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The movement among the agricultural labourers, due to the energy and devotion of Joseph Arch, was beginning to be discussed in the fens, and my sympathies went strongly with the claims of the labourers, for I knew their life-conditions.
The apartments through which they passed swarmed with the foremost nobles, court-functionaries, and ladies of France, in blazing gala costume, who all greeted the envoys with demonstrations of extreme respect: The halls and corridors were lined with archers, halbardiers, Swiss guards, and grooms "besmeared with gold," and it was thought that all this rustle of fine feathers would be somewhat startling to the barbarous republicans, fresh from the fens of Holland.
The fens in the seventh century were probably very like the forests at the mouth of the Mississippi, or the swampy shores of the Carolinas. Their vast plain is now, in summer, one sea of golden corn; in winter, a black dreary fallow, cut into squares by stagnant dykes, and broken only by unsightly pumping mills and doleful lines of poplar-trees.
To them it seemed that the skies were about to fall, and that they would be wise to stand from under. While the monks of Ely were revolving this threat of disaster in their souls, the tide of assault and defence rolled on. William's causeway pushed its slow length forward through the fens. Hereward assailed it with fire and sword, and harried the king's lands outside by sudden raids.
An incredible number of hippopotami arose very near them, and came plashing and snorting and plunging all round the canoe, and placed them in imminent danger. Thinking to frighten them off, they fired a shot or two at them, but the noise only called up from the water, and out of the fens, about as many more of their unwieldy companions, and they were more closely beset than before.
Imagine the Wash prolonged for twenty or thirty miles inland and broadened considerably as it proceeded as would a curving fan, or better still, a horseshoe, and you have the Fens: a horseshoe whose points, as Dugdale says, are the corners of Lincolnshire and Norfolk. All around them is land of some little height, and quite dry.
Far away to the north-east, in a sterile land of fens, a small ambitious family of money-lenders who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty, thoroughly selfish, rather thinly adopted the theories of Luther, and began to lend their almost savage hinds as soldiers on the Protestant side.
These impenetrable forests stand in a dead flat, which extends some miles beyond them, and is intersected in many directions by rivers, and more still by canals, which are navigable for small vessels. Nor is this the worst, for the fence of every field and garden is a ditch; and interspersed among the cultivated ground there are many filthy fens, bogs, and morasses, as well fresh as salt.
As it is, the country is a sort of a cross between the plains of Lombardy and the fens of North Cambridgeshire. At night, a lot of Nelson and Wellington men came to the club.
Bulbous roots were fairly popping out of the earth; the fens and the edges of the lakes were rich with things to eat, overhead and underfoot the horn of plenty was emptying itself without stint. In this world Neewa and Miki found a vast and unending contentment. They lay, on this August afternoon, on a sun-bathed shelf of rock that overlooked a wonderful valley.
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