- The Campaigns and the Line as It Stands
- Causey Households and Lantern Keeping
- Little Mere, White Reeds, and the Named Crossings
- What the Marsh Takes, and What It Returns
- The Meres, and Who Works Them
- What Is Left in Open Water on Purpose
“Everie generacion hath pusshed the causey further, hath garrisouned it, hath lost sum part of it, and hath handed on a mappe that is nat the mappe it receyved.”
The Campaigns and the Line as It Stands
What the belt calls the Marsh Campaigns had no enemy in the ordinary sense and no battle worth the name. There has been ground that would not stay reclaimed, a city that would not stop trying, and a succession of works — banks, cuts, causeys, sluices — each of which held for a while and some of which are holding yet. Read the place-names in the order of what they were before they were places, and the whole sequence stands up out of them. Two are works. Two are contested crossings, disputed not between armies but between parishes over labour obligation. Two are settlements that filled in behind a line once it had proved it would hold. And one, Black Orchard Lane, is a route that was corrected, the word the marsh uses for a thing the chapter preferred not to describe plainly.
The line as it stands runs from the Cut in the west, along Reedgate, to the fork at Black Fen, and thence to the higher ground east of Little Mere. Behind it the ground is reclaimed and taxed. Beyond it lies marsh proper, crossed by three maintained causeys and by an unknown number of paths which the keepers know and do not advertise. It has not moved substantially in seventy years. Nor, in the general opinion of the Reed Cross, will it move again without money the city has repeatedly declined to spend.
The cutting of Reedgate Causey is the wardens’ founding memory and their standing argument. In 4287, during a dispute over labour obligation, the breach was made at night, at the point where the causey crossed the deepest channel, by men who understood exactly where to cut; and it is less the ruin than that exactness which has kept the question of who they were alive for three hundred years. The water rose for four days. Eleven miles went under. The recorded dead were fifty-eight, and the wardens have always held that the drowned were more. Six settlements ceased. The parishes that had been in dispute over the labour obligation were among those lost, so that the dispute was ended and nothing at all was settled. The ground has never been recovered, and the breach is open water yet, called the Cut. Reedgate’s present causey runs around it. Every warden is taken to stand there in his first year, over the drowned ground, and nothing is said to him. The silence is the whole of the instruction.
The works themselves are simple and enormously laborious. A causey is a raised bank of clay and faggot, revetted with reed and stake, wide enough for a cart, and carrying a metalled surface where the money ran to it. Nothing about it stays made. The revetment rots, the bank settles, and the water finds the ends, so that a mile of causey consumes the labour of a parish for a fortnight every year; and the obligation to supply that labour is the single most disputed thing in the northern valleys.
The sluices and the cuts are the other half, and the dry ground behind the line is dry only by contrivance. Water is moved off it deliberately, through ditches, sluices and pumping engines, two of them, both certified at Cambridge, both maintained under contracts the Reed Cross regards as inadequate. An engine that fails in a wet autumn will leave six hundred acres drowned within the week. That has happened twice since 4560 A.C., and on both occasions the ground was recovered, which the wardens describe as fortunate rather than as evidence of anything.
Causey Households and Lantern Keeping
“A lamp is not lit for the traveller. A lamp is lit so that the next keeper down the causey can see that mine is burning, and if he cannot see it he comes. That is the whole system.”
Those who live here are settled, capable and extremely local, and are not at all what the phrase “marsh people” suggests to a Londoner. They are lantern keepers, reed cutters, fowlers, ferry families, causey wardens, and the households that hold the crossings: a working population with its own saints and its own arrangements, and with a long memory of having been used as a buffer by a city that will not admit it needs one.
Lantern keeping is the characteristic office. The keepers maintain the lights along the causeys against the dark, know which stretches have moved, and are the first people any sensible traveller asks. They are paid partly by the chapter, partly by the crossings, and partly in kind by everyone who uses the routes; yet their independence of all three is maintained with some ferocity. A keeper who tells a party not to go by night is not being obstructive, nor is he to be argued with. The lantern year belongs to them more than to anybody: whether the lamps burn steady, low, guttering, or with the flat blue the keepers dislike and cannot account for; whether the water is loud; whether the fowl have moved.
The Causey Wardens of Saint Frideswide are the institution above them, a lay order under the Reed Cross, drawn overwhelmingly from causey households, holding the stations and the crossings and keeping the counts. A warden may close a causey, refuse a party, impress labour for a repair, and hold a man at a station until the water falls. He may not arrest, may not testify in the chapter court without leave, and traditionally does not enter Oxford in warden’s dress. What is not usually said is that these limits are as much the wardens’ own preference as the chapter’s. An order that cannot arrest cannot be asked to arrest; a body that never appears in Oxford is a body Oxford cannot easily instruct.
The stations are the physical form of the whole arrangement: a building of stone or timber at intervals along each maintained causey, with a lamp, a bell, a store of fuel and food, a bed or two, and a warden or a keeper’s family in residence. They are victualled by the Reed Cross and inspected. A party crossing signs at each station, whereby the counts are kept, and whereby the House knows within a day that somebody did not arrive.
Reed, fowl, fish, peat and salvage are the livings here, in roughly that order of respectability. Reed is cut in the cold of the winter, bundled, and carried out for thatch and for the revetment of the causeys themselves, so that the marsh supplies the material that holds back the marsh. Fowling is seasonal and lucrative. Peat is dug where the ground allows. Salvage is what comes out of the water, is legally complicated, and is the Reed Cross’s particular business.
Little Mere, White Reeds, and the Named Crossings
“Aske at Litel Mere and thou shalt be answered curteisly and tolde no thing. That is nat unkyndenesse. That is the mersshe.”
Behind the line the largest settlement is Little Mere: perhaps four hundred people, a chapel, two inns, a reed market, and a permanent Reed Cross station. There a traveller stops before he crosses, and there enquiries are made.
It is also, by long custom, the seat of the Witch of Little Mere, a standing local power with whom the surrounding households have arrangements, honoured by people who would be uncomfortable explaining them to a visitation. Mother Joan Reed is the name most often given for the present holder of that position; whether she is the figure of the older stories or the latest of a line is a question the marsh considers ill-mannered. In everything but the word she is a Lady, and the word is not one the marsh uses; here the term is simply the Witch, said without malice and with a good deal of care. She is elderly, is fed by four settlements, has never been reported by any of them, and is the person the Reed Cross quietly consults when a station reports something it cannot account for. The Concord of Saint Winnow has attempted twice to record her terms, and has twice been refused, politely.
The arrangements at Little Mere are the clearest surviving example in the belt of a settlement holding terms with a named power, and they are conducted without embarrassment and without publicity. A day is kept. A place is kept. A person goes, and the person is not the incumbent. The village will confirm none of it to a stranger, nor will it deny any of it; and the chapel at Little Mere has had four incumbents in forty years, which the marsh regards as the city’s problem.
White Reeds is smaller, wetter, and the centre of the cutting trade. Its households live by reed and have no second trade, which is why the Reed Sickness matters there more than anywhere; and the Reed Cross, which keeps careful records, can usually say which beds the blight will take next, whereby the planning is helped and the eating is not.
Saint Jude’s Ford and Black Fen Fork are crossings with permanent households and a long history of dispute. Reedgate, principal of the causeys, is the busiest place in the marsh. The Causeway at Saint Frideswide’s Cut is the newest of the major works and the most expensive. And Black Orchard Lane is avoided at night by people who will not say why, nor has the Reed Cross ever encouraged them to.
Questions are answered politely here, and answered with very little, and the silence is worth understanding as a practice rather than as rudeness. These households have been reported on, requisitioned, blamed for the Cut, and used as a buffer for three centuries. They are perfectly willing to help a traveller cross safely, and entirely unwilling to explain anything about the place to anybody who will carry it back to the city.
What the Marsh Takes, and What It Returns
“We recovered nyne and twenty the laste yeer and buried oon and twenty of hem by name. That is a good yeer. I sette it doun so that no man shal seye afterward that we counted nat.”
The marsh is a hazard with an address, and the rule about the causeys is known to everybody. Events at the two ends of that rule are less well understood. Leaving them kills, and those who leave them commonly do so on purpose: cutting, fowling, salvaging, or keeping out of somebody’s way.
The things the marsh returns are the Reed Cross’s particular business. The dead come up, sometimes years later and sometimes not at all; the House gives burial to what is recovered and records what it can. It returns objects as well, for the marsh preserves, and a thing lost in one generation surfaces in another. Salvage from the water is legally complicated, morally worse, and constantly practised; the wardens’ view of it is short: a man who brings a find to the station will be dealt with fairly, and a man who does not will be dealt with.
Salvage law is a compromise that satisfies nobody and works. Anything recovered is to be brought to a station and entered; the finder receives a share fixed by custom; the remainder goes to the House, which attempts to find the owner and, failing that, applies it to the burial ground. In practice a good deal never reaches a station at all. The wardens know it, tolerate it at the margins, and come down extremely hard on organised salvage, which is the difference between a family taking what the water gave them and a trade.
For a company the work here is steady, unglamorous, and better paid than it looks. Recovery. Escort. Checking a station that has not reported. Establishing whether a party that set out arrived. Surveying beds for the sickness. Finding a person who came this way because they had nowhere else, which, given the North Gate four miles south, is a great many people. The Reed Cross hires openly, pays badly, and is honest; and a company that has worked the marsh for a season will find its name known everywhere in the belt that matters.
The commonest commission of all is the simplest and the saddest, which is to establish whether a named person crossed. The stations’ counts, the House’s register, the keepers’ memories and the gate book at the North Gate four miles south are between them a surprisingly complete record, so that a competent enquirer can often answer the question within a week. The answer is usually that the person did not cross, did not turn back, and is not in any register; which is its own answer, and is the one the house writes down.
The Meres, and Who Works Them
“Little Mere is four hundred acres in a wet year and two hundred in a dry one and nobody has ever drawn its edge, because it has not got one. What it has got is nine families who know where the bottom changes.”
Little Mere and White Reeds are geography before they are anything else. They are also worked water, which is what they are to the nine families who live off them, and which no account written from Oxford has ever set down.
A mere is not a lake, and the distinction governs everything. It has no fixed edge, its extent varying by hundreds of acres between a wet year and a dry one; it has no fixed bottom, the channels shifting; and it cannot therefore be owned in the way ground is owned, which is why the chapter’s estate reaches to the marsh and stops. A rotation among nine households stands in the place of ownership, unwritten, unbroken in living memory, enforced by nothing but the fact that everybody would know.
The four trades are eels, fowl, reed and leeches, and they run to a calendar the causey wardens do not administer and would not be able to. Eels in the autumn run, taken at the channels. Fowl in the cold of the winter, netted rather than shot, since a shot bird in a mere is a bird lost. Reed cut in the late winter for thatch and for the Cambridge benches. And leeches, the smallest trade and the most valuable, taken in the summer and sold to the guarantor rooms and the surgical houses of two cities.
The part a visitor notices is what the families will not do. Nobody works the mere after dark, at any season, for any money. Nobody takes from three places in it, which are named, and which are shown to a stranger without comment. And nobody goes onto the water on four days of the year, which are not the four a visitor would guess, nor the same four at Little Mere as at White Reeds. The wardens know all of this, record none of it, and arrange their own business around it.
The Reed Cross’s relation to the mere families is close, and is charity in neither direction. The families recover what the water gives up and bring it to a station; the House gives it burial and enters it. The house gives back the one thing the families cannot get for themselves, which is a name for the dead. Osbert Lyle has brought in nine bodies in twenty years and has been given a name for four of them, and he keeps the four names in the fowling book with the dates.
For a company the mere is at once the belt’s hardest ground to work in and the easiest to be helped in, and which of the two it proves depends entirely on whether the nine families have decided about you. They will not be hired. They will guide, for a fee that is nominal, once they have chosen to. And a party that goes onto the water without one of them is doing a thing every person in the marsh will hear of within a day, and will regard as evidence of exactly the kind of ignorance the marsh kills people for.
What Is Left in Open Water on Purpose
“We put things in. I will not tell you what and I will not tell you where and I have told the Concord as much as I am telling you, which they wrote down and did not press.”
The belt puts things into standing water deliberately, has done so for as long as there has been a belt, and does it for two entirely different reasons that cannot afterwards be told apart. The problem is the marsh’s peculiarly, and it has no equivalent anywhere in the realm.
The first reason is offering, in the sense the valleys use it for a boundary stone and for a threshold. Something small is put into a named water at a named time by a household or by a parish. It is not described as worship by anybody, and would be denied as such if the word were used. The practice is universal in the marsh and common in the valleys, and it is done at the meres, at the four named crossings, and at about a dozen pools that have no other significance whatever.
The second reason is disposal, and it is the older nuisance. When a thing must not be burned, must not be buried and must not be kept, the belt’s standard method is to put it into water. The Concord’s roll records the practice disapprovingly and has never proposed an alternative; and the Collegium’s refused material goes into water more often than into ground, for the plain reason that ground can be dug up.
Why the two cannot be told apart is the whole of Warden Poole’s difficulty, and it is not a philosophical one. An object recovered from nine years under mere water is corroded, is out of any context, and carries no mark whereby a thing given may be distinguished from a thing hidden. The wardens recover perhaps a dozen such objects in a year, enter them, and hold them; the recovery book has four hundred entries, and eleven of them have ever been claimed.
What the wardens do with the rest is the sensible thing, and it is not a solution. They hold them at Reedgate, in a room, indefinitely. The room has been full twice and twice made empty again, both times by putting the contents back into deep water at a place the wardens will not name; which Poole records with the observation that his office is therefore the largest single contributor to the problem it exists to manage.
For a company the practical rule is short, and worth having by heart before working anywhere in the marsh. Do not take anything out of standing water in the belt. If a thing must be taken out, take a warden. And if a warden cannot be got, take a mere-man and do exactly as he says, because the difference between a thing that was given and a thing that was hidden is a difference he can sometimes make and you cannot.