How landowners, drainage projectors, and investors worked with the
Crown to transform England's waterlogged Fens.
2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
The draining of the Fens in eastern England was one of the largest
engineering projects in seventeenth-century Europe. A series of Dutch
and English "projectors," working over several decades and with the full
support of the Crown, transformed hundreds of thousands of acres of
putatively barren wetlands into dry, arable farmland. The drainage
project was also supposed to reform the sickly, backward fenlanders into
civilized, healthy farmers, to the benefit of the entire commonwealth.
As projectors reconstructed entire river systems, these new, artificial
channels profoundly altered both the landscape and the lives of those
who lived on it.
In this definitive account, historian Eric H. Ash provides a detailed
history of this ambitious undertaking. Ash traces the endeavor from the
1570s, when draining the whole of the Fens became an imaginable goal for
the Crown, through several failed efforts in the early 1600s. The book
closes in the 1650s, when, in spite of the project's enormous difficulty
and expense, the draining of the Great Level of the Fens was finally
completed. Ash ultimately concludes that the transformation of the Fens
into fertile farmland had unintended ecological consequences that
created at least as many problems as it solved.
Drawing on painstaking archival research, Ash explores the drainage from
the perspectives of political, social, and environmental history. He
argues that the efficient management and exploitation of fenland natural
resources in the rising nation-state of early modern England was a
crucial problem for the Crown, one that provoked violent confrontations
with fenland inhabitants, who viewed the drainage (and accompanying land
seizure) as a grave threat to their local landscape, economy, and way of
life. The drainage also reveals much about the political flash points
that roiled England during the mid-seventeenth century, leading up to
the violence of the English Civil War. This is compelling reading for
British historians, environmental scholars, historians of technology,
and anyone interested in state formation in early modern Europe.
