Peat Bogs, Marshes and Fen as Disputed Landscapes
85
Nonetheless, financial greed was not in itself a great enough
incentive to drive the early modern processes of wetland draining,
clearance and cultivation. Exploiting the general reputation of marshes
and bogs as places of evil and infamy, religion and public morality
were also invoked as reasons for their reclamation. Indeed, the very
notion of “reclamation” – as with the later eighteenth-century idea of
“improvement” – struck a strong moral chord with contemporaries,
especially among the first generation of engineers and drainage experts in England, many of whom were Protestants and Huguenots fleeing religious persecution and civil strife on the Continent. Certainly,
among such avid Bible-readers, the constant threat of flooding posed
by the marshes and fens to surrounding agriculture and dwellings
might have recalled Noah’s flood, and was therefore to be checked not
just on social and financial grounds, but also on religious ones too.
The effects of regular flooding elsewhere in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe must only have reinforced this impression: Florence was heavily flooded in 1740 with the loss of many lives;
Avignon was swamped in 1763 when the Rhône burst its banks; and
in the winter of 1787 heavy rains and flooding swept away seed grain
in Saxony, causing famine the following year.
43 In the Breton forests
too, a lack of drainage expertise meant that heavy rains waterlogged
and weakened the roots of trees, drowned all seedlings, and left the
forest vulnerable to storm damage, a threat that was realized with devastating effect at least four times in the eighteenth century.
44
Effective draining, then, was crucial. By 1710 the English reclaimers of the Fens had imported from Holland the technique of using windmill-powered pumps to drain the wetlands. It was not,
however, until much later in the century that a further discovery and
subsequent innovation in draining expanded the practice of wetland
reclamation, first in Britain and then on the Continent. This discovery
took place near Leamington Spa in 1764 when a local farmer, Joseph
Elkington, solved the problem of underdrainage, that is, of clearing
not just the surface waters from an area of wetland but of siphoning
off low-level underground water tables by tapping and diverting their
springs. In 1795 the British Parliament awarded Elkington the hand___________________________
43 Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe, p. 19.
44 Andrée Corvol, “Tempêtes sur la forêt française XVIIe-XIXe siècles”, in
L’Événement climatique et ses représentations (XVIIe-XIXe siècle), ed. E. Le Roy
Ladurie, J. Berchtold, J.-P. Sermain (Paris: Desjonquères, 2007), pp. 43-59 (p. 48).
85
Nonetheless, financial greed was not in itself a great enough
incentive to drive the early modern processes of wetland draining,
clearance and cultivation. Exploiting the general reputation of marshes
and bogs as places of evil and infamy, religion and public morality
were also invoked as reasons for their reclamation. Indeed, the very
notion of “reclamation” – as with the later eighteenth-century idea of
“improvement” – struck a strong moral chord with contemporaries,
especially among the first generation of engineers and drainage experts in England, many of whom were Protestants and Huguenots fleeing religious persecution and civil strife on the Continent. Certainly,
among such avid Bible-readers, the constant threat of flooding posed
by the marshes and fens to surrounding agriculture and dwellings
might have recalled Noah’s flood, and was therefore to be checked not
just on social and financial grounds, but also on religious ones too.
The effects of regular flooding elsewhere in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe must only have reinforced this impression: Florence was heavily flooded in 1740 with the loss of many lives;
Avignon was swamped in 1763 when the Rhône burst its banks; and
in the winter of 1787 heavy rains and flooding swept away seed grain
in Saxony, causing famine the following year.
43 In the Breton forests
too, a lack of drainage expertise meant that heavy rains waterlogged
and weakened the roots of trees, drowned all seedlings, and left the
forest vulnerable to storm damage, a threat that was realized with devastating effect at least four times in the eighteenth century.
44
Effective draining, then, was crucial. By 1710 the English reclaimers of the Fens had imported from Holland the technique of using windmill-powered pumps to drain the wetlands. It was not,
however, until much later in the century that a further discovery and
subsequent innovation in draining expanded the practice of wetland
reclamation, first in Britain and then on the Continent. This discovery
took place near Leamington Spa in 1764 when a local farmer, Joseph
Elkington, solved the problem of underdrainage, that is, of clearing
not just the surface waters from an area of wetland but of siphoning
off low-level underground water tables by tapping and diverting their
springs. In 1795 the British Parliament awarded Elkington the hand___________________________
43 Black, Eighteenth-Century Europe, p. 19.
44 Andrée Corvol, “Tempêtes sur la forêt française XVIIe-XIXe siècles”, in
L’Événement climatique et ses représentations (XVIIe-XIXe siècle), ed. E. Le Roy
Ladurie, J. Berchtold, J.-P. Sermain (Paris: Desjonquères, 2007), pp. 43-59 (p. 48).