Tiger Sightings in The Fens

Beyond fantasies, what of the real Fen Tigers, history’s forgotten freedom fighters.

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 the comment sections of local papers across East Anglia. The Fens are the perfect place to see a tiger. They are flat, barren and devastated by industrial agriculture. If “ecological boredom” breeds fantasies of wildness, as George Monbiot says, then I’m surprised there haven’t been more. Historian Andy Wood captures the blandness well: “The fens are passed through on the traveller’s way to somewhere else — a cruciform of major arteries take the driver from Cambridge to Norwich, or from London to the North. It is a scruffy region, neither entirely solid land nor fluid water.” A child growing up there -as I did- could reasonably conclude that nothing has ever happened there and that nothing ever will. They might also conclude that it’s not possible to love such a place.

But that child has been lied to. The last 400 years of the Fens have seen powerful landowners fanatically trying to drain it. It’s the water they want gone, but life has left with it. And in the last 150 years or so, they have been winning. Scratch just a bit below the surface and there’s a story here that’s endlessly more interesting than fantasies of wild cats. It’s a story of a people in love with their home, one of the richest habitats in the country, willing to die protecting it, working together in ways unimaginable now. It’s a story no one’s getting taught in schools.

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Before they were drained the Fens were a different world. Flooding annually, they were a wetland where hundreds of species of birds, fish and water plants thrived. It was one of the wealthiest and most egalitarian parts of England. The people who lived there stewarded the ecosystem and lived easily off of the abundance. And the land preserved the people. The water made it impenetrable to conquerors and the ecology fed, housed and resourced them. James Boyce, a historian, claims that in 1700, “The Fennish comprised the largest group of English people still to be brought under effective state, ecclesiastical, landlord and employer control”. No wonder they fought to protect it.

From the start of the period we now call Enclosure in the early 1500s -where landowners across England stole common land for their own- the people of the Fens refused to let the land and their lives be destroyed. They sabotaged drainage works, rioted and burned down the houses of landlords. They were imprisoned, beaten, and hanged for resisting, but despite the repression, they often won. To take one episode of many, in 1637 the Bedford Corporation wanted to drain 300,000 acres of marsh, and the people weren’t having it. In Soham, a small town (where I went to school) hundreds of people poured into the streets to protest. Meanwhile, an operation led by women filled in six ditches forming part of a 10,000-acre enclosure. The landowners solicited the King, who, a few years later brought in troops to enforce order and compliance. Hundreds of people, armed with pitchforks and stones, ran them out of town. The Fen and its lifeways were maintained. The years that followed saw countless acts of disobedience and ingenious sabotage. See, for instance, pretend football matches used as a front for hundreds of people to gather and level the drainage ditches.

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The commitment and determination of these people were grounded in their relationship to the commons. To understand and learn from their resistance we need to unpack what the commons meant. On the surface, a commons is a resource that isn’t owned by an individual and nor is it managed by the State. Instead, it is managed by communities. The commons in the Fens would have revolved around seasonal rituals, carefully nurturing the ecosystem. Farming and gathering waterfowl, eels, fish, reeds and peat allowed commoners to thrive and kept the ecosystem in balance. Since Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize-winning work on the commons in the 90s, there’s a growing consensus that this is a vital route out of the tragedy of private exploitation and state expropriation.

But the commons in the Fens weren’t just an economic resource. They were what made the Fen people who they were. We couldn’t just transplant the rules and systems they used to govern the land and hope to revive the lost ecosystems. This is a point James Boyce makes persuasively a couple of years ago in his history of the Fennish people Imperial Mud: “The commons was as much a series of interwoven and dynamic relationships with people and place as it was a system of land management.” To revive the commons might mean reviving the way that people come to belong to a place and a community as much as it means reviving democratic rules, arbitration processes and organisation. As Boyce goes on to say “A commoner’s daily existence was enmeshed in social ties that were inseparable from the country they inhabited” and “the sharp distinction between self, community and land that is now embedded in the western mind did not exist in the Fennish world.” In this way, the Fennish resemble many other indigenous and colonised communities around the world.

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There’s an old story in the Fens passed down orally through generations called the Five Swans over Littleport. To me it tells of the most recent and longest period of defeat for the commoners. At the end of June, in 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 (recorded 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 resistance group often known as the Fen Tigers- can be found at the end of the story, when in 1840 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. Sound familiar? 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.

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There have been numerous attempts to reintroduce the butterfly since then. As ecological science develops and the vital role of thriving, complex ecosystems becomes more widely accepted, there have been many noble attempts to restore the Fens to their former abundance. One shiny example of this is the Great Fen Project. With millions of pounds of lottery funding since it began in 2010, it has bought a swathe of land south of Peterborough (including parts of the old Whittlesey Mere) to rewild and restore. It has had some great successes and is an admirable project. But it has failed to reintroduce the Large Copper Butterfly. In its outcomes report the project cites providing people with a pretty place to walk or cycle through as one of its main social achievements. It is far from restoring the deep sense of belonging, deep ties of dependence and real, actual love that tied the land together when the Fennish inhabited it. I’d guess that the restoration of the Fens will always fail if this connection remains broken because humans weren’t passive spectators when the land flourished. They were integral parts of the ecosystem. My hunch is that to bring back the Large Copper Butterfly we’ll need to bring back some actual Fen Tigers.

The story of the outside radicals betrayed by the residents of the Fen feels tragically familiar. Solidarity seems to be a scarce resource today. Reviving connection with people who have inhabited the land we live on now is one way to help solidarity grow. Understanding Enclosure in this country means understanding the truth of the origins of the current capitalist system: it is built on land theft. As Nick Hayes says, when the landlords colonised the commons during enclosure, they were practicing what they would later export to a quarter of the globe. This means white people identifying as English have more than a history of colonisation to connect with, there is a history of resistance too. The experience and the collective trauma is different to other struggles, there is nothing comparable to the transatlantic slave trade, or to the centuries of racialisation that followed, but the interest is the same. Rediscovering histories like this is, I think, how white people can heed the words of Emma Dabiri in What White People Can Do Next and, in different ways, Priyamvada Gopal in Insurgent Empire. We need to recognise the non-contrived, non-individualistic, non-moralistic solidarity that exists between the majority of the world’s people who have been displaced, dispossessed and robbed.

* since listening to this episode of the Farmerama podcast, it’s made me think there’s a lot missing from this story about how the enslavement of Africans likely funded the purchase and draining of the Fens, as well as how many displaced Fennish went on to become colonisers. An important piece. Edits and updates coming soon.