It is probable that the break-up of the ninth century saw the Fens partly drowned, and that after the Black Death something of the same sort happened again, for it is in the latter fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that you begin to hear of a necessity for reclaiming them.  John of Gaunt had a scheme, and Morton dug a ditch which is still called “Morton’s Leam.”  I say, every defeat of our civilisation was inflicted here in the Fens, but it is certain that the principal disaster followed the suppression of the monasteries.

These great foundations—­nourishing hundreds and governing thousands, based upon the populace, drawn from the populace, and living by the common life—­were scattered throughout the Fens.  They were founded on the “islands” nearest the good land:  Thorney, Ramsay, Croyland, Ely—­the nuns of Chatteris.

They dated from the very beginning.  Ely was founded within sight of our conversion, 672.  Croyland came even before that, before civilisation and religion were truly re-established in Britain; Penda’s great-nephew gave it its charter; St Augustine had been dead for little more than a century when the charter was signed.  Even as the monks came to claim their land they discovered hermits long settled there.  Thorney—­Ancarig it was then—­was even fifty years older than Croyland.  The roots of all these go back to the beginning of the nation.

Ramsay and Charteris cannot be traced beyond the gulf of the Danish invasion, but they are members of the group or ring of houses which clustered round the edge of the dry land and sent out its industry towards the Wash, making new land; for this ring sent out feelers eastward, draining the land and recovering it every way, founding cells, establishing villages.  Holbeach, Spalding, Freiston, Holland, and I know not how much more was their land.

When the monasteries were destroyed their lordship fell into the hands of that high class—­now old, then new—­the Cromwells and Russells and the rest, upon whom has since depended the greatness of the country.  The intensive spirit proper to a teeming but humble population was forgotten.  The extensive economics of the great owners, their love of distances and of isolation took the place of the old agriculture.  Within a generation the whole land was drowned.

The isolated villages forgot the general civilisation of England; they came to depend for their living upon the wildfowl of the marshes; here and there was a little summer pasturing, more rarely a little ploughing of the rare patches of dry land; but the whole place soon ran wild, and there Englishmen soon grew to cause an endless trouble to the new landlords.  These, all the while on from the death of Henry to that of Elizabeth, pursued their vigilance and their accumulations.  Their power rose above the marshes like a slow sun and dried them up at last.