Fenlands and their drainage commanded a remarkable amount of airtime amidst the political and military turmoil that engulfed mid seventeenth-century England. Writing in 1653, the anonymous ‘Anti-Projector’ began their short pamphlet with the urgent question: ‘whether drayning be good for the common wealth’? This was not only a matter of national prosperity, but critically also one of justice. The Anti-Projector accused drainage ‘projectors’ – an amorphous group comprising entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, and inventors – of ‘pretending the publick, but intending only their private ends’. Collaborating closely with the tyrannical king, Charles I, projectors had acted as judges in their own cause, advancing improvement by infringing on the rights of fen communities and perverting the laws of the realm. Such acts epitomised the abuses of royal power that had led Parliament to take up arms against the king. But projectors’ ‘over flowing corruptions’ had resurged once again to ‘hurtfully surround the Parliament’, leading its members to resurrect the project to drain the vast Great Level in East Anglia in 1649.Footnote ¹ In an early example of swamps as a metaphor for political corruption, the Anti-Projector called for these venal influences to be drained.

This pamphlet contributed to a virulent exchange of words about the legitimacy and value of wetland improvement, broadcast in print during the republican Commonwealth. The Anti-Projector was preoccupied by the unjust twists and turns through which such projects had been expedited, uncovering bribery, bias, factions, and scheming. But they also alluded to a politics that took place beyond Westminster, rooted in the lived experiences of those inhabiting the fens. Questions of commonwealth and justice had been violently fought out during riots in drained wetlands when civil war gripped England in the 1640s. In February 1646, for instance, commoners from Epworth Manor petitioned the House of Lords, alleging that drainage projectors in Hatfield Level had thwarted a trial to prove their ‘ancient right and title’ to the commons for almost two decades. In a counter-petition, their adversaries accused the rioting commoners of wreaking ‘much losse to the comon wealth’.Footnote ²

The matter of whether drainage was good for the commonwealth was by no means settled, not least because commonwealth was a slippery term capable of containing divergent arguments. Neither Parliament nor king exercised sacrosanct authority. Confronted by a House of Lords order to suppress rioting, Epworth commoners were defiant, declaring that ‘whatsoever was sowen upon any the improved lands, should be all destroyed’.Footnote ³ Plants growing in the earth and the water that flowed across wetlands were subject to competing forms of legitimacy and authority. The problem of who had the right to manage wetlands was entangled in the crises of sovereignty, liberty, and property that propelled national conflict. The collision of these controversies illuminates how environments were politically constructed and contested, and how environmental concerns inflected politics in early modern England.

1.1 Early Modern Wetlands and Environmental History

The early modern period has been identified as a time of dramatic ruptures and expanding frontiers of anthropogenic environmental change. Ambitious projects in English wetlands raise questions about the location and timing of these changes. The expanding cusp of empire as a frontier between humans and ‘wilderness’ has long preoccupied environmental historians.Footnote ⁴ With Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean in 1492, Atlantic colonisation transmitted new animals, plants, and diseases to the Americas alongside people and political structures. Biologically unifying the globe and dramatically reshaping the Atlantic world, this ecological ‘exchange’ was underpinned by profoundly uneven power dynamics. Relying on the displacement and death of Indigenous communities and the trafficking and exploitation of enslaved Africans, land expropriation, resource extraction, and intensive agriculture in American colonies fuelled European economies with furs, sugar, rice, cotton, and tobacco.Footnote ⁵

The juncture between the early modern and modern, meanwhile, is often defined by a pivotal moment of ecological rupture in mid eighteenth-century Europe. The precocious industrial revolution in Britain unlocked subterranean energy reserves accreted across millennia by harnessing coal to new technologies of thermodynamic motion. Previously, societies had relied on land and plants alone to produce the energy that fuelled animal and human labour, which in turn powered almost all production and transport; what Tony Wrigley has called the ‘photosynthetic constraint’.Footnote ⁶ By transcending Britain’s finite island landmass, colonies and coal together provided ‘ghost acres’ for its economy and released it from this constraint.Footnote ⁷ The advent of fossil-fuelled steam power aligns the dawn of capitalist modernity with the origins of the Anthropocene, a period in which humans have become the dominant force shaping global geology and ecology, establishing trends which accelerated dramatically from the mid twentieth century onward.

It was in the centuries before the industrial revolution that statesmen, colonists, entrepreneurs, and natural philosophers began to imagine land and resources as elastic – with material effects. In recent years, scholars have distinguished the fossil-fuelled ‘Mineral Anthropocene’ from an earlier ‘Organic Anthropocene’, precipitated by the intensification and globalisation of resource extraction and land use in the early modern world and, especially, by European colonisation in the Atlantic. Earth systems scientists have shown that human activities like land clearance, burning, ploughing, and drainage began to register in the atmospheric record of carbon dioxide and methane in the early modern period, and these land-use emissions were not outstripped by industrial, mineral, ones until 1910.Footnote ⁸ Expanding resource frontiers were not only a feature of early modern empire; they also operated through national projects to exploit forests, intensify fishing and farming, extract subterranean minerals, and irrigate and drain land.Footnote ⁹ In early modern England, enormous intellectual and practical energy was devoted to developing knowledge of nature and putting it to profitable use, so that ‘[n]ature being known, it may be master’d, managed, and used in the services of human life’.Footnote ¹⁰ Fuelled by and feeding colonial endeavours, these initiatives also propelled efforts to expand the amount and productivity of agricultural land within England. The scale of ambition often exceeded the technological and bureaucratic tools available, but projects of wetland improvement made aspiration material. Few environmental processes in early modern England were more intentional and anthropogenic in origin and few human acts were more geological and ecological in their impact. These highly capitalised ventures aimed to alter soil and water to engineer a habitat suitable for different types of plants. The diversity of grasses and animals nourished by wetland commons were to be replaced with domesticated species of rapeseed, barley, or wheat, cultivated intensively on dry and enclosed land. Contemporaries drew overt parallels between ventures in the fens and overseas colonies, imagining wetlands as a frontier at which the act of improvement would expand territory, amplify resources, establish settlements, and extend sovereignty.

There is no whisper of ‘the environment’ (a twentieth-century coinage) as a discrete concept in early modern records. Instead, it can be found densely woven into the fabric of everyday life. Environmental thought and action, recent studies have shown, were inseparable from medical care, economic livelihoods, neighbourly relations, aesthetic ideals, and sensory experiences of noise, dirt, and smell.Footnote ¹¹ Others have traced early modern roots to modern trajectories of accelerated economic and ecological change. London’s early transition to fossil fuels has been investigated by William Cavert, for instance, who charts its ‘precocious modernity’ as city dwellers negotiated coal supplies and smoky skies.Footnote ¹² Collectively, this burgeoning scholarship illuminates how early modern people encountered environments from the micro-politics of the parish pump to macro-trajectories of global climate change.Footnote ¹³ Agriculture employed much of the population in early modern Europe. It was perhaps the primary method through which people acted on the material worlds around them and, in aggregate, it fuelled urbanisation, colonisation, and the Organic Anthropocene. Yet, it is curiously absent from this new wave of early modern environmental history.Footnote ¹⁴ Studies instead tend to cluster in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when conservation initiatives and industrial technologies became powerful forces in Britain’s rural landscapes.Footnote ¹⁵

Wetland improvement has instead featured in two strands of scholarship about agricultural landscapes, one emphasising continuity and the other dramatic change. Historical geographers, archaeologists, and palaeo-ecologists have traced how climate, water, and land interacted with human activity in wetlands across the longue durée.Footnote ¹⁶ Seventeenth-century hydraulic projects are just one episode a fluctuating story of shifting boundaries and reciprocal adaptation. Such studies take environmental forces seriously as an actor within human histories, but often consider them in material rather than social or political terms. A contrasting story of seismic change has been told by socio-economic historians for whom seventeenth-century fen projects were a clean break. They represent the ‘most dramatic’ and ‘spectacular’ example of an early agricultural revolution in England, in which new farming techniques and patterns of land ownership established capitalist relations of production and significant increases in agricultural yields.Footnote ¹⁷ Many of these trends were piecemeal, regionally diverse, and locally negotiated, developing cumulatively over several centuries. By contrast, centrally coordinated improvement schemes sought to transform wetland regions into a new agricultural ideal in a matter of decades. As the ‘most heavily capitalized early modern English effort to increase arable land’, fen projects were integral to ‘the wholesale making of agricultural landscapes’.Footnote ¹⁸ These initiatives spearheaded enclosure during a century in which an estimated quarter of England’s common lands were lost.Footnote ¹⁹ From this vantage point, improvement transformed wetlands into alienable property: a colourless container for productivity that was alienated from ecological and social relations.

By working from environmental perspectives, Violent Waters seeks to move beyond land as the basic unit of analysis and agricultural output as the endpoint. So ancient and quotidian is agriculture as the method through which humans have created environments that it is often taken as the boundary beyond which nature lies.Footnote ²⁰ As Allan Greer has observed, however, land remains:

Identifying humans as just one of many organisms and forces that act within environments, scholars have recently argued that we can understand these interrelationships and interactions as ‘assemblages’.Footnote ²² An analogous word for these acts of world-making in early modern England was ‘environ’, which meant to inhabit or occupy a place by moving through it, to surround or be surrounded. This act could be performed by rivers and mountains as well as humans.Footnote ²³ Environmental acts were never simply material; they were political because they relied on and engendered relationships of power: decision-making institutions, laws, legitimacy, and – above all – negotiation and conflict. According to Paul Warde, ‘environing’ can be understood as a process through which resources were configured as a sphere of human action, investigating ‘what governed action’ and how environmental ‘regulation became an area for the contestation of power’.Footnote ²⁴ Endeavours to extend productivity and sovereignty to marginal environments, Jennifer Keating has argued, involved acting as ‘an ecosystem engineer, exercising power within and between more-than-human worlds’.Footnote ²⁵

Multiple engineers were at work in early modern wetlands, harnessing biotic energy and negotiating power to create environments and societies alike. This activity did not begin at the frontier of improvement. For centuries, wetlands had been managed as vast commons by local communities who exercised collective rights to graze livestock and gather peat, fish, earth, hay, and moss. Introducing new scales of action defined by transnational capital and Westminster politics, improvement generated new types of encounters between the more-than-human world and practices of digging, herding, and mapmaking. Violent Waters traces interactions between the multiple scales at which wetlands were made, as improvement forged connections between immemorial histories and imagined futures, a few yards of riverbank and national food security. Neither ecological nor governance scales should be understood as stable or objective; instead, they were ‘continuously (re)constructed in the interfaces of science, society, politics and nature’.Footnote ²⁶ In organising experience and guiding action through litigation, cartography, or commoning, rival groups sought to order the wetland world while grappling with its sometimes unpredictable forces. Exploring dynamic assemblages of water, bridges, sediment, grasses, ploughs, birds, livestock, and riverbanks, Violent Waters asks how they were understood, acted on, and disputed and how these wetland relations, in turn, reforged political and social relationships.

The overarching geological and ecological force in amphibious wetlands was a constant dialogue between land and water: fluctuating rivers, floods, bogs, and tides. The early modern period witnessed efforts to control water at scales that were national in ambition and transnational in execution, whether channelling drinking water into London, draining the Venice lagoon, or digging canals between Dutch cities.Footnote ²⁷ Hydraulic projects in England were part of a wave of endeavours by European rulers to lay wetland regions dry and recover land from the sea. Capital and expertise accumulated in the Low Countries crossed national borders as Dutch drainage engineers and investors secured patronage from German and Danish princes, Italian cities, and French and English kings.Footnote ²⁸ Water management at this scale required new forms of financial, legal, and administrative organisation to coordinate immense amounts of capital and physical labour. For this reason, water has been understood as a conduit through which state power flowed. At one extreme, Karl Wittfogel contended that ‘hydraulic societies’ have given rise to bureaucratic structures and autocratic states.Footnote ²⁹ But recent accounts of ambitious dam-building projects have stressed more reciprocal relationships. Even as hydraulic governance strengthened national authority and identities in modern South Asia, Sunil Amrith has argued, water acted as ‘a material constraint on every Promethean plan of growth and plenty’, unsettling fantasies of progress with its own cycles and disruptions.Footnote ³⁰

In the shadow of these grand designs, it is easy for the ‘micro-politics of water’ to be washed away.Footnote ³¹ For centuries before wetlands came into the orbit of improving states and entrepreneurs, their inhabitants managed flow by building sluices, repairing seawalls and riverbanks, and ‘scouring’ channels by removing reeds and silt. A rich seam of scholarship has shown how, across European wetlands and coastlines, local hydraulic practices were supervised by specialised institutions coordinating water at a regional level. A story of gradual, decentralised, and participatory ‘state development’ can therefore be traced alongside the narrative of centralised, top-down, and disruptive intervention in wetlands by central governors. By participating in ‘sewer commissions’ as regional water institutions in early modern England, John Morgan has argued, ‘local people acted with the power of the state to compel and coerce their neighbours’. This, in turn, empowered the state.Footnote ³² Violent Waters adds to understandings of how states and communities interacted in wetlands by showing that, prior to improvement, water management remained largely vested in communities enacting highly localised and often unwritten customary laws. In English wetland commons, a kaleidoscope of individual and collective water responsibilities mirrored customary rights to resources. Communal and intergenerational experiences of coping with regular flooding fostered participatory ‘water cultures’ coloured by ‘normative ideas of diligence, duty and order’.Footnote ³³ Projects of wetland improvement provoked struggles with local communities over hydraulic decision making, water responsibilities, and flood risk – which often pivoted on debates about the purpose and powers of sewer commissions. New infrastructure did not simply channel central authority; it generated a contested politics of flow as jurisdiction over water management was transferred from communities to improving experts, investors, and statesmen.

Creating a habitat suitable for intensive cultivation involved abrogating collective regulation of the commons via enclosure as well as freeing wetlands from floodwater. As a dense fabric of local rules, custom governed what kind of activities could take place within a common, when, where, and by whom. The plant and animal life supported by large terraqueous commons varied vastly by season and place, creating complex interdependencies. Reed-cutting at the wrong time or in the wrong place might disturb the ability to exercise fishing rights later in the year, for instance, while a ford for livestock to cross a river could prevent boats from travelling downstream. While custom can be understood as ‘a canon of management measures designed to limit damage to communal resources’, Warde has suggested that this regulation was driven primarily by social rather than ecological priorities, aiming to prevent infringement of others’ rights.Footnote ³⁴ Enclosure created a new swathe of landlords, comprised of investors in the drainage scheme, who were granted discretionary powers to determine the conditions of land use. In supplanting communal regulation with leasehold tenancies, ‘a concentration of managerial control over cultivation’ was produced.Footnote ³⁵ The welcome and the weedy were redefined and investments and extraction intensified, reorganising environments according to a nexus of new economic relations. Yet, it is possible to overstate the absoluteness of private property and its abstraction from other types of relations. In drained wetlands, land was not divorced from water. Improved hydraulic systems created new interdependencies and bound landowners into new responsibilities that were expressed in their liability for drainage taxes. In concert, exclusive property rights relied heavily on legal and coercive force orchestrated by central governors to subdue the wetland communities who challenged and transgressed these boundaries through litigation and riot. The material acts of drainage, enclosure, and cultivation were entangled in relations of power, calling for us to ‘unravel the political forces at work in environmental management, access, and transformation’.Footnote ³⁶

1.2 The Politics of Wetland Improvement

What kind of politics were at work in imagining, implementing, and contesting environmental change during wetland improvement? Fen projects entangled wetlands in thorny questions about justice, power, profit, and risk – and these questions are best answered by investigating the terms through which they were vigorously debated in early modern England. For governors, landlords, and investors, ‘improvement’ served as a tool to redefine the optimal management of water, land, and people in the fens. Historians have defined improvement as a ‘discourse’, ‘culture’, or ‘new ethic’ unique to England.Footnote ³⁷ Accumulating meaning and momentum across the early modern period, improving ideas and techniques were propagated by agricultural writers, expanded by natural philosophers, and elaborated by the propagandists and administrators of Irish and American plantations.Footnote ³⁸ In its earliest iteration, improvement simply denoted an increase in revenue from land, yoking the earth to profit. By the early seventeenth century, it had become synonymous with enclosure. More expansively, it began to describe the application of empirical knowledge to define, examine, and solve problems ranging from bad soil to poverty to international trade.Footnote ³⁹ In mobilising human and natural resources to bolster national wealth, improvement was framed not only by the logic of markets but also by normative concepts of a good economy.Footnote ⁴⁰ As such, it was understood as a foundation of social reform, instilling health, morals, and industriousness in the nation’s subjects.

It was through the lens of improvement that wetlands were identified as sites of untapped productivity and flooding as a problem to be solved by high-capital interventions and central political authority. Improvement in early modern England has often been conceptualised as an act of individual enterprise, disseminated via husbandry books and scientific networks and implemented by farmers and entrepreneurs rather statesmen and legislation. The state assumed a leading role, however, when the early Stuart crown launched flagships schemes of improvement in forests and fens in the 1620s. These ventures marked not only a sea change in governing attitudes towards enclosure, but also an intensification of the expression of political power through environmental transformation and an expansion of the resources – natural and financial – available to undergird sovereign authority. It was just one instance of a ‘spirit of reformation’ that increasingly brought governance of the natural world within the remit of early modern polities.Footnote ⁴¹ Civic authorities regulated urban sanitation as a means to reinforce social order, rival states contested oceanic spaces as strategic sites of power and exchange, and monarchies and republics alike attempted to optimise timber and mineral resources. Looking back at the century from the vantage point of 1690, the political arithmetician Sir William Petty singled out the ‘dreyning of fens’ and ‘improving of forrests, and commons’ as key contributors to England’s prosperity and power.Footnote ⁴² Paul Slack has likewise argued that the seventeenth-century culture of improvement fundamentally worked: ‘new kinds of information and aspirations to material betterment had a “positive-feedback” effect on economic performance’, producing greater national wealth, technological development, and a rise in living standards.Footnote ⁴³

Studies of improvement have often orbited around the printed word and elite networks of knowledge that spanned Europe and the Atlantic.Footnote ⁴⁴ But we still know relatively little about how improving ideas acted in practice within social and material environments.Footnote ⁴⁵ As a disembodied entity, ‘the state’ was not able to act directly upon forests or dirt. Regulating and transforming environments relied heavily on material action on the ground, on the labour of many hands. In an era before mechanisation, it was largely through exerting their own energy or directing that of animals that humans acted on soils, rivers, and plants. As a result, officials and institutions seeking to regulate environments were often concerned with regulating the actions of individuals and communities who inhabited them. Distributing rights and responsibilities involved compelling action or inaction, controlling movement, and identifying and punishing infringements. As early Stuart governors sought to expand their control over national resources, they often asserted that local communities were bad managers, depleting forests or degrading wetlands, and promised that state action would conserve or enhance resources for strategic purposes and future generations. In this way, anxieties about unruly people and untamed environments became enmeshed. In practice, the benefits of improvement were not evenly distributed and local communities did not always – or often – welcome improving interventions. Improvement ‘left winners and losers with different responses to economic betterment’, Slack acknowledged, and schemes to improve forests and fens caused the crown ‘more political trouble than they were worth in financial terms’.Footnote ⁴⁶ In constructing arcs of material progress, contemporary improvers and historians of improvement alike have obscured the social politics that emerged on the ground.

Wetland projects offer unparalleled insights into the implementation and negotiation of improvement in muddy environments and fluid political landscapes. At the heart of Violent Waters lies Hatfield Level, the first state-led project of wetland improvement in England, instigated by Charles I in partnership with the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden in 1626. The scheme encompassed 60,000 acres of fluvial wetland at the intersection of Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Yorkshire. Far less well-known than the fenland further south, these northern fens were located within a vast region of costal marsh and riverine wetlands around the Humber estuary that has now ‘evaporated from general memory’.Footnote ⁴⁷ They were bound together by river systems, but divided by parish, manor, and county boundaries. The north-west of Hatfield Level was dominated by Hatfield Manor in Yorkshire and its south-east by the Isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire, in which lay the vast manor of Epworth and its smaller neighbours Crowle and Wroot. At its northern and southern extremes, it included parishes fringing the River Ouse in Yorkshire and the River Idle in Nottinghamshire (Figure 7.1). As lord of almost all these manors, the crown was able to exercise seigneurial authority and state power to propel improvement. It relied on private funding and expertise to execute the project, however, which was outsourced to Vermuyden and a cohort of Dutch investors known as ‘Participants’. Together, they wrested management of water and the commons from local communities, intervening to redraw waterways and enclose two-thirds of drained commons. The Hatfield Level project served as a pilot scheme, opening the floodgates for ventures that quickly followed in the southern fenlands: the immense Great Level, spanning 360,000 acres, as well as a spate of initiatives in south Lincolnshire (Figure 1.1).Footnote ⁴⁸

Figure 1.1

Historic coastal wetlands of east and south-east England.

Figure 1.1 Long description

The wetlands on the coast of the North Sea are Humber Wetland, Fenland, N Norfolk Coast, Norfolk Broads, Suffolk Coast, Essex Coast, Thames Marshes, East Kent, Romney or Walland Marshes, and Pevensey Levels. It also highlights the locations of Hull and Hatfield Level in Humber Wetlands, Kings Lynn and Wisbech in Fenland, Dunwich near Suffolk Coast, London in Thames Marshes, New Winchelsea in Walland Marshes, and Dover between East Kent and Walland Marshes.

Sources: Map reproduced from James A. Galloway, ‘Coastal flooding and socioeconomic change in eastern England in the later Middle Ages’, Environment and History 19 (2013), 175. Used with permission of Environment and History; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Grand projects of environmental reform were forged within rough terrain and altered by encounters with environments and communities. As David Bell has forcefully argued:

In Hatfield Level, the national and transnational ambitions that drove wetland improvement collided with the dynamic politics of local custom. The loudest and longest dispute erupted in Epworth Manor, where commoners organised vigorously against improvement for almost a century. Tenacious litigation in defence of their customary rights was matched by huge riots, accounting for some 40 per cent of all seventeenth-century drainage disorder.Footnote ⁵⁰ Settlers who farmed the improved land – a transnational community of Calvinist refugees from France and the Low Countries – found themselves at the sharp end of much of this violence, targeted alongside the new infrastructure of banks, fences, and crops. In 1651, at the apex of a coordinated campaign to reclaim enclosed land, Epworth commoners forged a high-profile alliance with the political leaders of the radical Leveller movement, John Lilburne and John Wildman, who they briefly employed as legal advocates. The dispute concluded only in 1719, when protracted litigation led to commoners retaining 80 per cent of Epworth commons.Footnote ⁵¹ Yet, this conflict has sometimes drowned out a multitude of other disputes that rippled out of the Hatfield Level project, including the less spectacular ways that neighbouring communities navigated improvement. In response to scarcity in the commons and new flood risks, these commoners adopted strategies of petition, sabotage, negotiation, and adaptation.

As well as illuminating the politics of nature, re-examining the contentious politics that unfolded in drained wetlands casts fresh light on long-standing debates about the nature of politics in early modern England. Seventeenth-century riots in forests and fens were depoliticised by a generation of revisionist historians, who insisted that they were ‘non-ideological and non-revolutionary’ and disavowed any possibility of deciphering ‘an articulate voice of revolt in the records’.Footnote ⁵² Grappling with controversies over the causes of the English civil wars in the 1980s, these scholars were anxious to refute Marxist arguments about early modern class consciousness. Concluding his meticulous study of drainage disorder and civil war conflict, Keith Lindley found that rioters ‘did not give expression to political feelings’.Footnote ⁵³ These arguments rested on the premise that politics proper took place within Westminster, while rural communities’ interests were narrowly social and economic.

Social historians have since expanded the ‘political’ far beyond national events and the actions of governing elites to explore how power was negotiated locally – in church seating arrangements, the distribution of poor relief, and moments of gesture and speech.Footnote ⁵⁴ The lively politics of the parish, it has been argued, contributed cumulatively to the formation of the early modern state. The dispersed exercise of central authority in the provinces relied on an ‘unacknowledged republic’ of officeholders, who enforced order as justices of the peace and policed morality as churchwardens.Footnote ⁵⁵ An even broader range of people engaged with institutions ranging from parish vestries to Westminster courts by serving as jurors, testifying as witnesses, petitioning for redress, and instigating litigation – although participation was stratified by age, gender, and status.Footnote ⁵⁶ It is this model of politics that has provided the frame for more recent histories of drainage and water management. In Eric Ash’s study, a coherent, problem-solving state sought to create ‘a more effectively drained, more prosperous, and more governable fenland’. By dealing with social disorder and environmental problems, Ash argued, central governors developed their administrative, legislative, and coercive capacity.Footnote ⁵⁷ This approach echoes a wider scholarship on ‘state building from below’ in early modern Europe. Lawsuits, for instance, have been depicted as ‘more of an advantage than a threat to the process of state centralisation’, since governors ‘could enormously strengthen and expand their juridical competence’ by mediating disputes.Footnote ⁵⁸ Others have suggested that flood events acted as a trigger for the development of central authority, either through top-down initiatives or local appeals for assistance.Footnote ⁵⁹

This scholarship has re-opened investigation of vital connections between wetlands and Westminster. Politics often remains framed, however, by the state. Examining the vigorous conflicts that emerged in the wake of improvement in Hatfield Level, Violent Waters argues that the early modern state was by no means monolithic and not all forms of engagement with its actors and apparatus ultimately bolstered its power. As Brodie Waddell and Jason Peacey have recently argued, ‘everyday concerns could generate broader reflections upon political structures and systems’ and acts such as petitioning about local issues could involve making wider political claims about sovereignty, justice, and legitimacy.Footnote ⁶⁰ Popular notions of good order – social, political, economic, or environmental – were never simply a mirror of statutory law or royal proclamations. They were informed by a more flexible fabric of ideas about morality and justice, often rooted in local custom and fostering a profound legal plurality in society.Footnote ⁶¹ Common lands and customary laws were not easily integrated into the machinery of central governance. While parish vestries and sewer commissions have been identified as burgeoning institutions of the early modern state, custom is depicted as a declining remnant of manorial feudalism.Footnote ⁶² It was custom, however, which provided the political culture and collective organisation through which communities managed wetlands, and it was custom that they mobilised and adapted to meet the new challenges posed by improvement.

To decode how conflict over improvement interfaced with lived environments and national politics, therefore, it is necessary to take the local politics of custom seriously. The tensions captured by E. P. Thompson cannot be collapsed: if at ‘one extreme custom was sharply defined, enforceable at law, and (at enclosure) property’, it was also a more flexible ‘lived environment comprised of practices, inherited expectations, rules which both determined limits to usages and disclosed possibilities’.Footnote ⁶³ It is in the latter sense that custom knitted communal practices into the materiality of the wetland world, organising relations between humans and their immediate environs as well as among neighbours. While rooted in unbroken practice ‘tyme out of mynde’, custom was no rigid tradition. Andy Wood has shown how custom was often a site of competing claims and could evolve in response to new challenges as a ‘usable past’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Highly localised and often unwritten, customary rights relied on collective memory and embodied experience, with knowledge reproduced by both daily commoning and annual rituals like ‘beating the bounds’. Through this ‘material language of jurisdiction and right’, Nicola Whyte has written, landscapes were organised and ‘the boundaries of human relationships were physically tested and negotiated’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In regulating practices of gathering, digging, or grazing, custom co-produced environments and rights. While social historians have embraced custom as a micro-historical lens on local politics, the force it exercised within national politics and legal institutions has often been overlooked. At the interface between right as justice and right as practice, custom was wielded to negotiate improvement in courtrooms and commons.

The contentious environmental politics that emerged in Hatfield Level illuminates the often fractured and contingent nature of central authority in early modern England. As an instrument of coercion and legitimacy, legal structures both facilitated and limited governing strategies in early modern England.Footnote ⁶⁶ In principle, common rights and water management in the fens could not be altered legally without consent from local communities. Piet van Cruyningen has observed that where European states leant central force to drainage projects – disregarding local interests and failing to provide effective institutional channels to arbitrate complaints – violence and litigation threatened their economic and political viability. In the Dutch Republic, protracted legal and social conflict was often averted by well-developed and decentralised structures for negotiating competing claims, offering compensation, and adapting to local circumstances.Footnote ⁶⁷ In England, however, the early Stuart crown drove forward improvement by using executive and judicial power to coerce consent and suppress dissent – motivated in large part by its own financial difficulties and struggles with Parliament. This strategy was destabilising for both political legitimacy and wetland environments. With the summoning of Parliament and gathering of civil war in the early 1640s, simmering tensions in the fens broke into a wave of riots, petitions, and litigation that threatened to upend improvement projects. Struggles over who could legitimately make decisions about the just distribution of resources, responsibility, and risk in wetlands therefore intersected with national debates about the correct distribution of power in a well-governed polity. In Hatfield Level, meanwhile, coercive improvement produced social disorder and flood disaster, exposing central governors’ uncertain ability to implement controversial policies without local consent and participation. Through formal channels at Westminster and direct action in wetlands, fen communities redistributed flood and reconfigured property boundaries. The greatest obstacle to improvement was not violent waters or technological failure, but its lack of local legitimacy and the strength of custom as a method of environmental governance and political action.

1.3 Speech Acts, Action Speaks

Remaking and contesting wetlands took work, both political and material. Tracing interactions between transnational, national, and local scales of action in the fens involves reading across archive and print to make ‘connections across the types of conversations taking place within different groups of society’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Quentin Skinner has suggested that historians should read texts of political thought not as expressions of transcendent ideas, but as ‘speech-acts’ intended to intervene in historically bounded contexts.Footnote ⁶⁹ These linguistic methodologies can be extended beyond the printed texts, great thinkers, and discursive contexts that remain staples of intellectual history to the ‘social space wherein language becomes practice’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In this book, the ‘space’ or ‘context’ is understood as a social environment, rich with the ‘liveliness’ of the world.Footnote ⁷¹ Speech-acts articulated during fen disputes include surveys encoding new property rights and seditious words reported by witnesses in court. Structured by specific institutional contexts and epistemological tools, these were arguments intended to intervene in wetlands. If speech acted, then action also spoke. Illuminating a terrain in which meaning was made, the construction of fences and sabotage of drainage works expressed ideas about justice, property, and value through a material and symbolic syntax. By ‘working back and forth between texts and contexts’, it is possible to examine how different forms of action interacted to environ wetlands.Footnote ⁷²

Debate about drainage took place in Parliament, in projectors’ proposals, and on the pages of agricultural manuals, permeating the politics of central governance and infusing discourses of improvement. Whether persuading politicians or involving a reading public, these texts sought to alter material conditions in the fens. In the process, fen projects seeped into wider cultural imaginaries of laughter and morality, wending through comic plays, religious sermons, and political polemic. Wetland communities actively participated in this national conversation. Often acting as collectives such as the ‘inhabitants of the Isle of Axholme’, they tabled amendments to parliamentary bills and amplified their arguments in pamphlets. Petitions filled many of the gaps that emerged as drainage forged new lines between Westminster and wetlands and triggered new problems that the infrastructure of governance was ill-equipped to resolve. A moveable feast of central authorities – the Privy Council, House of Lords, king, and Lord Protector – were addressed by petitioners, reflecting the interventionist impulse behind drainage and the absence of institutional channels of arbitration. Almost every stakeholder in Hatfield Level made strategic use of petitioning, organising shared interests to elicit action and, in doing so, consolidating collective identities. Often deemed ‘the acceptable form in which requests for social re-ordering were made’ in early modern England, petitioning was also an effective method of environmental re-ordering in fen disputes and often operated in tandem with direct action in the commons.Footnote ⁷³

The negotiation of improvement on the ground is brought to light by the cascade of legal disputes it unleashed in Hatfield Level. Most took place in the Court of Exchequer, which dealt with cases related to royal finances and estates. Much legal business was conducted in the fens, where commissioners summoned witnesses to testify in local towns and ventured into wetlands to assess waterworks and define enclosures. Lawyers and letters shuttled between Hatfield Level and London, while dozens of witnesses travelled 120 miles to Westminster to speak their piece during a high-profile parliamentary inquiry into a decade of riots in the Isle of Axholme in the early 1650s. The business of the court – commissioners’ instructions and reports, litigants’ bills and answers, and ensuing decrees and orders – discloses how such projects were facilitated and legitimised in practice.

Even as Exchequer commissions and parliamentary inquiries acted as instruments of improvement, they also served as what Asdal has called a ‘hearing institution’, which in giving ‘space for other people’s judgements … enacts difference and multiplicity’.Footnote ⁷⁴ These hearing institutions heard selectively, but they nonetheless recorded hundreds of witness testimonies, which offer vital insights into local experiences of, and arguments about, wetland change and conflict. Early modern ‘depositions’ have been identified as a unique transcription of oral culture, rich source of plebeian political discourse, and window into ‘the rhythms and routines of … everyday existence’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Rival parties selected witnesses who answered ‘interrogatories’, a series of leading questions that outlined litigants’ arguments. Some witnesses delivered flat affirmations, while others went off-script to offer vivid information about environmental encounters and social interactions. Structured by the evidential culture of the court, the scribe’s editorial hand, and witnesses’ oblique personal motives, the resulting testimony contains multiple and sometimes divergent layers of intention and significance; ‘an excess of meaning’ acting in ‘an excess of contexts’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Rather than a flawed or unreliable transcript, depositions’ strength lies in their ‘relationality’, capturing encounters between social and legal cultures.Footnote ⁷⁷ By reading with the grain of litigation, we can examine how judges, cartographers, commissioners, drainage engineers, and witnesses interacted with one another when making arguments about what a wetland was and should be. Different forms of epistemic authority were at work. Experts quantified land and improvers speculated about future rental values, while local commoners offered thick descriptions of inhabited environments.

Mapmakers and witnesses alike made claims to veracity, but they did not reflect the environment as it was; they instead intended to actively constitute it. Even so, drawing a map was not sufficient to enclose a common. The material implementation of improvement relied on a chain of contingent events, influences, and labour. Much conflict over rights and responsibilities played out in wetlands, as the commands of the Privy Council or courts were enforced, evaded, and defied. It took place in armed exchanges on riverbanks, through struggles to control floodgates, and during midnight missions to rescue animals. Customary and improving practices were adapted in the unstable physical and political terrain wrought by drainage disputes. Although reports of unrest were laden with rhetorical attempts to discredit opponents and infused by official anxieties, glimpses emerge of how political ideas informed the meanings and modes of violence within wetland environments. Alongside these dramatic clashes, improvement was made and unmade through the work of many hands and sometimes by its refusal. Established in the wake of the drainage project, the Hatfield Level sewer commission recorded a multiplicity of quotidian acts that distributed water rights, responsibilities, and risk in the northern fens – some under its orders and others in contravention of them. Collectively, these documents offer a transcript of the environmental negotiation of power in early modern wetlands.

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In seventeenth-century England, there was no agreement about what kind of environment wetlands were, the problems they presented, or the solutions required. The chapters that follow chart how wetlands were remade and disputed through encounters in print, institutions, and environments. Part I investigates how scales of human action in English wetlands were reimagined in the centuries and decades prior to the first state-led project in Hatfield Level. Moving from icesheets’ geological action to confrontation on a riverbank, Chapter 2 traces dynamic wetlands and the environmental politics of custom prior to improvement. Chapter 3 examines proponents of improvement who wrote fen histories and futures, reframing wetlands in national terms and seeking to refashion the environment, intellectual climate, and social fabric alike. The development of a coercive approach to wetland improvement is charted in Chapter 4, which considers how transnational, national, and local scales of action collided and triggered controversy over the exercise of power in early modern England.

Part II explores the environmental practices through which improvement unfolded in Hatfield Level and how it was experienced and negotiated on the ground by wetland communities. Chapter 5 asks how maps and surveys sought to remake wetlands spatially and how those facilitating improvement interfaced with customary knowledge about social environments. Chapter 6 maps the fraught water politics that emerged from the hydraulic reconfiguration of Hatfield Level, which demanded new strategies for coping with risk and raised urgent questions about enforcement, adaptation, and responsibility. Rhetorical and material negotiations of enclosure in the northern fens are examined in Chapter 7. Custom was reconfigured as communities adapted to scarcity and, in turn, altered the improved environment through animal trespass and hydro-violence.

Part III traces the instabilities that rippled out from the contested environment in Hatfield Level. Conflict eroded the projected productivity and profits of improved land, Chapter 8 shows. It explores how the reforming Hartlib circle navigated evidence of these ambiguous results in the mid seventeenth century, resorting to improving technologies to evade human fallibilities. Revisiting interactions between wetland disputes and civil war politics, Chapter 9 explores how definitions of justice were disputed and notions of sovereignty reformulated by fen communities. The final chapter considers the ‘plantation’ of Calvinist refugees who settled as improving farmers in Hatfield Level, which generated affinities and animosity between transnational, national, and local communities. Violent Waters seeks to reintroduce agency and contingency to accounts of inexorable political and economic progress in early modern England. In untangling the contentious environmental politics that emerged in Hatfield Level, it argues that contested improvement produced unstable terrain in wetlands and in Westminster.