham Hall, in Norfolk, carried out a variety of improving experiments on his estate, mostly involving turnips. He was a fervent believer in the efficacious qualities of turnips for all agricultural improvements and became known as ‘Turnip Townsend’ from his habit of introducing his opinions of the plant into every conversation.
Joseph Foljambe of Rotherham, in Yorkshire, perfected a vastly superior plough which remained in use until the tractor was invented 170 years later.
DRAUGHT HORSES
In the early part of the century, the Duke of Hamilton imported six black Flemish stallions from Flanders which were crossed with local horses on his estates at Clydesdale, near Glasgow, to produce the eponymous Clydesdale horse. Clydesdales were the perfect multi-purpose work horse, which were eventually exported all over the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century there