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Updated: May 19, 2025
Did I not send again and again, entreating you to cross from Scheldtmouth to the Wash, and send me word that I might come and raise the Fen-men for you, and then we would all go north together?" "I have heard, ere now," said Earl Osbiorn, haughtily, "that Hereward, though he be a valiant Viking, is more fond of giving advice than of taking it." Hereward was about to answer very fiercely.
"Haven't got any in London only rats." The engineer greeted the lads warmly and went up to the temporary hut he occupied to fetch his gun, when, in the corner of the room Dick saw something which made him glance at Tom. "Yes," said the engineer, who saw the glance; "we're going to show your fen-men, Master Dick, that we do not mean to be trifled with.
The severe look passed off directly though, and he smiled. "Dick," he said gravely, "all those years at a good school, to come back as full of ignorance and prejudice as the fen-men! Shame!" He walked away, leaving Dick with his companion Tom Tallington. "I say," said the latter, "you caught it." "Well, I can't help it," said Dick, who felt irritated and ashamed.
"They'll have plenty of good land to grow potatoes, and oats, instead of water, which produces them a precarious living from wild-fowl and fish, and ruins no end of them with rheumatism and fever." "Yes, but " "But what, man? The fen-men who don't cultivate the soil are very few compared to those who do, and the case is this.
John came to the help of the fen-men, and drew up the so-called 'Pretended Ordinance' of 1649, which was a compromise between Vermuyden and the adventurers, so able and useful that Charles II.'s Government were content to call it 'pretended' and let it stand, because it was actually draining the fens; and how Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, after doing mighty works, and taking mighty moneys, died a beggar, writing petitions which never got answered; how William, Earl of Bedford, added, in 1649, to his father's 'old Bedford River' that noble parallel river, the Hundred foot, both rising high above the land between dykes and 'washes, i.e. waste spaces right and left, to allow for flood water; how the Great Bedford Rivers silted up the mouth of the Ouse, and backed the floods up the Cam; how Denver sluice was built to keep them back; and so forth, all is written, or rather only half or quarter written, in the histories of the fens.
The camp where they had come up with them before was deserted, and Herebald and Bernulf now had for their task the discovery of the direction the party had taken. Had they not been fen-men they might not have succeeded. But by night they felt that they were really on their trail.
How they sent for Vermuyden, the Dutchman, who had been draining in North Lincolnshire, about Goole and Axholme Isle; how they got into his hands, and were ruined by him; how Francis of Bedford had to sell valuable estates to pay his share; how the fen-men looked on Francis of Bedford as their champion; how Charles I. persecuted him meanly, though indeed Bedford had, in the matter of the 'Lynn Law' of 1630, given way, as desperate men are tempted to do, to something like sharp practice unworthy of him; how Charles took the work into his hands, and made a Government job of it; how Bedford died, and the fen-men looked on him as a martyr; how Oliver Cromwell arose to avenge the good earl, as his family had supported him in past times; how Oliver St.
The harness was thrust aside by the wheelwright, ready to take home, and then at a word the two fen-men came forward, and together they rolled the awkwardly-shaped root over and over toward the farm; while, once satisfied that the pine-root was on its way, Dick gave his companion a slap on the shoulder, and moistened his hand to get a better grip of his stick. "Get a stick, Tom," he said.
And after that, the fen-men said to each other, that all the birds upon the meres cried nothing, save "Hereward is come home again!" And so, already surrounded with myth and mystery, Hereward flashed into the fens and out again, like the lightning brand, destroying as he passed. And the hearts of all the French were turned to water; and the land had peace from its tyrants for many days.
There were old fen-men who murmured and declared that the place was being destroyed, but for the most part they lived to see that great drain and others made, and the wild morass become dry land upon which the plough turned up the black soil and the harrow smoothed, and great waving crops of corn took the place of those of reed.
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