Fen and Sea: Medieval and Early Modern Landscape Evolution in South-East Lincolnshire Before 1700

ABSTRACT

The low lands of south-east Lincolnshire are often described and interpreted as if they were a single landscape with a homogeneous history. Concentrating on the pre-industrial era this paper aims to show that there is a finer texture to both the visual landscape and the details of its evolution since Roman times. The keys to these developments are (a) reclamation from the wetlands of the sea fringes and from the freshwater fen, and (b) water management thereafter. In the course of the reclamation from the sea, new lands were created as a by-product of salt-making as well as deliberately for agricultural expansion; in this region the Fen stayed as a wetland until the nineteenth century unlike its equivalents in the Great Levels south of the Wash. Modern intensive agriculture has removed many traces of the history of land and water manipulation but a combination of documents, maps and aerial imagery allows a great deal of reconstruction, though gaps remain. Overall, the work is a reminder that de-watered terrain is prone to shrinkage and that modern efficient pumps do not remove the land from the threat of inundation; neither do any of the plans put forward by conservation-minded bodies.

Abbreviations: BA: Bethlem Royal Hospital Archive; CUCAP: Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography; LAO: Lincolnshire Archives Office; LHER: Lincolnshire Historic Environment Record; NMR: National Monuments Record; TNA: The National ArchivesA context

KEYWORDS:

• England
• medieval
• early modern
• drainage
• reclamation
• fens
• marshes

Acknowledgements

The collection of material was made possible by a donation from the late Arthur Owen FSA and many documents were retrieved, transcribed and translated by Patrick Mussett. Contributors to discussion have included Mark Bennett, Martin Redding, Tom Lane and Sue Oosthuizen, as well as journal referees. The illustrations were drawn by Chris Orton of the University of Durham Department of Geography Design and Imaging Unit. Pictures from Geograph (http://www.geograph.org.uk/) are reproduced under a Creative Commons Licence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ian Simmons FSA, FBA, Professor-Emeritus in Geography at Durham University wrote a number of environmental histories at different spatial scales and indeed was a contributor to this journal in its early days (volume 2.1 and – in the ‘What landscape means to me’ series – 4.2). His current research work has moved from the Mesolithic to the Medieval and from the uplands to the lowlands, while keeping an interest in the historic dimensions of the human interactions with nature. As a child, he had been evacuated for much of the Second World War from East London to East Lincolnshire, and since his retirement he has been able to investigate the landscape history of this little-known corner of England and to shift from paleoecology to multi-source local history. He was fortunate enough to attract a little finance and to be able to harness friends and former colleagues to help with documents. A narrative account of the work in progress can be seen at www.dur.ac.uk/east-lincs-history.