The Fenmen were a tough breed — stubbornly independent of the aristocracy, known to keep to themselves and resent outsiders. They found a good living, made better by tax avoidance, by fishing, catching waterfowl, trapping eels, coppicing willows and other marsh trees, making baskets, taking peat for fuel, and harvesting sedge and reeds. The sedge and reed harvests were economically important as high-quality thatch for roofs and were ecologically important for maintaining the Fens’ open character and abundant wildlife. Peat harvest was important in the same way, and the peat beds were left to restore themselves. In all, the Fens probably pumped as much net value into the medieval economy as the same amount of farmland.

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The Church owned nearly all of the Fens in this period, through a series of abbeys, monasteries and “colleges” (clerkly monasteries, with several rich ones in nearby Cambridge). Early monks liked the Fens for their solitude and set up a series of abbeys and monasteries on clay islands that rose above the general marsh. They were rewarded for their piety; wealth flowed from the Fens’ hidden resources into these abbeys. The religious foundations seem to have understood the Fens’ peculiar economy and maintained good relations with the Fenmen. They exploited the Fens’ wealth cautiously, expanding pasture and crops by drainage where convenient but making few systematic efforts. They probably knew better.

The greatest of these foundations was at Ely (from Eel Island), a 70-foot hill of clay deposited on a limestone outcrop, a veritable mountain rising from the Fens. Founded as a monastery in 673, Ely became a cathedral in 1109. The massive cathedral sits as a crown around the hilltop, with the town climbing down its slopes to a delightful small quay on the River Great Ouse (pronounced, fittingly enough, ooze). Ely remains and thrives to this day, and its 14 centuries of history sit kindly upon it. The Fens’ other religious houses were less lucky, and few show even scant ruins above ground.

With the Reformation, Henry VIII seized the great Fen foundations and gave their property to his pals and supporters — none of whom actually lived in, or knew anything about, the Fens. While the monks knew how to keep the Fenmen happy and the tithes flowing, the new owners did not. They seem to have assumed that the Fens were economically barren and didn’t notice that their Fenmen tenants had declared a permanent tax holiday. Truth be told, it took a brave and foolish man to enter the Fens with the intent of collecting money from Fenmen. This happy state for the Fenmen lasted for 100 years.

It was Charles I who broke up the party. His continuous struggles with Parliament — which eventually led to his execution — left him strapped for cash, and he wanted to put an end to the Fens’ duty-free zone. In 1630 the king granted the fourth Earl of Bedford the right to drain 95,000 acres traversed by the Rivers Nene and Great Ouse, stretching from Ely well to the north. Bedford, along with 13 fellow investors known as the Gentlemen Adventurers, hired the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to work on the project from 1630 to 1655, with time off for civil war.

Vermuyden understood that the flooding rivers clogged the Fens with deposits and set about fixing that by straightening their channels. A straightened river would rush its floodwaters right past the Fenlands, scour its channel and dump its sediment harmlessly into the Wash. In the largest of many projects, Vermuyden diverted the Great Ouse into two parallel channels running straight as a ruler — an amazing flood control structure 20 miles long and 1 mile wide. When floods became too great for the two channels, the mile space between them would store the excess waters. At the end of their 20-mile run, the channels intersected and rejoined the Ouse at the start of tidal waters, where a sluice could hold them back at high tide and release them at low tide to scour the channel.

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