Imperial Mud: the story of Fenland resistance

 

Imperial Mud, by James Boyce (Icon, 2020)

When I saw this book, I felt it inevitable I would buy it. I was in Waterstone’s Bookshop, for the first time in many months, following the covid-19 lockdown. A book on the Fens, and a scholarly book at that, displayed strategically on the new titles table, seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Having just visited the Fens (see the post on Isleham a few weeks ago), I felt this must be a message from the gods. Or, perhaps, from the Fens themselves.

Even more surprising was the tone of the book. Boyce’s account is not a tale of triumphant engineers combatting the floods to bring civilization to a remote quarter of England. Instead, displayed alongside the memoirs of TV stars and personal growth titles, here is a genuinely radical history book. James Boyce’s thesis is that the Fens represented an area of protest against enclosure, over at least 400 years, and he skilfully links it to the English Civil War (Cromwell was born and grew up in the Fens) to industrialisation, the agricultural crisis during (and after) the Second World War, right up to the environmental movement of the present day. His suggestion is that people lived better (and certainly more equally) in the unenclosed Fens than in the surrounding counties.

Even more remarkably, Boyce shows how the Fennish (his term) did not fit in a simple left/right agenda. While the young Cromwell supported the Fennish in their protests against enclosure, he changed allegiance once in power and aligned himself with the landowners trying to carry out the enclosures. In this instance, the Fennish called on the king to protect their traditional rights. In other disputes, the Fennish battled against the king, who had made deals with local landowners as a partner in the land exploitation. It is not a simple story, in other words; although as a rule the local inhabitants suffered, since frequently the monarch was in partnership (even as an investor) with nobility.

I have a few reservations. James Boyce has written a hybrid, a popular book with pretensions to scholarly standards. But the result, as so often, fulfils neither criterion very well. The book has lots of footnotes, some of which carry useful additional information (so why wasn’t that incorporated in the body of the text)? More seriously, the book is written almost entirely from secondary sources, and some of those rather questionable (how about Maureen James, Cambridgeshire Folk Tales?). Overall, I forgive the author since he has written such a compelling account and has made it relevant.

My other reservation is that he fails to explain how a radical area, with centuries of experience of protest and demonstrations, has become so resolutely Tory. The Fens are the area of the UK with the highest number of uncontested seats in local elections (one-third of the seats in the 2019 election, according to Peterborough Today) – and all of those seats are Conservative.

Boyce describes initiatives to recreate some of the common land lost in the Fen enclosures, including one in Spalding. What makes Spalding such a centre of radicalism? To an outsider, visiting the Fens today, there seems very little sign of radicalism or of environmental concern. There are plenty of horses to be seen, but these are horses for entertainment, not for working.