FullReads

The author of the History of Ramsey grows enthusiastic, and, after the manner of old monks, somewhat bombastic also, as he describes the lonely isle which got its name from the solitary ram who had wandered thither, either in some extreme drought or over the winter ice, and never able to return, was found, fat beyond the wont of rams, feeding among the wild deer. He tells of the stately ashes–most of them cut in his time, to furnish mighty beams for the church roof; of the rich pastures painted with all gay flowers in spring; of the ‘green crown’ of reed and alder which girdled round the isle; of the fair wide mere with its ‘sandy beach’ along the forest side: ‘a delight,’ he says, ‘to all who look thereon.’

In like humour, William of Malmesbury, writing in the first half of the twelfth century, speaks of Thorney Abbey and isle. ‘It represents,’ he says, ‘a very Paradise, for that in pleasure and delight it resembles heaven itself. These marshes abound in trees, whose length without a knot doth emulate the stars. The plain there is as level as the sea, which with green grass allures the eye, and so smooth that there is nought to hinder him who runs through it. Neither is therein any waste place for in some parts are apple trees, in other vines, which are either spread on the ground or raised on poles. A mutual strife is there between nature and art; so that what one produces not, the other supplies. What shall I say of those fair buildings, which ’tis so wonderful to see the ground among those fens upbear?’

But the most detailed picture of a fen-isle is that in the second part of the Book of Ely; wherein a single knight of all the French army forces his way into the isle of St. Etheldreda, and, hospitably entertained there by Hereward and his English, is sent back safe to William the Conqueror, to tell him of the strength of Ely isle.

He cannot praise enough–his speech may be mythical; but as written by Richard of Ely, only one generation after, it must describe faithfully what the place was like–the wonders of the isle: its soil the richest in England, its pleasant pastures, its noble hunting-grounds, its store of sheep and cattle (though its vines, he says, as a Frenchman had good right to say, were not equally to be praised), its wide meres and bogs, about it like a wall. In it was, to quote roughly, ‘abundance of tame beasts and of wild stag, roe, and goat, in grove and marsh; martens, and ermines, and fitchets, which in hard winter were caught in snares or gins. But of the kind of fish and fowl which bred therein, what can I say? In the pools around are netted eels innumerable, great water wolves, and pickerel, perch, roach, burbot, lampreys, which the French called sea-serpents; smelts, too; and the royal fish, the turbot [surely a mistake for sturgeon], are said often to be taken. But of the birds which haunt around, if you be not tired, as of the rest, we will expound. Innumerable geese, gulls, coots, divers, water-crows, herons, ducks, of which, when there is most plenty, in winter, or at moulting time, I have seen hundreds taken at a time, by nets, springes, or birdlime,’ and so forth till, as he assures William, the Frenchman may sit on Haddenham field blockading Ely for seven years more, ‘ere they will make one ploughman stop short in his furrow, one hunter cease to set his nets, or one fowler to deceive the birds with springe and snare.’

And yet there was another side to the picture. Man lived hard in those days, under dark skies, in houses–even the most luxurious of them–which we should think, from draughts and darkness, unfit for felons’ cells. Hardly they lived; and easily were they pleased, and thankful to God for the least gleam of sunshine, the least patch of green, after the terrible and long winters of the Middle Age. And ugly enough those winters must have been, what with snow-storm and darkness, flood and ice, ague and rheumatism; while through the long drear winter nights the whistle of the wind and the wild cries of the water-fowl were translated into the howls of witches and demons; and (as in St. Guthlac’s case) the delirious fancies of marsh fever made fiends take hideous shapes before the inner eye, and act fantastic horrors round the old fen-man’s bed of sedge.