‘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.
The Isle Chooses Its Side
When civil war broke out, the Isle of Axholme sided with Parliament. The reasons were not complicated. The drainage had been a royal project from the outset, concluded by royal contract with Vermuyden in 1626, backed by royal proclamations and administered through royal courts. The Participants were the King’s men. The commoners who had lost the greater part of their commons to the drainage had little reason to fight for a Crown that had stripped them of their ancient rights.[1]
Lindley is precise on what parliamentary allegiance meant in practice for the Islemen. An Epworth husbandman recalled in 1646 how he had often heard his fellows confide that ‘they would never have taken Arms for the Parliament, but that they intended thereby to have the power in their hand to destroy the Draining and Improvement and lay all waste again to their Common.’ A Haxey townsman put it more bluntly in 1652: he had fought for the Parliament, he said, but if they took away his commons, he would bring a hundred men to fight them. Parliamentary allegiance was conditional, instrumental, and frankly local. The great questions debated at Westminster were secondary to the question of the fens.[2]
In his journey from Beverley towards Nottingham in 1642, King Charles originally intended to pass through the Isle to Gainsborough. He was forced to alter his route by the strength of local feeling against him. An arms consignment was collected in the Isle for the Hull garrison; two foot companies were raised and maintained locally throughout the war; and a cartload of muskets and £300 in money was donated to Parliament in May 1643 by Simon Mawe, Humphrey Popplewell, and other Belton men.
Among those most active in marshalling local forces against the royalists at the outset was Daniel Noddel, who served as lieutenant to Captain Robert Dyneley in Parliament’s army. Born in 1611, probably from Misterton or Beckingham in Nottinghamshire, Noddel had received some formal education; his legal expertise and his talents as a propagandist both testify to it. He addressed a dismayed French pastor at Sandtoft in Latin. Yet there is no record of his having been at a university or admitted to an Inn of Court. He was, in every sense, a local man. After Edgehill he raised forces to oppose Sir Ralph Hansby. His fellow parliamentarians later swore that ‘whenever the Parliament prospered he rejoiced and leapt for joy and when the Parliament did not prosper he did much mourn.’ After the war he would become the commoners’ attorney and solicitor, acting for them from about 1646 until 1662.[3]
The Snow Sewer, February 1641/2
Around Candlemas, 2 February 1642, men from the Isle opened the floodgates of the Snow Sewer, one of the most important sluices in the entire drainage system. The waters of the Trent poured in, drowning a great part of Hatfield Chase. Armed men stood at the sluice and declared that ‘there they would stay till the whole level were drowned, and the Inhabitants forced to swim away like Ducks.’ They held their position for seven weeks, opening the gates with every incoming tide and keeping them shut at the ebb.[4]
This was not vandalism. It was a calculated reversal of everything Vermuyden had built. The Snow Sewer had been constructed precisely to keep the Trent’s floodwaters out of the Chase. The men who opened it understood exactly what they were doing. At the sluice, they erected stakes in the form of a gallows, a symbol that already had history in the Isle, echoing the improvised gallows raised during the riots of 1628. The message was the same: this is what awaits those who try to restore what we have destroyed.
In the Isle of Axholme itself, in July 1642, commoners petitioned Parliament against a bill the Participants had been steering through the House of Lords. The bill fell as civil war hostilities commenced; Parliament had other things to attend to, but not before the Commons had noted ‘tumults’ in Hatfield Level. By June 1642 the commoners were already pulling down fences, destroying enclosure works, and demolishing houses on the disputed 4,000 acres. By the end of 1642 they had effectively repossessed them.[5]
The Years of Destruction, 1642–1649
The Civil War years saw a sustained campaign of direct action in the Isle and across the Hatfield Level. In 1645, commoners systematically destroyed the drainage banks, re-flooding the land. The desecration at Epworth church, filthy carrion buried under the communion table, belongs to these years of accumulated rage against an alien settlement that the commoners regarded as the physical embodiment of the encroachment on their commons.[6]
The Huguenot community at Sandtoft found itself caught between forces it could not control. The settlers. Dutch, Walloon, and French Protestants had been brought in to farm the newly drained land. They had no part in the original decisions that had displaced the commoners, and no power to reverse them. They had simply come to work land that was offered to them. Now they found themselves the most visible target of a fury directed at Vermuyden, at the Participants, and at the Crown that had sanctioned the whole enterprise.
It is worth pausing here, as van Cruyningen’s research prompts us to do, on the economic reality of what was being destroyed. The drainage of the 1630s had, by the standards of its time, worked. Lucas van Valkenburg had spent 55,400 guilders between 1628 and 1635 draining 1,000 acres; the land was genuinely productive. The commoners knew this. When they opened the Snow Sewer, when they pulled down the banks, when they drove the settlers from Sandtoft, they were not protesting a failed project. They were deliberately dismantling a successful one, because its success had come at their direct expense.[7]
The years between 1642 and 1649 were ones of intermittent but persistent pressure. The commoners entered the Participants’ enclosed grounds, grazed their cattle on them, destroyed crops, pulled down fences. The Participants appealed to Parliament and to the Lords; the commoners petitioned in return. Parliament, absorbed in the war and its aftermath, was unable or unwilling to impose a definitive settlement.
Noddel, Lilburne, and the Escalation of 1650–1651
The situation changed decisively in 1650. Until then, the Epworth commoners had seemed content to hold the 4,000 acres they had retaken in 1642 and had even reportedly offered the Participants peace terms, 4,000 acres in exchange for an undertaking to maintain the drainage works, which the Participants declined. In May 1650 everything shifted. William Scott led sixty to eighty-five Belton men in a systematic campaign: fences thrown down, cattle turned into crops, houses demolished. By October the disorder had spread and intensified. Thomas Bernard and Richard Mawe of Belton were at the forefront. ‘It was as ordinarily done,’ one witness later said, ‘as for men to go to their labour.’[8]
In Crowle, between forty and fifty commoners armed themselves with swords, guns, and headpieces to resist the sewer tax collector. In Epworth about a hundred commoners rescued distrained corn. The collectors were so terrified that ‘none of the latter dared venture into the Isle for fear of having their legs or arms broken if they should meet them alone.’[9]
It was in this context that Daniel Noddel brought in outside help. His contact with John Lilburne probably dated from the Civil War, when Lilburne had served as major of foot in Colonel King’s Lincolnshire regiment. Noddel enlisted him and John Wildman as legal advisers while the commoners’ case was being heard in the Exchequer, and subsequently as direct participants in the Isle. Their presence was first noted in autumn 1650. The reason one leading commoner gave for recruiting Lilburne was practical: ‘Lilburne was a powerful man and he having friends would give a sooner end to the business.’[10]
Noddel combined legal cunning with a careful attention to what the law would and would not permit. He advised commoners to proceed in pairs, ‘go by two and two’, so that their actions could not technically constitute a riot. When the sheriff arrived in January 1651 to execute an Exchequer order requiring the removal of the commoners’ cattle from Participants’ land, Noddel accompanied him to the enclosures where about a dozen commoners were carefully demolishing fences in pairs. He turned to the sheriff and remarked ‘look you here is no force’, and then asked the offenders’ names, who confirmed they would neither oppose the sheriff nor commit a riot, and continued pulling down fences, as Noddel stood ‘jeering’.[11]
The Say and Darley parliamentary committee, appointed to investigate the disorders, was deeply biased towards the Participants: William Say had purchased fenland from the leading Participant John Gibbon in 1637 and had recently prosecuted Lilburne at his 1649 treason trial. Noddel exposed the committee’s partiality in meticulous detail, noting that Gibbon had been lent the original deposition transcripts while the commoners had received no copy, and that the final report had given ‘in ten lines locked up and imprisoned the truth of above twenty witnesses’ for the commoners while stretching the Participants’ case over nearly two hundred.[12]
The Fall of Sandtoft, June 1651
The month of June 1651 saw the decisive blow. In coordinated actions involving groups of twenty to a hundred men or more, nearly all from Belton and Epworth, the rioters demolished a windmill and over eighty houses and outbuildings, most of them belonging to the foreign settlers, and destroyed the surrounding crops. The town of Sandtoft was almost completely destroyed, though the church, for the moment, was only damaged. The Participants estimated the total damage at £80,000.[13]
The destruction was systematic and sustained. Rioters warned the minister’s wife that the house would be pulled down within six to eight days if she did not vacate it. Building materials were chopped up and carted away to prevent rebuilding. One family was forced to shelter in a dry dyke bottom for most of the summer; Richard Mawe and his companions threw fire in among them and warned ‘we will root you out, you shall stay no longer there.’
The windmill owned by John Amory, a French settler, was first visited by around forty-five men who turned the sails out of the wind but, moved by Amory’s plea of poverty, took only forty shillings from him. On a second visit, however, Robert Ryther of Belton led between 120 and 160 men to the mill and, upon being refused entry, chopped through the posts, forced their way in, expelled the occupants, and commenced demolition. The men worked, in the words of one witness, ‘as if it were at day’s work.’
The rioters were not silent. ‘If we cannot get our Commons by no other Law,’ they declared, ‘we will get it by Club Law.’ Working through the destruction, they told one another: ‘we do good work, we do God’s work.’ When the Exchequer decree was read to them, Thomas Bernard interrupted halfway through and said they had heard enough and would obey neither decree nor Parliament, ‘that it was a traitorous Order.’ William Wash added that ‘they could make as good a Parliament themselves.’[14]
Lilburne and Wildman publicly dissociated themselves from the violence. Lilburne acknowledged that ‘some, especially of the poorer sort’, impatient of the delays and costs of legal proceedings, had ‘foolishly’ pulled down dwellings erected by the Participants, but he emphasised that this found no favour among ‘the most discreet Commoners and tenants of the Isle.’ Wildman told the rioters plainly ‘they would undo themselves.’ As Lindley notes, the events of May and June 1651 raise serious doubts about Noddel’s ability to control commoner action: the riots served as a caveat against the temptation to see the violence as directed from above rather than driven from below by men who had run out of patience.[15]
The Commoners’ Land
By the late summer of 1651, the Sandtoft settlement lay in ruins. The Huguenot congregation that had worshipped there since the 1630s was scattered. The Participants’ tenants, Dutch, French, and English alike, had fled or been driven out. The 7,400 acres that the 1636 Exchequer decree had awarded to Vermuyden and his associates were, for the moment, back in the hands of the people who had always believed they belonged to them.
The commoners of the Isle of Axholme had taken back their land.
What happened next — how the authorities tried to restore the Participants’ position, how Nathaniel Reading pursued the commoners through the courts and across three decades of conflict, and how the long reckoning finally ended — will be the subject of the next post in this series.
Sources: Dugdale, History of Imbanking and Draining (1662), Axholme chapter; Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution (Heinemann, 1982), chs 4 and 6; van Cruyningen, ‘Dutch investors in the drainage of Hatfield Chase’, AgHR 64, I (2016); Robson, ‘The Edges of Governance’, in Waddell and Peacey (eds), The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain (UCL Press, 2024); Peacock, Anthropological Review (1870); Lloyd, The Communities of the Manor of Epworth in the Seventeenth Century, PhD thesis, University of Sheffield (1998); Boyce, Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens (2023); Sheffield Papers (Grimsby Archives); TNA SP 16/113; PC 2/38; H.L.R.O., Main Papers.
[1]Lindley, Fenland Riots, pp. 139–41. On the Epworth husbandman’s remark: H.L.R.O., Main Papers, 10 February 1646 affidavit of Robert Palmer of Epworth, cited in Lindley, p. 142. On the Haxey townsman’s threat in 1652: P.R.O., S.P. dom. 18/37, cited in Lindley, p. 142. On the King’s altered route and the intercepted arms consignment: Lindley, p. 140. On Noddel’s rank and record: Lindley, pp. 140–1, drawing on P.R.O., S.P. dom. 18/37, f. 11III and Lansdowne 897, fols 205–6.
[4]On the Snow Sewer: Dugdale, History of Imbanking and Draining (1662), Axholme chapter; Tomlinson extract. On the gallows at Snow Sewer: Peacock, Anthropological Review (1870). The Peacock detail of stakes in the form of a gallows erected at the sewer echoes the mock-gallows constructed during the 1628 riots at Haxey, suggesting a deliberate continuity of symbolic intimidation. On the 4,000 acres occupied: Lindley, Fenland Riots, p. 140; Lloyd, Communities of the Manor of Epworth, PhD thesis (1998), pp. 3–4.
[5]Robson, ‘The Edges of Governance’, in Waddell and Peacey (eds), The Power of Petitioning in Early Modern Britain (UCL Press, 2024), pp. 181–2, on the July 1642 petition and the Commons noting ‘tumults’ in Hatfield Level. On the Lords committee for the Participants’ bill: ibid., p. 181. Lindley, Fenland Riots, p. 142: an Epworth husbandman recalled in 1646 how he had often heard his fellows say they would never have taken arms for the Parliament but intended thereby to have the power to destroy the Draining and lay all waste again to their Common.
[6]On the Snow Sewer episode and the mock gallows: Peacock, Anthropological Review, and Dugdale, Axholme chapter. On the Dutchman set adrift: Peacock records that one unfortunate Dutchman was reportedly set floating on the river Trent, when the tide was ebbing seaward, among the branches of an uprooted elder-tree, with instructions to go back to Dutchland. On the 1645 destruction of banks: Dugdale, Axholme chapter; Sheffield Papers (Grimsby). On the filthy carrion buried under the communion table at Epworth: Peacock, correcting the Sheffield Papers scribal corruption which rendered this as cannon and Ten Commandments. The Prime manuscript also reads carnion. The correct reading is carrion.
[7]Van Cruyningen, ‘Dutch investors’, AgHR 64, I (2016): on Lucas van Valkenburg’s expenditure of 55,400 guilders between 1628 and 1635 and the valuation of his land at only 49,000 guilders at his death in 1652, indicating a marginal economic return despite real drainage success. On the 1630s agricultural productivity of the drained land: van Cruyningen, pp. 33–4. The commoners’ deliberate reversal of a functioning drainage system was therefore not a futile gesture but a calculated destruction of a working enterprise.
[8]Lindley, Fenland Riots, pp. 188–9, on the May 1650 incursions led by William Scott and sixty to eighty-five Belton commoners; the October escalation; Bernard, Robinson and Noddel’s role. On the commoner who declared Parliament ‘a Parliament of Clouts’: Lindley, p. 188, citing P.R.O., S.P. dom. 18/37. On resistance to sewer tax collectors in Crowle: Lindley, p. 190, citing Notts. U.L., H.C.C. 6001, fols 586–7: ‘between forty and fifty commoners were reported to have armed themselves with swords, guns and headpieces.’
[10]On Noddel’s legal stratagems: Lindley, Fenland Riots, pp. 196–8, drawing on P.R.O., S.P. dom. 18/37 and Noddel’s own published declarations. The ‘go by two and two’ advice is cited by Lindley at p. 197. On Noddel’s biography: Lindley, p. 140 (b. 1611, d. 1672; rank of lieutenant; address given as Owston in 1647). On Lilburne’s Lincolnshire connection: Lindley, pp. 192–3, noting his commission as major of foot in Colonel King’s regiment from October 1643; possible earlier acquaintance with Noddel.
[12]Lindley, Fenland Riots, pp. 193–4: on the Say and Darley committee, its bias towards the Participants, and Noddel’s detailed rebuttal. Noddel’s phrase: ‘a most partial, wicked, and erroneous report of Master Say and Master Henry Darley … Master Gibbon’s great coached and feasted friends.’ Say had purchased fenland from Gibbon in December 1637, creating an obvious conflict of interest. On Say’s role in Lilburne’s 1649 trial: Lindley, p. 191, fn. 8.
[13]Lindley, Fenland Riots, pp. 199–201, on the June 1651 destruction. Rioters worked ‘in groups ranging from twenty to 100 or more’; a windmill and over eighty houses and outbuildings demolished; the windmill owner John Amory initially paid forty shillings to be spared, but on a second visit Robert Ryther led 120 to 160 men and forced entry, demolishing it. On the minister’s wife’s warning: Lindley, p. 200. Boyce, Imperial Mud (2023), p. 83, confirms the scale: ‘eighty-two houses, barns, stables, outhouses and a windmill demolished in ten days.’ The Participants estimated damage at £80,000.
[15]Lindley, Fenland Riots, pp. 200–2, on Lilburne and Wildman’s dissociation from the riots. Lilburne acknowledged that ‘the poorer sort’ had ‘foolishly’ pulled down dwellings, but emphasised that ‘that folly of the multitude none of the most discreet Commoners and tenants of the Isle do justify.’ Wildman told them ‘they would undo themselves.’ The argument that the June violence ran ahead of Noddel’s legal strategy is Lindley’s own: ‘The events of May and June 1651 in fact raise serious doubts about Noddel’s ability to control, or effectively direct, commoner action in the Isle and serve as a caveat against the temptation to view rioters through the eyes of the authorities who almost invariably regarded them as manipulated from above’ (p. 202). Boyce, Imperial Mud, p. 84, endorses this reading.
