The Dutch Connection: Vermuyden and the investors in the draining of Hatfield Chase 1626-1656 – Piet van Cruyningen, Wageningen University, Netherlands

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 expertise, the ways in which he mobilised a group of investors in London and the Netherlands and the methods applied to drain the level. The outcome was a partial failure due to resistance of the commoners of the Isle of Axholme and financial mismanagement by Vermuyden himself. Ultimately, however, the main problem was that although Vermuyden’s plans were theoretically sound, seventeenth-century technology was not yet sophisticated enough to effectively drain such a large area as the Hatfield Level