Q&A with Susan Oosthuizen, Professor of Medieval Archaeology, University of Cambridge

This is the second interview for this new blog, which is devoted to the part of eastern England known as the Fens, and to the people who inhabit, and have inhabited, the area. The first interview, with Professor Ian Rotherham, can be read here. An introduction to the blog is available here. 

Here I interview Professor Susan Oosthuizen, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Archaeology in the University of Cambridge. Her teaching and research focus on rights of common, and on the development of the English landscape between about 400 and 1300 AD. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, of the Royal Historical Society, and of the Higher Education Academy, and is the author of several books and numerous papers.

© Susan Oosthuizen

In 2017 Professor Oosthuizen published her book The Anglo-Saxon Fenland. This examines how the inhabitants of the Fens were organised within territorial groups and how their prosperous livelihoods were based on careful collective control, exploitation and management of the vast natural water-meadows on which their herds of cattle grazed.

Her most recent book – The Emergence of the English – was published in 2019. 

The interview begins …

Q: I realise that the term Fenland is used more widely than East Anglia alone, but where would you set the borders of the Fens of East Anglia, which I think are mainly viewed as being situated in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, plus parts of Norfolk and Suffolk. Can one define a precise geographical boundary? If so, where would you set it and why? 

A: The fenland is a large, low-lying region covering around 4,000 sq. km. To the west, south and east it’s defined by the maximum height of freshwater flooding brought by the rivers that flow through it towards the Wash: around 12 feet above sea level. And to the north, it’s bounded by the shoreline of the Wash itself. 

Q: What in your view is most distinctive about the Fens, both physically and culturally? In what ways is it/was it special and why? 

A: Until drainage began in the mid-seventeenth century, the southern part of the basin was covered by an extensive peat wetland, interrupted by islands of higher ground. It supported a mosaic of different kinds of habitat – grassland, both rough pasture and meadow, used both for grazing and for growing hay; beds of reed, osier and sedge; peat for fireing; and many meres, ponds, canals (called lodes locally) and ditches that supported a wide range of fish and wild fowl. There were other similar landscapes across Britain – but the fen peatlands were the most extensive. 

Q: In your book, The Anglo-Saxon Fenland you explored the way in which local communities managed the natural resources of the Fens at that time, and I guess for some time after too. What was unique about the way this was done in the Fens and what were the implications of the enclosures of the 18th and 19thCentury, both then and for today? 

A: Fen communities exploited these vast rich resources through complex systems of ancient common rights. They worked collectively – timetabling grazing and hay making on the grasslands as well as for cutting reeds, sedges and willows; restricting fishing and fowling to particular seasons to support both fish and birds; digging and maintaining ditches and canals to keep the wetlands damp but not flooded; removing weeds and coarse grasses from the pastures to enrich the pastures. 

That communal work was carefully organised by regular assemblies (fen courts), to which all those with common rights were expected to come, and which admitted new commoners, regulated how much one could take of each resource, and punished those who broke the rules. 

The rules were focused on enabling commoners to make a good livelihood today while still assuring the long-term sustainability of the resources they exploited. 

These systems were not unique to the fens. They were found across Britain and still exist in many places today. They had largely (though not completely) disappeared from the fens by the time of the parliamentary enclosures which mostly postdated the drainage by around 150-200 years. 

Q: What in your view are the pros and cons of the Fens having been drained? Apart from the famous Holme Posts, what would you point to as the two or three most graphic examples of the impact that the draining of the Fens has had? 

This question asks for a value judgement – was fen drainage a good or a bad thing? One answer might be that it depends on whether or not individuals, communities and other groups benefitted and how. Income is only one way in which that might be judged. 

Another might focus on changes to relationships between individuals of different status. A third might discuss the effects on ways of making a living. And so on. 

Reconstruction

© Susan Oosthuizen

Q: Do we have any real sense of how the Fens looked before they were drained? Is there a particular picture or illustration that you would point me to/share with me? 

A: The reconstructed wetlands at Wicken Fen give some idea of the undrained fenland, as do those – like that at Woodwalton – managed by the Great Fen Project. 

But of course, what they cannot reconstruct are the interconnections between that restored ecology and communities that made their living from the wetlands on the basis of common rights.

Q: In your book you also explored (and challenged) long-held views about migration to the Fens in the post-Roman world and suggested that there was probably no sudden displacement of local people by the incomers, that the newcomers were probably assimilated, and that perhaps there was no great loss of population after the Romans left, but a continuity that many have assumed was not there. Is our understanding of such matters of historical importance alone, or does it also help us understand the Fens of today? 

A: One of the important results of my research is that it demonstrates that movement into, within and from the British Isles has been going on for thousands of years. Most people in fenland – and everywhere else in Britain – a have some ancestors who had always lived in the region, and others who had moved to the region from elsewhere. 

All the evidence shows that incomers and their descendants become part of the communities in which they settle, their contributions as indistinguishable and valuable as those of the people among whom they have come to live.

The greatest challenge

Q: What would you say have been the three most significant events and dates for the Fens and its inhabitants, and why? And what do you believe to be the three most important places and why? 

A: Dates, people and places change in importance from one era to another. In the end it is not individuals who change history but groups of one kind or another, and even their influence is moderated by everything else that is going on at the time. 

Even Vermuyden was not acting as an individual but working for a much larger group made up of the king and members of the Stuart court who were in turn enacting a decision on debates that were at least a century old by the mid-seventeenth century. 

Q: There are a number of projects today focused on restoring and re-creating the Fens. What are the advantages of doing this? Is it a “nice to have” development, or a necessity? Which projects do you think hold out greatest hope? Is it possible that such schemes have come too late to have a meaningful impact? 

A: Climate change is the greatest challenge of our era. Any work that restores the character of the pre-drained fenland contributes to mitigating its impact since the wetlands are a store for carbon and a support for increasing the diversity of all forms of life that every ecosystem needs in order to work successfully. 

I have no idea whether this work has come too late. I’m not sure that anyone does. We all simply have to do our best to contribute in the hope that our collective efforts will help future generations. 

Q: Thank you very much for taking the time to answer my questions.