The Fenland Riots

by Ann Swinfen
An Editor's Choice, originally published April 15, 2014.  
Editors' note: Ann passed away on August 4, 2018

My new novel Flood takes place in the seventeenth century in a very distinctive area along the east coast of England, known as the Fens. Once a remote, slightly mysterious region of marshes and hidden villages, it attracted the attention of men greedy to get their hands on land by fair means or foul, never mind the consequences for the local inhabitants. They used the notorious method of ‘enclosure’, but in the Fens they were up against a formidable people who could not easily be bullied into submitting. When I discovered their story, I knew I had to write about it.

I had always known about enclosures, of course. From roughly Tudor times to the nineteenth century in England, land was stolen by large landowners or groups of speculators by semi-legal means. This stolen land was ‘common land’, that is, land held in common by a group of people, often the free villagers of a parish who were peasant farmers or yeomen. They had ancient rights to cultivate arable land on a shared basis, to graze their flocks and herds on local meadows, and to gather firewood and feed their pigs in neighbouring woods.

The enclosers fenced off the commons, expelled the commoners – sometimes even seizing their animals – and took possession of the land for themselves. The local people rarely had any means of redress or compensation. If they went to law, almost invariably they lost their cases, at considerable financial cost, when opposed by those with influence and deep pockets. The result is that there are very few common lands left today. Port Meadow in Oxford still has common grazing for a few Freemen who can claim ancient rights granted by Alfred the Great. The New Forest has privileges for those who are eligible.

This was a massive injustice, carried out under the guise of land improvement, or in order to create large wool-producing businesses. And in some cases it may have led to more efficient farming methods, but nevertheless it resulted in poverty, starvation and dispossession for many of its victims. The Highland Clearances in Scotland had a similar effect, although in their case small tenants were cleared off land already owned by a wealthy landowner in order to produce a larger income from sheep.

The Fens of East Anglia (stretching along the east coast of England from Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk to Lincolnshire) were from ancient times an area where land, water and marsh combined to form a rich tapestry with unique problems and rewards. The natural phenomenon of the area is the annual deposit by winter rains of rich silt from higher ground inland on to the lower arable fields of the fenlands. This produced some of the richest soil in England.

Floods would cover these fields in winter, then drain away, leaving land ready for cultivation. Between these arable fields lay a network of ancient peat bogs and waterways – some natural, some man-made over the centuries by local people who understood their special environment and the behaviour of their annual floods. They lived by arable farming, raising stock, fishing and water-fowling. The peat bogs provided fuel as well as absorbing excess water, and the rushes and willows growing along the waterways furnished materials for everything from thatch to hurdles and eel-traps.

Then, in the early seventeenth century, the ‘adventurers’ came – adventurers because they invested their money in a speculative venture. They would drain this boggy land, which they mistakenly believed to be poor and unprofitable, seize control of it, and install settlers from Holland and France as rent-paying small farmers. The return on their money would be phenomenal – it was a fool-proof investment. There were plenty of Protestant refugees from Catholic persecution on the Continent who would be only too glad of a chance to start a new life on the reclaimed lands.

And what of the local people? Many held charters of ancient rights. These were ignored in the law courts. Some tried to obtain compensation, but often found themselves imprisoned or fined instead, for attempting to oppose the speculators.

Oliver Cromwell

But they were a tough people, the fenlanders. They fought for their rights, destroying the drainage ditches and pumping mills, attacking the drainage workers and settlers. The unrest spread throughout the Fens and was one of the underlying causes of the English Civil War. The war itself brought a temporary halt to the drainage, but in the lull between the two phases of the war, it began again. And whereas the first period of drainage and enclosure had been financed by the aristocracy and the king, the new speculators were the men who had risen to power under the new government, and included Oliver Cromwell himself, who, in the past, had declared that he would protect the fenlanders.

Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder

I was drawn to the period and the events in the Fens by the persistent courage of the local people in defending their land and their customary way of life. I was also fascinated by discovering that the women fought alongside their men, some of them even being accused of being witches because of their unwomanly behaviour. Yes, this was the very period when the infamous ‘witch-finder general’, Matthew Hopkins, was roaming over this same area, instigating witch-hunts and hounding hundreds of innocent men and women to their deaths. Mostly women. But some men too. Because of the imposition of strict and unforgiving Puritan rules by Cromwell’s government, clergymen who continued to practice the established ceremonies of the Anglican church – such as baptism and church weddings – were attacked and in some cases tried and executed for witchcraft.

The more I read about the Fenland Riots, as they came to be known, the more I wanted to tell the story of these persecuted people. In my novel Flood, Mercy Bennington and her family and friends provided the voices of those forgotten seventeenth century forebears of ours.

And the irony of it all? Because the engineers brought in to drain the Fens did not understand the local terrain, their works resulted in uncontrollable floods. Water which would once have been absorbed by the marshland was pumped out into new ditches which overflowed and flooded villages and homes. Not until the nineteenth century was efficient drainage carried out, and it destroyed the peat bogs which by the present day have withered and shrunk, so that in many places the rivers are now higher than the surrounding lands, a dangerous and unsustainable situation. In recent years it has come to be realised that the marshes along the sea coast of the Fens used to provide a buffer against that other source of floods – floods from the sea. As a result, some coastal farmlands are now being allowed to revert to salt marsh, to protect the land.

I wonder what Mercy Bennington would have had to say about that?

References:
Fraser, Antonia, The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth Century England
Lindley, Keith, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution
Plowden, Alison, Women All on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War

~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Ann Swinfen (http://www.annswinfen.com) published three novels with Random House, but The Testament of Mariam, Flood and The Secret World of Christoval Alvarez – she published herself under the imprint Shakenoak Press. Loving the whole independent publishing process, and the control it offers to authors, she thought it unlikely she would ever return to conventional publishing. Some of her short stories which previously appeared in magazines and on BBC radio are now published on Kindle. She also reissued her backlist titles as paperbacks and Kindles. In July 2018, she published The Stonemason's Tale (Oxford Medieval Mystery 6).

FLOOD @ Amazon UK
FLOOD @ Amazon US

Bed and Breakfast in Seventeenth Century England

by Deborah Swift

Jan Steen  - Peasants Before an Inn

"There is no place in the world where passengers may so freely command, as in the English inns, and are attended for themselves and their horses as well as if they were home and perhaps better, each servant being ready at call, in hope of a small reward in the morning. Neither did I ever see inns so well furnished with household stuff" Fynes Moryson  1617*

In the seventeenth century, the coaching inn, sometimes called a coaching house or staging inn, was a vital hub of travel anywhere in England. Coaching inns were used to stable and feed the teams of horses necessary for stagecoaches and mail coaches, always having a fresh team ready so that travellers could soon be on their way again.  Traditionally, inns were seven miles apart, but obviously  in rural areas they could be few and far between, whereas in the city, and on popular routes, they would be far closer together. The stagecoach developed for fare-paying passengers, whereas previously, the coach was the personal conveyance of aristocrats and the gentry. The first ever stagecoach route, from Edinburgh to Leith, began in 1610.

Road conditions were generally terrible (see this post on the state of the roads in rthe 17thC)) and because the countryside was unmarked a traveller would sometimes hire a guide "one guide will serve the whole company, though many ride together, may easily bring back the horses, driving them before him, who knows a way as well as a beggar knows his dish"

Painiting by Frank Moss Bennett

In other words, sometimes the guide would drive extra horses with the party, so they could be changed, and then he would return the ‘used’ horses to the previous staging post. The most rapid way to travel then was by means of post-horses, relays of which stood ready at fixed stages. The authorities had fixed the cost of post-horse hire at 2 1/2d a mile with sixpence for a mounted post boy who brought back the hired horse. From stage to stage, ten miles an hour was not uncommon. When the roads were in good condition and you were provided with fresh horses, anything from seven to more than a hundred miles could be accomplished in one day. This why when people ask how long it takes to travel from a to b in the 17th century, the answers can be so variable.

Bath Stagecoach map

In 1639 Captain Bailey, formally a sea captain, erected a hackney coach stand near the Maypole in the Strand. This new idea was the equivalent of our taxi service. Seeing its success, other coach drivers soon flocked to the same place so that;

‘sometimes there is 20 of them together, which disperse up and down, that they and others are to be had everywhere, as watermen are to be had by the waterside. Everybody is much pleased with it all; whereas before coaches could not be had but at great rates; now a man may have one much cheaper.’  Letter from Mr Garrard to Wentworth, London 1639

Travellers depended on the inns if they were going on a long journey, whether they were in a coach or the newly invented hackney carriage the horses still needed to rest. Some towns, such as Barnet in Hertfordshire, on The Great North Road, boasted as many as ten staging inns and the competition between them was intense, not only for the income from the stagecoach operators, but because of the profit made by charging passengers for accommodation and food.

 the old White Hart Inn, Southwark

London was very well supplied with inns, and at the beginning of the 17th century the largest, most famous one was the White Hart in Southwark. It had been established in the medieval period and is even mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part II as the headquarters of the rebels of the Kentish rebellion. It also became one of the many famous stage posts in the days of Charles Dickens. Unfortunately it was demolished and rebuilt in the Victorian era.

Walking was the cheapest and most common means of travel, though it was safer on horseback or in a coach. Hounslow Heath and Shooters Hill near Blackheath were notorious places for highway thieves, so after a day travelling on terrible roads and in fear for your life, the inn was no doubt a very welcome sight.

Once at the inn, men of quality were divided from men of inferior rank. Gentlemen could rent chambers and usually ate alone, unless they brought their friends or their female ‘consorts’. When I say alone, obviously gentlemen would have one or two servants attending, and the bill for the night might be five or six shillings for supper, bed, and breakfast. A solo traveller might get away with two shillings. Solo travellers would eat communally at the host’s table and be charged sixpence.

At his inn in St Martins Lane in  London in 1695 Thomas Brockbank had ‘sack, mutton stakes and pigeons’ for his supper, and for breakfast ‘toast and ale.’ Of course the horses fodder would also be charged to you, eighteen pence in winter for oats, hay and the bedding straw. In summer horses would be put out to pasture for threepence. (facts from Moryson’s Itinerary 1617)

detail from interior of a Tavern, Jan Steen

The bed you slept on was likely to be a simple box bed, shared with your travelling companions, and in the same room as your servants. Poorer people would share two or three to a bed with strangers, sharing the tally for the bed, and because it gave warmth in winter when a fire in the hearth cost extra. There was little space for privacy. The mattresses were often filled with pea-shucks, straw, or, if you were lucky, feathers. Inn beds could also be crawling with parasites. The diarist, John Evelyn, used another person’s bed when travelling, without changing the sheets because he was ‘heavy with pain and drowsiness.’ The next day, he wrote; ‘I shortly after paid dearly for my impatience, falling sick of the smallpox.’ 

Many wealthy people carried their own bed with them, and these could be elaborate affairs. Anne Clifford in her diary recounts how she travelled with her own bed. Having a travelling bed reduced the risk of infection. This great little article from Lancaster University about 17th century sleeping says: 'Stockport Heritage Service owns a travelling box bed, from approximately 1600. This bed was made with a set of stairs (in order to climb into the bed), with two locking wig boxes (again, indicating a relative degree of wealth) and two carved depictions of a husband and wife, complete with initials, fixed to the front of the bed. The panels indicate that this was made to commemorate a wedding and probably given as a gift to the husband and wife.'

As well as choosing an inn, it was possible to stop and refresh yourself at an alehouse. Alehouses generally did not provide stabling or accommodation, and were often one-man, or one-woman enterprises, selling from the doorstep. Donald Lupton in 1642 observed that ‘kerb appeal’ was important for an alehouse:  ‘if the houses have a box-bush or an old post, it is enough to show their profession. But if they be graced with a sign complete, it's a sign of good custom’. Interestingly, he also tells us that in these houses "you shall see the history of Judith, Susanna, Daniel in the Lion's Den, or Dives and Lazarus painted upon the wall.' So biblical murals are also a sign of a respectable establishment!

Unlike the coaching inns, with their gentrified clientele, the alewife must ‘Be courteous to all, though not by nature yet by her profession, for she must entertain all good and bad; tag and rag, cut and  long-tail. She suspects tinkers and poor soldiers most; not they will not drink soundly, but that they will not pay lustily.’

Bibliography

Every One a Witness in the Stuart Age - A F Scott

Suart England - Blair Worden

Young Mr Pepys - John Hearsey

Voices from the World of Samuel Pepys - Jonathan Bastable

Bath Tourist Info

Roads in Tring Hertfordshire

Pictures from wiki commons

*Fynes Moryson was educated at Cambridge, and after graduating From May 1591 to May 1595 he travelled round Continental Europe for the specific purpose of observing local customs, institutions, and economics. In 1617, Moryson published the first three volumes of An Itinerary: Containing His Ten Years Travel through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohemia, Switzerland, Netherland, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland and Ireland.

Deborah Swift is the author of three novels set in the 17th Century, and a teenage trilogy. She also writes WWII fiction under pen-name Davina Blake. Find her on Facebook, or twitter @swiftstory, or visit her historical fiction blog.

Below stairs - the Footman

by Deborah Swift

' the lady of fashion chooses her footman without any other consideration than his height, shape, and tourniture of his calf'  Mrs Beeton

Horace Roome, a liveried footman at Shugborough Hall
(1920's)

The footman has been doing his duties in English upper class households since the seventeenth century. His name comes from the fact he was originally employed to run alongside the carriage, to make sure it was not overturned because the original tracks were rutted and full of boulders and tree roots. This then extended to the duties of opening and closing the carriage doors, or running errands when the Lord or Lady were out and about in town.

Image from The Telegraph

'In the eighteenth century they were frequently matched to run against horses and carriages. One of the last recorded contests was in 1770 between a famous running footman and the Duke of Marlborough, the latter wagering that in his phaeton and four he would beat the footman in a race from Windsor to London. His Grace won by a very small margin. The poor footman worn out by his exertions and much chagrined by his defeat, died, it was said, of over fatigue.'

from 'A Handy Book of Curious Information' William Shepard Walsh, 1913

The footman was a personal outdoor servant, who would assist a specific person within a household thus adding to their aura of luxury and status.

Appearances were important, so a tall personable footman was paid more than a shorter plain one. They were often dressed in impractical embellished liveries, which were at odds with the duties they were expected to perform. A 'livery' was a uniform that identified the servant’s employer. The heraldic arms of the employer’s family would be echoed in the colour and decorations of the clothes distributed to these servants. The word 'livery' comes from the French livree - to hand over. For more on livery in the 19thC see this article in Jane Austen's world.

Where more than one footman was employed, they had to match, like bookends, in terms of height and colouring. Because they were supposed to submerge their own personality, footmen were often given a name chosen by the employer. James and John for a matching pair, or John Thomas for a single footman were popular names.

Silent service was the order of the day, so shoes that squeaked were replaced, and a footman was not expected to speak or show signs that he had heard the family's conversation.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, footmen began to do duties indoors, and one of their first and surviving indoor tasks was to clean all the boots and shoes of the family before they were required, in other words at night. This could be a long task, as several different pairs of shoes were worn each day by each person or guest. The polish was made of  'charcoal, spermicetti oil, treacle and white wine vinegar' in the 17th century.

Another indoor duty was to trim wicks, re-fill wall sconces, and in the later centuries to deal with the many oil lamps. At Belvoir Castle in the 1830's about six hundred gallons of oil were consumed for light in the four months of winter.

After World War I fewer households could  afford servants, so the position of footman is now rare except in the British Royal Household, where they wear a distinctive scarlet livery on state occasions.

As many of you know, I have been interested in the lives of the servant class, and my seventeenth century books are told from the perspective of ordinary people witnessing extraordinary events.

You might like this lovely Daily Mail article about the real life of servants at Downton Abbey
And this about the duties of the second footman at Manor House

Bibliography
The Duties of Servants Reprinted from 1894 publication by Copper Beech Publishing, Ltd.

The Victorian Domestic Servant - May

Early Modern England, A Social History - Sharpe

The Story of Pepys's Buried Treasure

by Deborah Swift

What did you do with your money in the 17th century if you thought looters might be after it? There were no banks of course, so the answer was - to bury it.

After the battle of the Medway in which the Dutch sailed boldly up the Thames and captured the English flagship, the 'Royall Charles', there was a widespread fear amongst Londoners that the Dutch would then take the city. Samuel Pepys, who was (to say the least) careful with his money, became panic-stricken that the Dutch would take his gold, but could not leave the city himself as he was in charge of the Navy treasury. He also feared that the Navy Office might be blamed for this disaster, and that angry Englishmen, let alone the Dutch, might besiege the offices and his house adjoining them.

By the time the news arrived that a second Dutch fleet were on their way, and worse, that English ships were being sunk to prevent the enemy coming further up the Thames, Pepys was desperate. He was determined to save his hard-earned wealth, so he dispatched his father and his wife Elizabeth to the family home in the country. Elizabeth and Mr Pepys senior left London by coach, the gold in bags under the seats, with the orders that they should bury it ringing in their ears.

Brampton House

They chose the vegetable garden at the family home in Brampton, probably in great haste because they feared servants might see them doing it, and they did not want to risk anyone else knowing where it was.

The gold stayed were it was, and in the end the invasion was just a scare, and the Dutch retreated. So a few months later Pepys went back for his treasure. Impatient to see if it was all there, he would not wait until morning but went out by lantern-light to look for it. If you've ever tried digging up something you've hidden, you will know that once the ground has been flattened by rain and weather, it is not easy to remember where the exact spot is. So of course they could not find it:

'But, Lord! what a tosse I was for some time in, that they could not justly tell where it was; that I begun heartily to sweat, and be angry, that they should not agree better upon the place' says Pepys.

Pepys of course blamed Elizabeth, first for not being able to find it, but then when he did, for not burying it deeply enough. Poor woman, she just could not win! 

'But, good God! to see how sillily they did it, not half a foot under ground, and in the sight of the world from a hundred places, if any body by accident were near hand, and within sight of a neighbour's window, and their hearing also, being close by: only my father says that he saw them all gone to church before he begun the work, when he laid the money, but that do not excuse it to me.'

The cloth bags had rotted so that they had to scrabble in the dirt for the individual coins. With the help of Will Hewer they managed to unearth most of it. At which point Pepys would not go to bed until they had sieved and washed every last coin and note.

11th October 

'And then rose and called W. Hewer, and he and I, with pails and a sieve, did lock ourselves into the garden, and there gather all the earth about the place into pails, and then sift those pails in one of the summer-houses, just as they do for dyamonds in other parts of the world; and there, to our great content, did with much trouble by nine o'clock (and by the time we emptied several pails and could not find one), we did make the last night's forty-five up seventy-nine:'

So Pepys did get his gold back after all.

An interesting footnote to the story is that in 1842, when an old wall was removed at Brampton, a hoard of silver coins was discovered, and taken to the Earl of Sandwich, the owner of the house. The iron pot was corroded and fell apart, but the coins were preserved. They were Elizabethan half-crowns and coins of James and Charles I, of the right date to be part of Pepys's treasure. Although Pepys only mentions gold in his diary, such a coincidence is unlikely, and it is probable Elizabeth buried some other silver coins too.

Seventeenth century tokens from Pepys's Small Change

If you have an interest in the sort of coins and tokens used by Pepys, or seventeenth century money and trade, then you will find the following website absolutely fascinating: Pepys's Small Change

Sources: Pepys's Diary Online
You might also enjoy this novel - The Journal of Mrs Pepys - Sara George

All three of my novels are set in the Seventeenth Century, and I rely on Pepys's Diary for his wealth of detail, and his fascinating insights into seventeenth century life.

'The past comes alive through impeccable research, layers of intriguing plotline, and the sheer power of descriptive prose.Add to all this Swift’s rich characterisation and subtle evocation of a period of religious upheaval and you have a classy, compelling adventure story and a true journey of discovery.' Lancashire Evening Post