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The draining of Hatfield Chase was a Dutch enterprise. The engineer Cornelius Vermuyden and all but two of his 45 backers were Dutch, and they applied Dutch technology. They aimed at changing the wetlands into valuable farmland – not realising that those ‘wastelands’ provided resources that were cherished by the local population. The paper will focus on Vermuyden’s background and...

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...