Author: angus.townley@gmail.com

August 7, 2026

Where did Vermuyden Live whilst the drainage works were going on?

Several places have claimed to be the residence of Cornelius Vermuyden during his work on the draining of the Isle of Axholme & Hatfield Chase. There do not appear to be any contemporary sources providing details on where Cornelius Vermuyden lived whilst working in the area. Most sources are secondary and written a significant time after the event. This post...

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July 18, 2026

Evening Talks – from September

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July 2, 2026

Thirty-One Battles: Nathaniel Reading and the Long Reckoning

The Isle of Axholme, 1651–1719 By the summer of 1651 the Sandtoft settlement lay in ruins, the Participants’ tenants had fled, and the commoners of the Isle of Axholme held the land they believed had always been theirs. They had won, for now. What followed was not peace. It was six more decades of conflict. The Restoration and Reading’s Return...

Categories Opposition to Vermuyden's Drainage Comments: 0

June 25, 2026

‘They Would Stay Till the Whole Level Were Drowned’

The Civil War, the Snow Sewer, and the Fall of Sandtoft, 1642–1651 After the Star Chamber proceedings of 1631 and the Exchequer Award of 1636, a tense and uneasy quiet settled over the Isle of Axholme. The commoners had not accepted the settlement. They had been compelled, temporarily, to live with it. They were waiting. In 1642, their moment came....

Categories Opposition to Vermuyden's Drainage Comments: 0

June 19, 2026

‘Only to Maintaine Their Right’

The Crown’s Legal Counterstroke and the Star Chamber, 1628–1631 Robert Coggan was shot dead on 15 August 1628. The Crown did not investigate his killing. Instead, it moved swiftly to secure the drainage works, silence the opposition, and settle the legal question of the Epworth commons in terms that favoured the Participants. What followed over the next three years was...

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June 12, 2026

Spirit of the Waters – a play with music about the turbulent history of the Isle of Axholme.

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June 11, 2026

The Killing of Robert Coggan

Friday, 15 August 1628: Armed Men at Haxey Carr Two days after the stoning of John Kitchen, and the wider violence of Wednesday 13 August, the situation at Haxey Carr had not calmed. It had hardened. Vermuyden’s work crew had spent Thursday recovering, regrouping — and rearming. When they returned to the carr on Friday morning to resume the damming...

Categories Opposition to Vermuyden's Drainage Comments: 0

June 4, 2026

The Women of Haxey

Wednesday, 13 August 1628: The First Day of Riots on the Isle of Axholme In the early afternoon of Wednesday, 13 August 1628, an English labourer named John Kitchen was walking along the road to the village of Haxey. Kitchen worked for Cornelius Vermuyden, the Dutch engineer commissioned two years earlier by King Charles I to drain the great fenlands...

Categories Opposition to Vermuyden's Drainage Comment: 1

May 15, 2026

A Church for the Strangers: The Chapel at Sandtoft

A Congregation of Refugees The settlers who gathered at Sandtoft were not a single homogeneous group. The first wave, arriving around 1628, comprised some eighty families from Walloon Flanders — Dutch and French-speaking Protestants who had fled the religious persecution of the Spanish Netherlands. They were followed in 1635 by a further substantial influx, mostly artisans and tenant farmers from...

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May 9, 2026

Cornelius Vermuyden’s Fortified Camp at Sandtoft

When Cornelius Vermuyden arrived in the Isle of Axholme in the 1620s, he brought with him workers from across the North Sea. The transformation of Hatfield Chase and the surrounding marshlands required skilled labourers, surveyors, craftsmen, and administrators, many of them Dutch, many of them strangers to the landscape they were about to reshape. Their base of operations became Sandtoft,...

Categories Vermuyden's Drainage Scheme Comments: 4