Tag: “Fen Drainage”

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...

Categories Opposition to Vermuyden's Drainage Comments: 0

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 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

April 9, 2026

Vermuyden’s Subsidiary Drainage Works – sasses and sluices.

1629 – Court of Sewers appointed In 1629, the Crown appointed a new Court of Sewers to oversee the “Level of Hatfield Chase,” a move intended to mark the completion of Cornelius Vermuyden’s great drainage project. This court was charged with maintaining the new network of drains, banks, and sluices that had reshaped the wetlands and opened large areas to...

Categories Vermuyden's Drainage Scheme Comments: 0

April 2, 2026

Vermuyden’s Drainage Scheme – Phase 2

Draining the Levels – Vermuyden’s Second Phase (1628-1631) By 1627, just two years after Cornelius Vermuyden and King Charles I had signed their fateful contract, Vermuyden reported that the first phase of drainage works was completed so that a commission could be appointed to allot the land and commence its work. The 1627 Commission was appointed to begin the process...

Categories Vermuyden's Drainage Scheme Comments: 0

March 12, 2026

Vermuyden’s Drainage Scheme – Phase 1 – Drainage of Hatfield Chase – 1626-1628

The first phase of Cornelius Vermuyden’s works took place between 1626 and 1628

Categories Vermuyden's Drainage Scheme Comments: 0

February 26, 2026

Vermuyden’s’General Rule of Drayning‘

Cornelius Vermuyden’s “General Rule of Draining,” is detailed in his 1642 work A Discourse Touching the Drayning of the Great Fennes, was a foundational approach to large-scale land reclamation in 17th-century England.  Although this paper was written after Vermuyden had left Hatfield Chase and the Isle of Axholme and was focused on the Great Level in Cambridgeshire, it shows Vermuyden’s approach...

Categories Cornelius Vermuyden Comments: 0