Prose Idylls, New and Old

In the bottom of this mere were found two shells of the fresh-water tortoise, Emys lutaria, till then unknown in England.

These little animals, who may be seen in hundreds in the meres of eastern Europe, sunning their backs on fallen logs, and diving into the water at the sound of a footstep, are eaten largely in continental capitals (as is their cousin the terrapin, Emys picta, in the Southern States).  They may be bought at Paris, at fashionable restaurants.  Thither they may have been sent from Vienna or Berlin; for in north France, Holland, and north-west Germany they are unknown.  A few specimens have been found buried in peat in Sweden and Denmark; and there is a tale of a live one having been found in the extreme south part of Sweden, some twenty years ago. 4  Into Sweden, then, as into England, the little fresh-water tortoise had wandered, as to an extreme limit, beyond which the change of climate, and probably of food, killed him off.

But the emys which came to the Wretham bog must have had a long journey; and a journey by fresh water too.  Down Elbe or Weser he must have floated, ice-packed, or swept away by flood, till somewhere off the Doggerbank, in that great network of rivers which is now open sea, he or his descendants turned up Ouse and Little Ouse, till they found a mere like their old Prussian one, and there founded a tiny colony for a few generations, till they were eaten up by the savages of the table dwelling; or died out—as many a human family has died out—because they found the world too hard.

And lastly, my friend Mr. Brady, well known to naturalists, has found that many forms of Entomastraca are common to the estuaries of the east of England and to those of Holland.

It was thus necessary, in order to account for the presence of some of the common animals of the fen, to go back to an epoch of immense remoteness.

And how was that great lowland swept away?  Who can tell?  Probably by no violent convulsion.  Slow upheavals, slow depressions, there may have been—indeed must have been—as the sunken fir-forests of Brancaster, and the raised beach of Hunstanton, on the extreme north-east corner of the Wash, testify to this day.  But the main agent of destruction has been, doubtless, that same ever-gnawing sea-wash which devours still the soft strata of the whole east coast of England, as far as Flamborough Head; and that great scavenger, the tide-wave, which sweeps the fallen rubbish out to sea twice in every twenty-four hours.  Wave and tide by sea, rain and river by land; these are God’s mighty mills in which He makes the old world new.  And as Longfellow says of moral things, so may we of physical:—

‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small.Though He sit, end wait with patience, with exactness grinds He all.’

The lighter and more soluble particles, during that slow but vast destruction which is going on still to this day, have been carried far out to sea, and deposited as ooze.  The heavier and coarser have been left along the shores, as the gravels which fill the old estuaries of the east of England.

From these gravels we can judge of the larger animals which dwelt in that old world.  About these lost lowlands wandered herds of the woolly mammoth.  Elephas primigenius, whose bones are common in certain Cambridge gravels, whose teeth are brought up by dredgers, far out in the German Ocean, off certain parts of the Norfolk coast.  With them wandered the woolly rhinoceros (R. tichorhinus), the hippopotamus, the lion—not (according to some) to be distinguished from the recent lion of Africa—the hyæna, the bear, the horse, the reindeer, and the musk ox; the great Irish elk, whose vast horns are so well known in every museum of northern Europe; and that mighty ox, the Bos primigenius, which still lingered on the Continent in Cæsar’s time, as the urus, in magnitude less only than the elephant,—and not to be confounded with the bison, a relation of, if not identical with, the buffalo of North America,—which still lingers, carefully preserved by the Czar, in the forests of Lithuania.

The remains of this gigantic ox, be it remembered, are found throughout Britain, and even into the Shetland Isles.  Would that any gentleman who may see these pages would take notice of the fact, that we have not (so I am informed) in these islands a single perfect skeleton of Bos primigenius; while the Museum of Copenhagen, to its honour, possesses five or six from a much smaller field than is open to us; and be public-spirited enough, the next time he hears of ox-bones, whether in gravel or in peat (as he may in the draining of any northern moss), to preserve them for the museum of his neighbourhood—or send them to Cambridge.

But did all these animals exist at the same time?  It is difficult to say.  The study of the different gravels is most intricate—almost a special science in itself—in which but two or three men are adepts.  It is hard, at first sight, to believe that the hippopotamus could have been the neighbour of the Arctic reindeer and musk ox: but that the woolly mammoth not only may have been such, but was such, there can be no doubt.  His remains, imbedded in ice at the mouth of the great Siberian rivers, with the wool, skin, and flesh (in some cases) still remaining on the bones, prove him to have been fitted for a cold climate, and to have browsed upon the scanty shrubs of Northern Asia.  But, indeed, there is no reason, à priori, why these huge mammals, now confined to hotter countries, should not have once inhabited a colder region, or at least have wandered northwards in whole herds in summer, to escape insects, and find fresh food, and above all, water.  The same is the case with the lion, and other huge beasts of prey.  The tiger of Hindostan ranges, at least in summer, across the snows of the Himalaya, and throughout China.  Even at the river Amoor, where the winters are as severe as at St. Petersburg, the tiger is an ordinary resident at all seasons.  The lion was, undoubtedly, an inhabitant of Thrace as late as the expedition of Xerxes, whose camels they attacked; and the ‘Nemæan lion,’ and the other lions which stand out in Grecian myth, as having been killed by Hercules and the heroes, may have been the last remaining specimens of that Felis spelæa (undistinguishable, according to some, from the African lion), whose bones are found in the gravels and the caverns of these isles.

And how long ago were those days of mammoths and reindeer, lions and hyænas?  We must talk not of days, but of ages; we know nothing of days or years.  As the late lamented Professor Sedgwick has well said:—

‘We allow that the great European oscillation, which ended in the production of the drift (the boulder clay, or till), was effected during a time of vast, but unknown length.  And if we limit our inquiries, and ask what was the interval of time between the newest bed of gravel near Cambridge, and the oldest bed of bogland or silt in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk, we are utterly at a loss for a definite answer.  The interval of time may have been very great.  But we have no scale on which to measure it.’

Let us suppose, then, the era of ‘gravels’ past; the valleys which open into the fen sawn out by rivers to about their present depth.  What was the special cause of the fen itself? why did not the great lowland become a fertile ‘carse’ of firm alluvial soil, like that of Stirling?

One reason is, that the carse of Stirling has been upheaved some twenty feet, and thereby more or less drained, since the time of the Romans.  A fact patent and provable from Cramond (the old Roman port of Alaterna) up to Blair Drummond above Stirling, where whales’ skeletons, and bone tools by them, have been found in loam and peat, twenty feet above high-water mark.  The alluvium of the fens, on the other hand, has very probably suffered a slight depression.

But the main reason is, that the silt brought down by the fen rivers cannot, like that of the Forth and its neighbouring streams, get safe away to sea.  From Flamborough Head, in Yorkshire, all down the Lincolnshire coast, the land is falling, falling for ever into the waves; and swept southward by tide and current, the debris turns into the Wash between Lincolnshire and Norfolk, there to repose, as in a quiet haven.

Hence that vast labyrinth of banks between Lynn and Wisbeach, of mud inside, brought down by the fen rivers; but outside (contrary to the usual rule) of shifting sand, which has come inward from the sea, and prevents the mud’s escape—banks parted by narrow gullies, the delight of the gunner with his punt, haunted by million wild-fowl in winter, and in summer hazy steaming flats, beyond which the trees of Lincolnshire loom up, raised by refraction far above the horizon, while the masts and sails of distant vessels quiver, fantastically distorted and lengthened, sometimes even inverted, by a refraction like that which plays such tricks with ships and coasts in the Arctic seas.  Along the top of the mud banks lounge the long black rows of seals, undistinguishable from their reflection in the still water below; distorted too, and magnified to the size of elephants.  Long lines of sea-pies wing their way along at regular tide-hours, from or to the ocean.  Now and then a skein of geese paddle hastily out of sight round a mud-cape; or a brown robber gull (generally Richardson’s Skua) raises a tumult of screams, by making a raid upon a party of honest white gulls, to frighten them into vomiting up their prey for his benefit; or a single cormorant flaps along, close to the water, towards his fishing ground.  Even the fish are shy of haunting a bottom which shifts with every storm; and innumerable shrimps are almost the only product of the shallow barren sea: beside, all is silence and desolation, as of a world waiting to be made.

So strong is the barrier which these sea-borne sands oppose to the river-borne ooze, that as soon as a seabank is built—as the projectors of the ‘Victoria County’ have built them—across any part of the estuary, the mud caught by it soon ‘warps’ the space within into firm and rich dry land.  But that same barrier, ere the fen was drained, backed up for ages not only the silt, but the very water of the fens; and spread it inland into a labyrinth of shifting streams, shallow meres, and vast peat bogs, on those impervious clays which floor the fen.  Each river contributed to the formation of those bogs and meres, instead of draining them away; repeating on a huge scale the process which may be seen in many a highland strath, where the ground at the edge of the stream is firm and high; the meadows near the hillfoot, a few hundred yards away, bogland lower than the bank of the stream.  For each flood deposits its silt upon the immediate bank of the river, raising it year by year; till—as in the case of the ‘Levée’ of the Mississippi, and probably of every one of the old fen rivers—the stream runs at last between two natural dykes, at a level considerably higher than that of the now swamped and undrainable lands right and left of it.

If we add to this, a slope in the fen rivers so extraordinarily slight, that the river at Cambridge is only thirteen and a half feet above the mean sea level, five-and-thirty miles away, and that if the great sea-sluice of Denver, the key of all the eastern fen, were washed away, the tide would back up the Cam to within ten miles of Cambridge; if we add again the rainfall upon that vast flat area, utterly unable to escape through rivers which have enough to do to drain the hills around; it is easy to understand how peat, the certain product of standing water, has slowly overwhelmed the rich alluvium, fattened by the washing of those phosphatic greensand beds, which (discovered by the science of the lamented Professor Henslow) are now yielding round Cambridge supplies of manure seemingly inexhaustible.  Easy it is to understand how the all-devouring, yet all-preserving peat-moss swallowed up gradually the stately forests of fir and oak, ash and poplar, hazel and yew, which once grew on that rank land; how trees, torn down by flood or storm, floated and lodged in rafts, damming the waters back still more; how streams, bewildered in the flats, changed their channels, mingling silt and sand with the peat-moss; how Nature, left to herself, ran into wild riot and chaos more and more; till the whole fen became one ‘Dismal Swamp,’ in which the ‘Last of the English’ (like Dred in Mrs. Stowe’s tale) took refuge from their tyrants, and lived, like him, a free and joyous life awhile.

For there were islands, and are still, in that wide fen, which have escaped the destroying deluge of peat-moss; outcrops of firm land, which even in the Middle Age preserved the Fauna and Flora of the primæval forest, haunted by the descendants of some at least of those wild beasts which roamed on the older continent of the ‘gravel age.’  The all-preserving peat, as well as the monkish records of the early Middle Age, enable us to repeople, tolerably well, the primæval fen.

The gigantic ox, Bos primigenius, was still there, though there is no record of him in monkish tales.  But with him had appeared (not unknown toward the end of the gravel age) another ox, smaller and with shorter horns, Bos longifrons; which is held to be the ancestor of our own domestic short-horns, and of the wild cattle still preserved at Chillingham and at Cadzow.  The reindeer had disappeared, almost or altogether.  The red deer, of a size beside which the largest Scotch stag is puny, and even the great Carpathian stag inferior, abound; so does the roe, so does the goat, which one is accustomed to look on as a mountain animal.  In the Woodwardian Museum there is a portion of a skull of an ibex—probably Capra sibirica—which was found in the drift gravel at Fulbourne.  Wild sheep are unknown.  The horse occurs in the peat; but whether wild or tame, who can tell?  Horses enough have been mired and drowned since the Romans set foot on this island, to account for the presence of horses’ skulls, without the hypothesis of wild herds, such as doubtless existed in the gravel times.  The wolf, of course, is common; wild cat, marten, badger, and otter all would expect; but not so the beaver, which nevertheless is abundant in the peat; and damage enough the busy fellows must have done, cutting trees, damming streams, flooding marshes, and like selfish speculators in all ages, sacrificing freely the public interest to their own.  Here and there are found the skulls of bears, in one case that of a polar bear, ice-drifted; and one of a walrus, probably washed in dead after a storm.

Beautiful, after their kind, were these fen-isles, in the eyes of the monks who were the first settlers in the wilderness.

The author of the History of Ramsey grows enthusiastic, and, after the manner of old monks, somewhat bombastic also, as he describes the lonely isle which got its name from the solitary ram who had wandered thither, either in some extreme drought or over the winter ice, and never able to return, was found, fat beyond the wont of rams, feeding among the wild deer.  He tells of the stately ashes—most of them cut in his time, to furnish mighty beams for the church roof; of the rich pastures painted with all gay flowers in spring; of the ‘green crown’ of reed and alder which girdled round the isle; of the fair wide mere with its ‘sandy beach’ along the forest side: ‘a delight,’ he says, ‘to all who look thereon.’

In like humour, William of Malmesbury, writing in the first half of the twelfth century, speaks of Thorney Abbey and isle.  ‘It represents,’ he says, ‘a very Paradise, for that in pleasure and delight it resembles heaven itself.  These marshes abound in trees, whose length without a knot doth emulate the stars.  The plain there is as level as the sea, which with green grass allures the eye, and so smooth that there is nought to hinder him who runs through it.  Neither is therein any waste place for in some parts are apple trees, in other vines, which are either spread on the ground or raised on poles.  A mutual strife is there between nature and art; so that what one produces not, the other supplies.  What shall I say of those fair buildings, which ’tis so wonderful to see the ground among those fens upbear?’

But the most detailed picture of a fen-isle is that in the second part of the Book of Ely; wherein a single knight of all the French army forces his way into the isle of St. Etheldreda, and, hospitably entertained there by Hereward and his English, is sent back safe to William the Conqueror, to tell him of the strength of Ely isle.

He cannot praise enough—his speech may be mythical; but as written by Richard of Ely, only one generation after, it must describe faithfully what the place was like—the wonders of the isle: its soil the richest in England, its pleasant pastures, its noble hunting-grounds, its store of sheep and cattle (though its vines, he says, as a Frenchman had good right to say, were not equally to be praised), its wide meres and bogs, about it like a wall.  In it was, to quote roughly, ‘abundance of tame beasts and of wild stag, roe, and goat, in grove and marsh; martens, and ermines, and fitchets, which in hard winter were caught in snares or gins.  But of the kind of fish and fowl which bred therein, what can I say?  In the pools around are netted eels innumerable, great water wolves, and pickerel, perch, roach, burbot, lampreys, which the French called sea-serpents; smelts, too; and the royal fish, the turbot [surely a mistake for sturgeon], are said often to be taken.  But of the birds which haunt around, if you be not tired, as of the rest, we will expound.  Innumerable geese, gulls, coots, divers, water-crows, herons, ducks, of which, when there is most plenty, in winter, or at moulting time, I have seen hundreds taken at a time, by nets, springes, or birdlime,’ and so forth till, as he assures William, the Frenchman may sit on Haddenham field blockading Ely for seven years more, ‘ere they will make one ploughman stop short in his furrow, one hunter cease to set his nets, or one fowler to deceive the birds with springe and snare.’

And yet there was another side to the picture.  Man lived hard in those days, under dark skies, in houses—even the most luxurious of them—which we should think, from draughts and darkness, unfit for felons’ cells.  Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased, and thankful to God for the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of green, after the terrible and long winters of the Middle Age.  And ugly enough those winters must have been, what with snow-storm and darkness, flood and ice, ague and rheumatism; while through the long drear winter nights the whistle of the wind and the wild cries of the water-fowl were translated into the howls of witches and demons; and (as in St. Guthlac’s case) the delirious fancies of marsh fever made fiends take hideous shapes before the inner eye, and act fantastic horrors round the old fen-man’s bed of sedge.

The Romans seem to have done something toward the draining and embanking of this dismal swamp.  To them is attributed the car-dyke, or catch-water drain, which runs for many miles from Peterborough northward into Lincolnshire, cutting off the land waters which flow down from the wolds above.  To them, too, is to be attributed the old Roman bank, or ‘vallum,’ along the sea-face of the marshlands, marked to this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole.  But the English invaders were incapable of following out, even of preserving, any public works.  Each village was isolated by its own ‘march’ of forest; each yeoman all but isolated by the ‘eaves-drip,’ or green lane round his farm.  Each ‘cared for his own things, and none for those of others;’ and gradually, during the early Middle Age, the fen—save those old Roman villages—returned to its primæval jungle, under the neglect of a race which caricatured local self-government into public anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an alien enemy, who might be lawfully slain, if he came through the forest without calling aloud or blowing a horn.  Till late years, the English feeling against the stranger lasted harsh and strong.  The farmer, strong in his laws of settlement, tried at once to pass him into the next parish.  The labourer, not being versed in law, hove half a brick at him, or hooted him through the town.  It was in the fens, perhaps, that the necessity of combined effort for fighting the brute powers of nature first awakened public spirit, and associate labour, and the sense of a common interest between men of different countries and races.

But the progress was very slow; and the first civilizers of the fen were men who had nothing less in their minds than to conquer nature, or call together round them communities of men.  Hermits, driven by that passion for isolated independence which is the mark of the Teutonic mind, fled into the wilderness, where they might, if possible, be alone with God and their own souls.  Like St. Guthlac of Crowland, after wild fighting for five-and-twenty years, they longed for peace and solitude; and from their longing, carried out with that iron will which marked the mediæval man for good or for evil, sprang a civilization of which they never dreamed.

Those who wish to understand the old fen life, should read Ingulf’s ‘History of Crowland’ (Mr. Bohn has published a good and cheap translation), and initiate themselves into a state of society, a form of thought, so utterly different from our own, that we seem to be reading of the inhabitants of another planet.  Most amusing and most human is old Ingulf and his continuator, ‘Peter of Blois;’ and though their facts are not to be depended on as having actually happened, they are still instructive, as showing what might, or ought to have happened, in the opinion of the men of old.

Even more naïve is the Anglo-Saxon life of St. Guthlac, written possibly as early as the eighth century, and literally translated by Mr. Goodwin, of Cambridge.

There we may read how the young warrior-noble, Guthlac (‘The Battle-Play,’ the ‘Sport of War’), tired of slaying and sinning, bethought him to fulfil the prodigies seen at his birth; how he wandered into the fen, where one Tatwin (who after became a saint likewise) took him in his canoe to a spot so lonely as to be almost unknown, buried in reeds and alders; and among the trees, nought but an old ‘law,’ as the Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into seeking for treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit’s cell thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him, as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his servant; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint one day, there fell on him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac’s throat, and install himself in his cell, that he might have the honour and glory of sainthood?  But St. Guthlac perceived the inward temptation (which is told with the naïve honesty of those half-savage times), and rebuked the offender into confession, and all went well to the end.

There we may read, too, a detailed account of a Fauna now happily extinct in the fens: of the creatures who used to hale St. Guthlac out of his hut, drag him through the bogs, carry him aloft through frost and fire—‘Develen and luther gostes’—such as tormented likewise St. Botolph (from whom Botulfston=Boston, has its name), and who were supposed to haunt the meres and fens, and to have an especial fondness for old heathen barrows with their fancied treasure hoards; how they ‘filled the house with their coming, and poured in on every side, from above, and from beneath, and everywhere.  They were in countenance horrible, and they had great heads, and a long neck, and a lean visage; they were filthy and squalid in their beards, and they had rough ears, and crooked nebs, and fierce eyes, and foul mouths; and their teeth were like horses’ tusks; and their throats were filled with flame, and they were grating in their voice; they had crooked shanks, and knees big and great behind, and twisted toes, and cried hoarsely with their voices; and they came with such immoderate noise and immense horror, that him thought all between heaven and earth resounded with their voices.  And they tugged and led him out of the cot, and led him to the swart fen, and threw and sunk him in the muddy waters.  After that they brought him into the wild places of the wilderness, among the thick beds of brambles, that all his body was torn.  After that they took him and beat him with iron whips; and after that they brought him on their creaking wings between the cold regions of the air.’