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5 ‘DROWNED LANDS’:^1 CHARLES KINGSLEY’S
HEREWARD THE WAKE AND THE
MASCULATION OF THE ENGLISH FENS
Lynsey McCulloch
Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons,
Hexagons, and other fi gures, instead of remaining fi xed in their places, move freely
about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it,
very much like shadows – only hard and with luminous edges – and you will then have
a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should
have said ‘my universe’: but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.
E. A. Abbot, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions^2In 1866, Charles Kingsley published Hereward the Wake: Last of the English,
a quasi-historical novel based on the life of an eleventh-century Anglo-Danish
outlaw and his last stand against William the Conqueror’s Norman incursion
into England. Described by Graham Swift as a ‘fenland fabulist’, Kingsley opens
his text with a prelude dedicated to the novel’s setting , the lowlands of East
Anglia.^3 Read as a defence of the Fens against the domination of highland spaces
within romantic and historical literature, Kingsley’s preface usefully represents
the bifurcation of British rurality, a division based on gradient. But his cham-
pioning of East Anglia is partial. While the nineteenth-century fl atlands were
drained, cultivated and eff ectively tamed by engineers and agriculturists – a
process initiated formally in the seventeenth century – Kingsley’s medieval fens
are a morass of marshlands and Dark Age superstition. Rather than patronizing
the ‘modern’ lowlands, Kingsley takes advantage of his novel’s eleventh-century
context to romanticize the pre-drainage Fens. In describing the region’s great
cathedrals as promontories, the author elevates the landscape; lowlands become
highlands and the gentlemen farmers of eastern England are replaced by the
Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish savages (née heroes) of British myth, fi gures
of overbearing masculinity. Like Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 experimental novella
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions – which imagines a similarly two-
dimensional landscape and contrasts the rigidity of its class structure with the
movement and imaginative freedom available in the third dimension – Here-