Ian D. Rotherham and David McCallam
76
full of loathsome vermin; the earth, spuing, unfast and boggie”.
2 In
France, swathes of swamp in the Camargue, the Dombes, the Landes
and Sologne remained undrained and infected, with mortality rates in
the last of these areas still standing at fifteen percent above the national average at the end of the eighteenth century.
3 These natural
dangers were compounded in places where cities such as London polluted the surrounding marshlands or built slums on them. Contemporary observers of bogs and fen often imputed the abhorrent nature of
the physical environment to the moral character of its inhabitants.
Hence Arthur Young, writing in 1799, explains the depredations of
sheep thieves in Lincolnshire by stating that “so wild a country nurses
up a race of people as wild as the fen”.
4 Certainly, in the second half
of the eighteenth century, Romney Marsh swarmed with armed smugglers, as did parts of the Landes near Bordeaux. Politically too, wetlands provided a refuge for outlaws and a site of violent resistance to
government, a breeding ground for both the anti-drainage violence of
the seventeenth-century “fen tigers” and the more considerable antirevolutionary violence of the Chouans in the Vendée marshes.
However, in England, and yet more so in France, the main
source of social and political conflict in the wetlands of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was land rights. This habitually turned
on peasants challenging seigneurial attempts to appropriate, clear or
drain areas traditionally considered to be common land. This wasteland was used to graze small numbers of livestock; it was also a
source of water, fuel, often in the form of peat, or bedding in the form
of rushes or reeds. Thus, the commons, as such lands were called,
were jealously guarded by peasant communities, not least because appropriation and enclosure of commons by the local seigneur was invariably followed by taxation, by the imposition of the “cens” (quit
rent) or “lods et ventes” (sales tax) levied on all who worked, tended
or exploited the newly enclosed plots.
5 Peasant resistance was
___________________________
2 William Lambarde cited in Jeremy Purseglove, Taming the Flood: A History and
Natural History of Rivers and Wetlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p.
25.
3 See John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death in
Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 10.
4 Arthur Young, General View of The Agriculture of the County of Lincoln (London:
1799), p. 223.
5 See Pierre Goubert, La Vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle (Paris:
Hachette, 1982), pp. 42-43.
76
full of loathsome vermin; the earth, spuing, unfast and boggie”.
2 In
France, swathes of swamp in the Camargue, the Dombes, the Landes
and Sologne remained undrained and infected, with mortality rates in
the last of these areas still standing at fifteen percent above the national average at the end of the eighteenth century.
3 These natural
dangers were compounded in places where cities such as London polluted the surrounding marshlands or built slums on them. Contemporary observers of bogs and fen often imputed the abhorrent nature of
the physical environment to the moral character of its inhabitants.
Hence Arthur Young, writing in 1799, explains the depredations of
sheep thieves in Lincolnshire by stating that “so wild a country nurses
up a race of people as wild as the fen”.
4 Certainly, in the second half
of the eighteenth century, Romney Marsh swarmed with armed smugglers, as did parts of the Landes near Bordeaux. Politically too, wetlands provided a refuge for outlaws and a site of violent resistance to
government, a breeding ground for both the anti-drainage violence of
the seventeenth-century “fen tigers” and the more considerable antirevolutionary violence of the Chouans in the Vendée marshes.
However, in England, and yet more so in France, the main
source of social and political conflict in the wetlands of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was land rights. This habitually turned
on peasants challenging seigneurial attempts to appropriate, clear or
drain areas traditionally considered to be common land. This wasteland was used to graze small numbers of livestock; it was also a
source of water, fuel, often in the form of peat, or bedding in the form
of rushes or reeds. Thus, the commons, as such lands were called,
were jealously guarded by peasant communities, not least because appropriation and enclosure of commons by the local seigneur was invariably followed by taxation, by the imposition of the “cens” (quit
rent) or “lods et ventes” (sales tax) levied on all who worked, tended
or exploited the newly enclosed plots.
5 Peasant resistance was
___________________________
2 William Lambarde cited in Jeremy Purseglove, Taming the Flood: A History and
Natural History of Rivers and Wetlands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p.
25.
3 See John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death in
Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 10.
4 Arthur Young, General View of The Agriculture of the County of Lincoln (London:
1799), p. 223.
5 See Pierre Goubert, La Vie quotidienne des paysans français au XVIIe siècle (Paris:
Hachette, 1982), pp. 42-43.