sevenTeenTh-CenTury environmenTs: Woodland and WasTe 33and invertebrates found within the drainage ditches or ‘dykes’ were highly
diverse because, although the water was mainly fresh (and thus suitable
for cattle to drink), it often became more brackish towards the sea ‘wall’.^66
Maintenance of a high water table also ensured that the margins of dykes
were poorly defined, trampled and muddy, providing a wide diversity of
niches occupied by a range of invertebrates including the anopheles mosquito,
host for the parasite Plasmodium which is responsible for malaria. Indeed,
marshes were generally regarded as dangerous, disease-ridden places in the
past: but less so than fens.
These, our third main type of wetland, were formed over areas of low-
lying peat, many of which lay immediately inland from coastal marshes,
occupying the flood plains in the lower reaches of slow-moving rivers.
Indeed, most of our more extensive English wetlands (such as the Somerset
Levels or the Norfolk Broads) comprised both kinds of landscape, merging
and in immediate proximity. In some places in the north of England, fens
developed into raised ‘mires’, with up to ten metres of peat, as on the Thorne
and Hatfield Moors south of the river Humber.^67 Relatively few fens were
reclaimed and improved in the Middle Ages, or even brought into private
ownership, and they were generally devoid of settlements. Instead they were
exploited as common land by communities living around their margins.^68
Depending on local circumstances they would be grazed during the drier
summer months; mown for rough marsh hay or litter; or cut for thatching
materials in the form of reed and saw sedge (Cladium mariscus). In the latter
case, regular cutting in the right season for one species tended to suppress
the growth of the other, leading in time to increasingly pure reed- or sedge-
beds. In addition, peat was dug on a huge scale for domestic fuel, usually in
shallow excavations a spade or two spade’s depth but occasionally from pits
up to two metres deep, such as those which, excavated in the early Middle
Ages, were then flooded to produce the ‘broads’ of east Norfolk and north-
east Suffolk, or the ‘deeps’ of the Lincolnshire fens.^69
Many people in the seventeenth century regarded fens with horror and
nobody of wealth would live anywhere near them, in part because of the
dangers of malaria. Dugdale in 1662 typically described how the fen air was
‘for the most part cloudy, gross, and full of rotten harrs [fogs]; the water
putrid and muddy, yea full of loathsome vermin’.^70 Such attitudes have, to
some extent, clouded our own perception of fen landscapes, which by the
seventeenth century were in general less wild, and often less waterlogged,
than we sometimes assume. Areas like the Fenlands of East Anglia, or
the Isle of Axholme, were characterized more by grass than by reeds,
and managed more by grazing than by cutting. Michael Drayton in 1622
described livestock on the fens near Ely ‘hid over head in grass’,^71 and some
of the attempts currently under way to ‘restore’ the fens of eastern England
arguably place too much emphasis on water and wildness.^72 Nevertheless,
most fens did include areas of standing water (either natural, like the great
‘meres’ at Whittlesey and Soham in Cambridgeshire, or the consequence of