Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

‘Drowned Lands’ 81

chest and strength of limb; while his delicate hands and feet and long locks of golden

hair marked him of most noble, and even, as he really was, of ancient royal race. He

was dressed in a gaudy costume, resembling on the whole that of a Highland chief-

tain. His wrists and throat were tattooed in blue patterns.^32

Hereward’s image – an almost irreconcilable mix of the delicate and the thickset

• looks to resolve the contradictions inherent in Kingsley’s muscular Chris-
  tianity but it is also patently Scottish, to the extent that the novelist off ers a
  footnoted defence of his decision to present an Englishman tattooed when
  antiquarian consensus suggested that this was an exclusively Celtic or Pictish
  activity. Hereward is every bit the highland outlaw. Shipwrecked in France on
  his way home from his romantic adventures, Hereward rewards French hospi-
  tality with ‘a great Scotch Cairngorm brooch’.^33 His masculinity is borrowed;
  borrowed from Scott.
  Kingsley’s appropriation of highland masculinity is not undertaken with
  subtlety; he even imagines a highland visitor to the Fens to test the manliness of
  these presumptive lowlanders:

And the highlander who may look from the promontory of Peterborough, the

‘golden borough’ of old time; or from that Witham on the Hill which once was a

farm of Hereward the Wake’s; or from the tower of Crowland, while he and Torfrida

sleep in the ruined nave beneath; or from the heights of the Isle of Ely which was so

long the camp of refuge for English freedom – over the labyrinth of dykes and lodes,

the squares of rich corn and verdure, will confess that the lowlands, as well as the

highlands, can at times breed gallant men.^34

Th e highlander acknowledges the gallantry of the lowlander but, as he does
so, the lowlands themselves become highlands. Peterborough is a promontory,
Witham sits on a hill, Crowland Abbey has its tower and Ely its heights. Th e
region’s religious and commercial centres were – for practical reasons – situated
at higher points than much of the surrounding fen marshland, but Kingsley’s
elevation of the Fenland ‘islands’ dramatically overstates their stature and his
description of Bourne in Lincolnshire follows the same pattern:

He rose slowly into the long street between the overhanging gables, past the crossways,

and along the Water-gang and the high earth-banks of his ancient home. Above them

he could see the great hall, its narrow windows all ablaze with light.^35

Th e landscape itself is aggrandized; the terrain is muscular, the architecture promi-
nent. Kingsley masculates the Fens, even when it compromises their integrity:

Th e low rolling uplands were clothed in primeval forest; oak and ash, beech and elm,

with here and there perhaps a group of ancient pines, ragged and decayed, and fast

dying out in England even then; though lingering still in the forests of the Scotch

highlands.^36