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Updated: June 7, 2025
He looked this way and that, wondering whether it were as late as his kitchen-clock informed him, and observing the sun, that hung now lamentably high up in that enormous dome of summer sky that sat on the fenland like a dish-cover on a dish.
The Fenland was perhaps already stirring, and the Abbot of Peterborough might have to act as a military commander. In this case the prelate appointed, a Norman named Turold, was accordingly more of a soldier than of a monk. From these assemblies of 1070 the series of William's ecclesiastical changes goes on. As the English bishops die or are deprived, strangers take their place.
Tho once surrounded by fenland, the Abbey of Glastonbury a veritable treasure-house of legendary lore stands now amid orchards and level pasture lands engirt by the river Bure. The majestic Tor overshadows this spot, where, undoubtedly, the first British Christian settlement was established.
Much of it is reclaimed from the sea, and here and there the surface is broken by isolated knolls, there being some two hundred square miles of this region, with the range of Polden Hills extending through it and rising in some places three hundred feet high. In earlier times this was an exact reproduction of the Cambridgeshire fenland, and then, we are told,
Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby; England has need of thee, and so have I— She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour, League after grassy league from Lincoln tower To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen. Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men, Like a tall green volcano rose in power.
The grey of the dawn, the far, desolate reaches of the fenland smitten with winter, the sea-meadows rank with herbage, were stark enough to rejoice his soul.
And indeed, if it resembles anything I know it is not with the wide moors of Somerset, Sedgemoor, or the valley of the Brue, nor with the great windy Fenland in the midst of which Ely rises like a shrine or a sanctuary, I would compare it, but with the Campagna of Rome, whose tragic mystery it seems to have borrowed, at least in part, whose beauty it seems to wear, a little provincially, it is true, and whose majesty it apes, but cannot quite command.
Yet Eadmund our king, and even Ulfkytel, deemed that we were safe as ever behind our fenland barrier, fearing naught so long as no landing was made from across the Wash. "No matter," said men to one another. "It will be a hard thing for Danes to cross the great fens to come hither. They will turn aside into Mercia's very heart, and then the Wessex folk will rise."
We passed through scattered belts of pinewood, where the wild cat howled and the owl screeched, and across broad stretches of fenland and moor, where the silence was only broken by the booming cry of the bittern or the fluttering of wild duck far above our heads.
For during the long decay of the empire, the corsairs of the flat banks and islets of Sleswick and Friesland made many a light-hearted plundering expedition upon the unlucky coasts of the maritime Roman provinces; and it was to repel their dreaded attacks that the Count of the Saxon Shore was appointed to the charge of the long exposed tract from the fenland of the Wash to the estuary of the Rother in Sussex.
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