Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens
By James Boyce
London: Icon Books, 2020
248 pp.
About 4000 years ago, the wetland areas of Eastern England known as the Fens were so abundant with fish, eels and waterbirds that eels were considered a form of medieval currency. The Indigenous people, collectively known as the Fennis, fought to preserve their lands, culture and community in the face of attempts to displace them by enclosure.
Richard Boyce, the author of Van Dieman’s Land (2008) traces the history of the Indigenous Fennish resistance in his 2020 book Imperial Mud: The fight for the Fens, drawing parallels between their loss of land from the 16th century onward and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples by imperialist powers.
Boyce traces the evolution of the Fens from the Iron Age, including the ways the Fennish people adapted their communal way of living and survived the Romans, Saxons and Normans — even incorporating the Romans into their creation myth as a race of giants.
Because the Fens were seen as inhospitable and uninhabited lands and because of their direct resistance, combined with accommodation, adaptation and deal making, the Fennish people and their way of life survived, despite the early Christian churches establishing monasteries and churches on the Fens.
Efforts to dispossess the Fennish people began in the 1530s, during the English Reformation under Henry VII, when the monasteries were dissolved. The new landowners were unwilling to respect previous Fennish customs, let alone receive their rent in eels. More than one thousand Fennish villages were deserted due to enclosure.
Meanwhile, as the medieval system of charity broke down, the ruling class targeted the landless, who were unable to find work and classed as “vagrants” under the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601. These laws were not fully abolished until the adoption of the welfare state in the late 1940s.
The dispossession of the Fennish people met with much resistance, most notably in 1549, when under the leadership of Robert Kett, about 16,000 people gathered in an encampment outside Norwich to protest enclosures and marched on the town. Despite its eventual suppression, the rebellion lived on in popular memory, immortalised in the first of 29 demands, which said: “We pray …. from henceforth no man shall enclose anymore”.
Resistance by the Fennish people to further enclosures continued from the 17th to early 19th centuries, leading to the Isle of Axeholme not being fully enclosed until 1795. The Lincolnshire Fennish people's successful resistance to enclosure, between 1636 and 1642, led to the population of the Lincolnshire Fens almost doubling between 1563 and 1723.
Fennish football matches were among many of the customs and rituals used in the resistance. For example, in June 1638, hundreds of people from the Littleport area assembled for a football match in Whelpmore and Burnt Fen and used this as cover while they destroyed a ditch being built to drain the Common marsh.
During this period, coinciding with the rise of capitalism, the British state expanded its reach throughout Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and its colonial empire beyond. Meanwhile, legislation such as the 1723 Black Acts, which broadened the types of crimes the authorities could either execute or transport people for, expanded the state's repressive features.
From the mid-18th century onwards, in a process similar that of the Scottish Highland clearances, the dispossession of the Fens continued through acts of enclosure and drainage by the British state. Between 1750 and 1820, 1,800 enclosure bills were enacted and 21% of England was enclosed, including 2.8 million hectares between 1760 and 1800.
Ultimately, despite the centuries-long resistance of the Fennish people, technological changes associated with the Industrial revolution in the late 18th and 19th centuries, World War II, food shortages and the devastating 1947 and 1953 floods sped up the final drainage and enclosure of the Fens.
Boyce argues that the process of Fennish dispossession was similar to that of other Indigenous peoples in North America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere: “The Fennish story is an integral part of the troubled history of the imperial age. As elsewhere in the empire, an Indigenous people fought the land grab through every means available to them, including force, until the subversive power of the modern state and the technological power of the Industrial Revolution achieved what seemed to be a final victory.”
In Imperial Mud, Boyce brings the Fennish people to life as active agents, resisting their dispossession and colonisation, but ever adaptable in protecting an evolving eco-system. We should take inspiration from this in the fight against capitalism, climate change and for Indigenous sovereignty.