Fen and Sea: The Landscapes of South-east Lincolnshire AD 500–1700

By I.G. Simmons

Renowned environmental historian I.G. Simmons synthesizes detailed research into the landscape history of the coastal area of Lincolnshire between Boston and Skegness and its hinterland of Tofts, Low Grounds and Fen as far as the Wolds. With many excellent illustrations Simmons chronicles the ways in which this low coast, backed by a wet fen, has been managed to display a set of landscapes which have significant differences that contradict the common terminology of uniformity, calling the area ‘flat’ or referring to everywhere from Cleethorpes to King’s Lynn as ‘the fens’.

These usually labeled ‘flat’ areas of East Lincolnshire between Mablethorpe and Boston are in fact a mosaic of subtly different landscapes. They have become that way largely due to the human influences derived from agriculture and industry. Between the beginning of Norman rule and the advent of pumped drainage, a number of significant changes took place.

The author has accumulated information from Roman times until the beginnings of fossil-fuel powered drainage, bringing together both scientific data and documentary evidence including medieval and early modern documents from the National Archive, Lincolnshire Archives, Bethlem Hospital and Magdalen College, Oxford, to explore the little-known archives of regional interest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Release date: Dec 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911188971

I.G. Simmons

I.G. Simmons retired from the University of Durham in 2001 and applied himself to the landscape history of the area to which he had been a wartime evacuee. This required different skills from the palynology of earlier years and he was grateful for help with both finance and the interpretation of documents from a number of archives. A number of papers in journals have appeared as well as this book.

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CHAPTER ONE

Before Domesday

Studies of the milieu of Roman and Early Medieval England are undergoing immense changes of data acquisition and thinking and as such are best left to specialists.¹ Not a great deal of new information has come to light in SEL and so the approach taken here is to note some general trends and findings and see how they might have worked out in this region. Hence, speculation is more prevalent than in most of this book.

The distribution of land and sea is immediately a germane topic.² The proposals by B. B. Simmons for the Roman period can be modified somewhat to reflect the additional data provided by LiDAR and recent bathymetry,³ but overall the suggestion of a marine incursion as far as the foot of the Wolds leaving a scatter of islands of glacial till holds good.⁴ The well-documented rise in RSL in late Roman times has been refined by hypotheses of regional variation in the outcomes of any marine incursions.⁵ One possible cause was the compaction of peat; the weight of the water created even more space for tidal reach, depending on the depth and distribution of the organic matter. The other, related, means was the removal of peat (as a fuel in salt-making) so that flooding was caused by human intervention. In both cases, one basin might not be so deeply flooded as another, for example the southern Lincoln Marsh versus the East Fen, though in both cases there is insufficient knowledge of the stratigraphy to make firm statements.⁶ It is possible that there were repeated marine transgressions: the LiDAR images of the East Fen show a number of creek systems in different directions, with superimpositions (Fig. 1.1).

Post-Roman settlement assumes that communities made their living from the variety of ecosystems that colonised the emerging ecosystems after the sea-level rise. The growth of freshwater fen started with ponding at the foot of the Wolds and spread seawards in some places compressing the other zones into a smaller space.⁷ Fen might interface with salt water, a contact now found only at one European site, in Germany.⁸ In every place, nevertheless, an intertidal and barely supratidal zone of sand and muds emerged, as depicted by Silvester (Fig. 1.2).⁹ For many years, scholars regarded any initial colonisation of such zones as being of Germanic immigrants, views now regarded as being too monolithic; Roman remainers and even Britonnic speakers have come into focus.¹⁰ It seems most feasible that the initial settlers should have used the sea as a main resource, for marine animals like fish, shellfish and cetaceans together with salt-marsh for grazing animals, especially sheep. An analogy might be sought in the Venetian lagoon of AD 523, when Cassiodorus wrote of the communities:¹¹

FIG. 1.1 LiDAR image of the East Fen, bounded by the Stickney ridge in the west and the Tofts on the south-east. At least two creek systems can be seen, with one superimposed on the other east of Stickney. Source: Malone 2014; Environment Agency LiDAR data under Open Government Licence v. 3.0.

For you live like sea birds, with your home dispersed like the Cyclades, across the surface of the water. The solidity of the earth on which they rest is secured only by osier and wattle; yet you do not hesitate to oppose so frail a bulwark to the wildness of the sea … All your energies are spent on your salt-fields.

In a comparable tilt at apparently primitive societies, Pliny the Elder wrote of Frisia (probably in the AD 70s) of a people living in huts on platforms or patches of ground above the level of the highest tide:¹²

It does not fall to them to keep herds and live on milk like the neighbouring tribes … they twine ropes of sedge and rushes from the marshes for the purpose of setting nets to catch the fish and they scoop up mud in their hands and dry it by the wind more than sunshine and with earth as fuel warm their food and so their own bodies, frozen by the north