Peat Bogs, Marshes and Fen as Disputed Landscapes
77
grounded in the belief that all uncultivated land, including waterways
and marshes, was theirs by natural right, that it was to be collectively
and freely enjoyed; as such, the commons often provided a major
physical and symbolic bond for what Rétif de la Bretonne describes as
the communal peasant “famille”.
6 In France resistance usually took
the form of civil or legal disobedience or the setting up of “métayages”, sharecropping partnerships between landowner and land
worker(s) entailing an equal division of any profits made from working the earth. Yet resistance could also be fierce and violent, as in the
smashing of sluices in seventeenth-century Lincolnshire, or the reported stoning and burning in effigy of a local drainage agent on the
Somerset Levels in 1769.
7 Thus, where resistance was successful, or
where there had been no attempts at forced clearance and drainage,
wetlands were settled and exploited largely as they had been since the
Middle Ages. They were used for the summer grazing of livestock,
especially cattle and sheep; they were home to geese reared for quill
and duvet manufacturing; they were hunted for wildfowl, eel and fish;
if surrounding cultivation needed draining, it was drained by ridgeand-furrow ploughing. And where the geology allowed, they were, of
course, exploited for peat.
Peat is essentially the accumulated remains of dead plants,
trees and other vegetal matter. Modern scientific analysis has found
that it is ninety-nine percent organic in composition, of which at least
eighty per cent is combustible when dried out.
8 In the eighteenth century, a number of theories were advanced to explain both its composition and formation. Taking as his example the peat fields of Flanders,
the great naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon concluded that
peat was produced by violent sea flooding of the coastal regions
which uprooted all trees and vegetation in the area. This vegetal matter was then overlain by sea waters under which it compressed and
rotted. As the sea eventually receded from this part of western Europe,
the peat deposits were dragged together to accumulate and concentrate
___________________________
6 Nicolas Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, La Vie de mon père (Paris: 1788), II, p. 82.
7 Purseglove, Taming the Flood, p. 52.
8 For a comprehensive chemical and biological analysis of peat, see R. S. Clymo,
“Peat”, in Mires: Swamp, Bog, Fen and Moor: General Studies, ed. A. J. P. Gore
(Amsterdam; Oxford; New York: Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, 1983), pp.
159-224 (p. 159).
77
grounded in the belief that all uncultivated land, including waterways
and marshes, was theirs by natural right, that it was to be collectively
and freely enjoyed; as such, the commons often provided a major
physical and symbolic bond for what Rétif de la Bretonne describes as
the communal peasant “famille”.
6 In France resistance usually took
the form of civil or legal disobedience or the setting up of “métayages”, sharecropping partnerships between landowner and land
worker(s) entailing an equal division of any profits made from working the earth. Yet resistance could also be fierce and violent, as in the
smashing of sluices in seventeenth-century Lincolnshire, or the reported stoning and burning in effigy of a local drainage agent on the
Somerset Levels in 1769.
7 Thus, where resistance was successful, or
where there had been no attempts at forced clearance and drainage,
wetlands were settled and exploited largely as they had been since the
Middle Ages. They were used for the summer grazing of livestock,
especially cattle and sheep; they were home to geese reared for quill
and duvet manufacturing; they were hunted for wildfowl, eel and fish;
if surrounding cultivation needed draining, it was drained by ridgeand-furrow ploughing. And where the geology allowed, they were, of
course, exploited for peat.
Peat is essentially the accumulated remains of dead plants,
trees and other vegetal matter. Modern scientific analysis has found
that it is ninety-nine percent organic in composition, of which at least
eighty per cent is combustible when dried out.
8 In the eighteenth century, a number of theories were advanced to explain both its composition and formation. Taking as his example the peat fields of Flanders,
the great naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon concluded that
peat was produced by violent sea flooding of the coastal regions
which uprooted all trees and vegetation in the area. This vegetal matter was then overlain by sea waters under which it compressed and
rotted. As the sea eventually receded from this part of western Europe,
the peat deposits were dragged together to accumulate and concentrate
___________________________
6 Nicolas Edme Rétif de la Bretonne, La Vie de mon père (Paris: 1788), II, p. 82.
7 Purseglove, Taming the Flood, p. 52.
8 For a comprehensive chemical and biological analysis of peat, see R. S. Clymo,
“Peat”, in Mires: Swamp, Bog, Fen and Moor: General Studies, ed. A. J. P. Gore
(Amsterdam; Oxford; New York: Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, 1983), pp.
159-224 (p. 159).