A tale of two tigers

Tracing forgotten history of fenland resistance

This story was originally published in The Land Magazine issue 32, 2023. The Land Magazine is an excellent publication and the only one dedicated to land rights, history and justice of its kind in the UK, check them out!

The Fens is a 4,000 square kilometre bioregion of the East of England which, as peat and marine silt from the North Sea coalesced, over a few thousand years, came to form one of this land’s most biodiverse, thriving wetlands. For centuries the Fens have been inhabited by the Fennish, a mostly forgotten people with a deep connection to the land. Outsiders have seen it as a barren backwater. With the same terra nullius (‘land without master’) logic of global colonialism, it was portrayed as an underused wasteland in need of civilising. And, with the same rational response to colonialism around the world, the people that lived there put up a fierce 250-year resistance to it. 

This resistance succeeded for 150 years, and, as the historian James Boyce observes, as late as the 18th century, “the Fennish comprised the largest group of English people still to be brought under effective state, ecclesiastical, landlord and employer control”. The land -marshy and impenetrable- and the people’s connection to it -intimate and dependent- proved difficult to wrestle into submission. To anyone interested in the indigenous history of the UK, and the history of land struggle, the Fennish are worth knowing. Boyce’s book, Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens, published in 2020, is one solid place to start.

One pronounced theme in his account is that the Fennish were able to resist for so long because of the way they lived with the land. Fish, eels, waterfowl, corn grown in gardens and dairy from grazed livestock, provided enough food and then some. Their houses were made with wattle and daub, latticed wooden walls daubed with a mixture of soil, clay and straw, roofed with reeds, insulated with sheep’s wool, deerskin and bird feathers, and heated with peat; all these resources were easy to access because most of the marshland was held as a common, and was carefully managed. This common also provided a reliable source of income from grazing cattle and selling milk, butter and cheese in nearby towns. All of this made the Fennish some of the most well-off peasants in the country.

This comfort, as Boyce rightly points out, didn’t preclude a deep intimacy with the land (like ours often does today). Rather it was the source of it. The land itself was one of the richest ecosystems in the country: red deer, hares, ermines, ferrets, otters, eels, great pike, pickerels, lampreys (also known as water snakes), geese, coots, cormorants, herons and lapwings (as well as garganies, pochards, shovellers and teals - whatever they might be) all thrived. The seasonal flooding of the great plains, which is what gave the Fens its distinctly marshy quality, deposited silt which kept the land extremely fertile. Meanwhile, the Fennish traversed the abundant wetland on stilts, vaulted over dykes with poles and skated over the frozen lakes in the winter.

It’s not easy to piece together exactly how the Fennish managed the marsh together. It involved a complicated system of intercommoning between villages that in general terms allotted sections to specific groups of people, imposed seasonal restrictions and empowered local courts to sanction transgressions. There are a few old stories that spice up our view of things a bit, giving us a glimpse of the colour of these arrangements. Take this from JS Padley in 1882:

In the summer season, when the water had drained off or been evaporated, the surface of large districts was exposed, which speedily bore a strong crop of coarse grass, called " fodder." Every persons having a right in this Fen, had the privilege of employing two labourers, and with them would go down into the Fen on the evening before Midsummerday, and lie down until they heard the report of a gun which was fired exactly at twelve o'clock (midnight) ; then each party would arise and set to work. By common agreement, all the “fodder” they could mow a path around became the frontager's own property.

After completing one circle, each party hastened to find fresh - ground to encircle in like manner, as long as any remained unclaimed, after which they completed at leisure the mowing of those parts they had surrounded. (...)

This unwritten law was rigidly observed, and whenever one of them accidentally trenched upon another's “balk," he immediately withdrew; a narrow row of grass was usually left standing to mark the boundary of each person's temporary property. 

Regardless of this cooperation and evident care, the Fennish were vilified by outsiders. They constructed them as a backward, brutish people to make it easier to steal their land. This report from an anonymous traveler in 1635 sums it up: “I think they be half fish, half flesh, for they drink like fishes, & sleep like hogs (...) Their climate is so infinitely cold, & watery; their habitations so poor, and mean; their means so small, & scant; their diet so course and sluttish; & their bodies so lazy, and intemperate.” Note how their closeness to the land is a source of disdain, while also being inadequately extractive.

Piecing together a picture of their life from their own perspective is also difficult here, as it is with most peasant histories. The records that were kept were court reports, clergy diaries and the writings of the new middle class. However, there is one way in which the voice of the peasantry can echo into our time: through folklore. The Fennish were a story-telling people, and in the remnants of these stories, we can infer a lot about their understanding of the world they lived in. 

One of my personal favourites is that of Tiddy Mun, the spirit of the marsh. He’s an old man, the size of a small child, with long, tangled white hair and beard, both protector of the Fen and punisher of those who mismanage it. The old song about him went: 

Tiddy Mun wi'out a name, 

White he'ad, walking la'ame, 

While the wattar te'ems the fen 

Tiddy Mun'll harm nane.

The peasant’s fates depended on Tiddy. On a flooded evening, when the water level threatened houses, crops or animals, a family might go out into the night and chant to the spirit. And, if they heard the Lapwing (Tiddy’s earthly spokesperson) call out, they’d know they’d been heard. By the next morning, the water would have receded. 

Following the chaos of Henry VIII’s Reformation in the 1530s, the gentry seized the chance to drain and enclose the commons. It took another century for these efforts to succeed in any meaningful way because the commoners resisted fiercely. But, when they eventually succeeded, you can hear the consequences for the commoners echoing in the evolution of the tale of Tiddy Mun. As vast tracts of the Fens began to be drained so that landowners could make huge profits, Tiddy curses the people that lived on the Fen. Their horses go lame, children take ill, lambs die and houses fall apart. Every conceivable aspect of the commoners’ lives was destroyed. But in Tiddy Mun’s reaction you can see how, by alienating their protective spirit, a deeper tragedy was unfolding, a people were being severed from their land. 

It is no wonder that from the 1500s all the way to the early 1800s, the Fennish sabotaged, rioted, and, in rare moments, killed to defend their homes. And even though the landowners -backed by the state- imprisoned, beat, and hanged them for their trouble, for most of this fight, the people won. There are countless stories worth telling over these 300 years; a constant toing and froing between outraged commoners, insatiable landowners and a monarchy clinging to power. 

Something distinct began to happen in 1630 when the pace of change ramped up quickly. It began with a group of landowners clubbing together with the support of one of the region’s wealthiest aristocrats, Francis Russel, Earl of Bedford. Together, under the nauseatingly named banner of the ‘adventurers’, they set their eyes on 300,000 acres of Fen to drain and enclose. This was five times the size of the largest drainage project that preceded it.

They sparked widespread resistance, and it’s the source of the best-known literary defense of the Fens, the Powte’s Complaint, a poetic call to arms: 

Come, Brethren of the water, and let us all assemble,

To treat upon this matter, which makes us quake and tremble;

For we shall rue it, if ’t be true, that Fens be undertaken,

And where we feed in Fen and Reed, they’ll feed both Beef and Bacon.

Away with boats and rudder, farewell both boots and skatches,

No need of one nor th’other, men now make better matches;

Stilt-makers all and tanners, shall complain of this disaster,

For they will make each muddy lake for Essex calves a pasture.

The feather’d fowls have wings, to fly to other nations;

But we have no such things, to help our transportations;

We must give place (oh grievous case) to horned beasts and cattle,

Except that we can all agree to drive them out by battle.

When work began the townsfolk rallied to sabotage and level the ditches. The king’s forces quickly targeted the leadership and issued warrants for their arrest. The warrants, however, proved extremely difficult to enforce. When constables arrived to make arrests they were met with fierce collective defiance. I imagine it felt similar to the moments of eviction and deportation resistance we see today. As an example, in the summer of 1632 constables returned to the small village of Soham to arrest four leaders of the resistance. Anticipating resistance, they arrived with 60 hired hands. Nevertheless, a hundred townsfolk, led by small groups of women, met them and declared, “if any laid hands of any of them, they would kill or be killed”. The constables were forced to return to the king empty-handed and ask for more resources. Similar events were unfolding across the Fen in nearby villages like Wicken and Chippenham. 

Such a display of refusal would be impressive (if not unthinkable in Soham itself) today but is even more so when we consider that 100 people would have made up a huge proportion of the local people. It makes you wonder about the details. How spontaneous was all this? Did the villagers meet before to plan how they’d react to the constables? Did they run ‘know your rights’ trainings? And how must it have felt when they successfully drove off the police? What must that victory party have been like?

Over the next few years, the resistance spread and consolidated. Fences were destroyed, and cattle run through newly enclosed fields. Bridges and roads to work sites were destroyed. And mass actions were undertaken to fill in ditches. The peasants responded to the inevitable repression with more inventive tactics. One story has it that commoners would gather under the pretext of playing a huge game of football, spreading themselves along a ditch, and, when the whistle was blown, proceeded to start digging to fill it in. This specific action included 200 people from towns many miles away. It speaks to a high level of coordination, not to mention wit. 

By 1638, landowners warned the king that these uprisings threatened to spread across the country into a general rebellion. However, a different sort of rebellion was growing which would come to overshadow and eventually betray the resistance of the Fennish: the English Civil War. The irony is that Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the parliamentary forces against King Charles I, lived in the Fens and -prior to the war- was an outspoken defender of the Fennish peasantry. Sadly, as with the civil war generally, the parliamentary forces betrayed the interests of the peasantry and poor. After the war, Cromwell, in debt to the Earl of Bedford and ‘the adventurers’, supported their drainage efforts and in many ways sealed the fate of the Fens. 

There’s an old story passed down orally through generations about the Five Swans over Littleport, which to me marks the end of the resistance to enclosure in the Fens (so far). At the end of June 1816, five swans were seen flying over the small town of Littleport landing in the Great Ouse. They nested in this river for years afterwards. The swans landed at the same time as William Beamiss, George Crow, John Dennis, Isaac Harley and Thomas South were hanged in Ely, the next town over, for taking part in riots triggered by the rising cost of food. The hangings were followed by strikes and direct action but nonetheless marked the beginning of the end. In the words of the local storyteller who told this in W.H. Barrett’s 1966 Tales from the Fens ‘they had to tell themselves that, for the first time since the Fens were made, those living in them were beaten’.

The death of Fennish radicalism  -and with it the radical peasants often referred to as the Fen Tigers- was confirmed in 1840 when a pair of outside radicals were tarred and feathered by the townspeople out of fear that they would bring back the violence they had seen in 1816. The locals were rewarded by the gentry who had been hunting the radicals across the country. With this, the Fen’s place as an enclave and refuge for dissidence died. A few years later, the last remaining wetland, the Whittlesey Mere, was pumped dry, and the last of the English Large Copper Butterfly, Lycaena dispar, died. 

The Fennish matter now for a few key reasons. The enclosure of the commons created a new class of landless peasants who were forced into wage labour to live. This was a necessary precondition of industrialisation; factories couldn’t have functioned without it. Meanwhile, the land that was once common, and carefully managed, was now at the mercy of private landowners with only the goal of extracting as much profit as they could in mind. Cattle grazing destroyed abundant ecosystems across the country, and was a precursor to the systematic and massive destruction of ecosystems (i.e. the Amazon) across the world for cattle feed today. 

Since the 80s dozens of people have reported seeing a large, wild cat roaming the Fens. It’s been dubbed the ‘Fen Tiger’, and it excites Facebook groups and comments sections across East Anglia. The Fens are the perfect place for such a sighting. If  “ecological boredom” breeds fantasies of wildness, as George Monbiot says, then I’m surprised there haven’t been more. It’s quite understandable how someone growing up in the Fens, like me, might not think much of the land. It seems to be barren and monocultural. This is the awkward way in which the colonial tale of a dull, blank landscape in need of civilising became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Decolonisation, now, in this particular place, requires reviving the alternative radical history, remembering the abundance lost and noticing what survives. A different, and much more interesting kind of Fen Tiger.