- Lantern Mere
- The Ferrylords
- The Reed Rights
- The Sessions, and How the Fen Settles Things
- The Eel, the Fowl, and the Peat
- The Wet Country’s Refusal
“A gentleman from the Collegium asked me last year to justify the reed rights, since he could see no reason a parish should be compelled to cut ground it does not want. I gave him the custom, because the custom is the answer I have. I have since thought of a better one and I have not written to him, because I do not want it in a letter.”
Lantern Mere
“Four miles by rather more than one, and the deepest water in the march by a long way. It is called Lantern Mere because of the lights, and I will not be drawn further than that, and you may put in your book that the ferryman would not be drawn.”
Lantern Mere is the largest body of standing water in the north of the realm and the centre of everything in the wet country. It runs four miles from the Harrowgate staithe to the Mereton shore, is rather more than a mile across at the widest, and is deep in a way that surprises people who expect fen water to be shallow. Soundings taken in the priory’s time found nine fathoms in the middle and did not find bottom in two places.
It freezes perhaps one winter in seven and the freezing is the great event of the fen year. Sledges cross, goods move that could not otherwise move, and the villages hold a fair on the ice at the middle point that is attended by people who will not otherwise meet. The ice is also the one condition under which the fen will walk across the mere rather than round it, and the walking is done in daylight, in company, and by an agreed line.
The name is not disputed and its cause is. Lights are seen on the mere, are seen frequently enough that no fen person regards a sighting as remarkable, and are described with fair consistency: low, pale, steady rather than flickering, singly or in twos, over the water and never over the land. The Collegium’s explanation is marsh gas. The priory has no explanation and does not offer one. The fen has several and will not give them to an outsider.
What the fen does about them is more informative than what it says. No boat is worked toward a light. A boat that finds itself near one turns and goes the other way. The turning is done without comment and without any of the ceremony a stranger might expect. The boatmen describe this as ordinary seamanship, in the tone a coasting master would use about a rock, and are genuinely impatient with visitors who want it to be more than that.
The one rule that is stated aloud concerns the middle. The deep water at the centre of the mere, roughly where the soundings failed, is not fished, is not crossed after dark, and is not anchored in at any hour. The priory blessed that water once, within the record, at the request of a prior who thought the avoidance unwholesome. The blessing was performed, the boat came back, and the fen went on rowing round it exactly as before, which the chapter has never decided how to read. The ferry line from Harrowgate to Mereton bends around it, adding the better part of a mile to every crossing, and the bend is old enough that the boatmen row it as the natural line and have to be shown a chart before they will agree that it is a bend.
Offerings go into the mere. This is done quietly, is not organised by anybody, and is denied by nobody when asked directly. What goes in is small, is usually iron or bread, and goes in at the staithe rather than at the middle. The priory’s position is that the practice is superstitious, that it is not idolatry since nothing is addressed, and that a prior who forbade it would be obeyed at the staithes he can see and nowhere else.
The Ferrylords
“There are three of us that matter and we do not much like one another. What we have in common is that none of us can be replaced, because the grant is not a licence the priory issues but a thing my family has held since before there was a priory to issue anything.”
Three families hold the crossings that matter, and the fen calls them the ferrylords without meaning anything by it beyond that they are the largest. The Gedneys hold the Harrowgate staithe and the long crossing to Mereton. The Redhams hold the middle crossing and the two staithes on the eastern holms. The Wiggenhalls hold the northern water and the coast passage, which is the least profitable and the most dangerous.
Their power is entirely negative and is the stronger for it. None of them can compel anything. What each can do is decline to carry, and in a district where every route of consequence crosses water at least once, a declining is a sentence. The assize has been asked three times in two centuries to rule that a ferry grant carries an obligation to carry all comers, and has three times declined, on the ground that a man forced onto the water against his judgement is a drowned man.
What they may not refuse is fixed and is the oldest part of the arrangement. The parish, at any hour. A priest, at any hour, whether or not he says why. A midwife. A coffin. And the bell, which in the wet country means that when a staithe bell is rung on the far shore the ferry goes out, in any weather short of ice, without asking who rang it or what for. The Wiggenhalls have lost two men to that obligation within the century and have never sought to be released from it.
The ferrylords are also, and not incidentally, the people who know the mere. They can say where the lights have been seen this season. They know which staithes have been left unlit and how long. They carry the bounty men and hear what the bounty men say. A company that wants the condition of the wet country should ask a ferrylord rather than a bailiff, and should expect to pay for the crossing whether or not it needs to cross.
Their quarrel with the priory is old and is about burial rather than about money. The chapter holds that the drowned are to be carried to the parish church for the ordinary rites wherever they are recovered. The ferrylords hold that a body taken out of the mere goes first to the staithe from which the boat set out, is watched there one night by the family, and goes to the church in the morning. The practice has no standing in canon law and has never been stopped.
The reason given for the watching is the one the fen gives for most things, which is that it is done. Pressed, a ferrylord will say that a man taken out of deep water has been in the mere and that the mere should be given the night to be finished with him. The watch itself is plain enough: the body on trestles at the staithe head, a lamp at the feet, iron laid on the chest, and two of the family sitting with it until light. No prayer is said over it, which is the part the chapter dislikes, since an unblessed dead lying out a night is precisely the circumstance the burial rite exists to prevent. Pressed further, he will stop answering. The priory has recorded the practice, has declined to condemn it, and has twice sent a brother to sit the watch with the family, which the fen regarded as handsome.
The Reed Rights
“Every holm has its cut and every cut has its bounds, and the bounds are walked every year with the same care the upland gives its parish stones. A stranger asks why a parish should quarrel so bitterly about the right to do hard work in cold water for a poor price. It is a fair question and I have never heard a fen man answer it.”
The reed rights are the central institution of the wet country and the one an outsider is likeliest to misread. Each holm holds the right to cut a defined area of reed, the areas are bounded precisely, the bounds are walked annually, and disputes over them reach the Harrowgate assize more often than every other fen matter combined. To a visitor this looks like a quarrel about a commodity, and the commodity is thatch, which is not valuable.
The right is not a right to take. It is a duty to cut, and this is the part that the assize records make plain and that nobody in the fen states. A holm that fails to cut its area forfeits it, and the forfeiture is not to the Crown or the priory but to the neighbouring holms, who divide it and must then cut it themselves. There is no provision anywhere in the custom for ground simply going uncut.
The cutting is done between Candlemas and the end of March, in cold water, by every able person on the holm, and it is miserable work for a return that would not pay a labourer. The fen does it without complaint and it does it completely. A cut that is left half-finished is a matter the neighbouring holms will raise, in public, at the reed sessions, in terms that suggest the failure is a good deal more serious than a shortfall of thatch.
Set beside the bounty book, the shape of the arrangement is not difficult to see. Cover grows where reed is left standing. What lives in the cover comes nearer as the cover thickens. The fen has a saying about it that sounds like husbandry, reads like a warding, and runs: cut it, it keeps its ground; leave it, the ground is its. The seven bounty payments from the north carrs fall in the decade after the cutting there was abandoned, and the fen villages nearest that ground will say, without being asked, that the north end has got worse and that somebody ought to take the cut up again.
They do not put the two together aloud, and it is worth being careful about why. The custom is four centuries old and the reason for it is not written in any document the march holds. What the fen has is a duty it performs, a cost it accepts, and a strong disinclination to see it neglected, none of which requires anybody to know what the duty is for. The knowledge may have been lost. It may never have been general. The cutting continued either way.
The Collegium’s recent interest is therefore more dangerous than it appears. A licensed surveyor has twice proposed that the northern cuts be formally released, on the entirely sound ground that they are unprofitable and that compelling poor villages to work them is oppressive. The argument is correct in every particular that can be documented. The priory has resisted it without being able to say why, and the prior’s visitation book records that he gave the custom as his reason and has since thought of a better one.
The Sessions, and How the Fen Settles Things
“We sit twice a year, we sit in the open on the staithe at Mereton, and every soul on eleven holms may speak. It is not a court. The assize is a court. This is the fen agreeing with itself in public, which is a slower business and holds a great deal better.”
The reed sessions meet twice a year on the staithe at Mereton, in the open, and constitute the nearest thing the wet country has to a government. They have no legal standing whatever. The assize does not recognise them, the priory does not appoint to them, and nothing they decide can be enforced by anybody. They have settled the business of the fen for as long as the fen has kept a book, and their decisions are almost never appealed.
Anybody from the eleven holms may speak and the order of speaking is fixed by custom rather than by rank. The holm that raises a matter speaks first, the holm complained of answers, the neighbouring holms speak in a settled order, and the ferrylords speak last and briefly. A reeve keeps the book, reads out what was decided at the previous sessions, and has no vote and no power beyond the reading.
What the sessions actually do is reallocate obligations. A holm that has lost people to fever and cannot cut its whole area says so. The area is then divided for a term of years among the neighbours, and the division is entered and read out at every sessions until it is reversed. A holm that has fallen behind on causeway work is given a date. A staithe whose lamp has been unlit is asked about it, publicly, and the asking is the whole of the sanction. The book also carries a standing item that the reeve reads whether or not there is anything in it: what has been seen, where, and by whom. Lights on the water go into it. So do the bounty payments, the unhallowed ground at the north carrs, any omen the holms have agreed to take seriously, and every death out of doors with the manner of it.
The sanction works because the fen is small and because everything in it is visible. A holm that ignores the sessions cannot be fined and cannot be compelled. It will find instead that its neighbours are slower to lend boats, that its causeway levy is scrutinised, and that its marriages arrange themselves with more difficulty. None of this is decided, organised, or admitted. It is simply how eleven villages behave toward a twelfth that has stopped pulling.
The priory attends and does not preside, which has been the arrangement since a prior attempted the opposite four generations ago and was ignored so completely that the attempt is still mentioned. A brother sits, listens, and answers if asked a question of doctrine. The present prior attends in person twice a year, which the fen regards as courtesy and which his own chapter regards as eccentric.
For a company the sessions are the single most useful two days available anywhere in the march. Eleven villages state, in public, in order, what has gone wrong in their district in the past half year. The bounty payments are read. The unlit staithes are named. The cuts that were not finished are named, and by whom, and the reason given is read into the book. A traveller with a notebook and the patience to sit through it will leave knowing the condition of the wet country better than anybody at Harrowgate.
One case is cited at the sessions more than all the others together and it is not a case from this fen. In the Spirit War of the Three Fens, three half-held marsh belts stopped accepting the same bargains they had kept for a generation: raised paths, seasonal tolls, no-cut reed zones, burial islands, licensed ferries, and understandings with powers that polite maps leave out. Then came ditching, embankment and reclamation charters, and men from dry offices who spoke of corrected acreage as though a fen had no memory but a survey pole.
The reed men tell it with the names in, and the names are the point. James Odo Harcourt backed the southern dike works because he believed secure roads would pacify the whole basin. Surveyor Mark Vale certified channels the local ferrymen had warned against. The marsh warden David Fenner failed to put down the rumour that a fen witch out of Mere Rill had promised three seasons of retaliation if the no-cut islands were touched. The contractors went past the old limits anyway, and the country answered with refusal after refusal rather than with one miracle.
What the refusals looked like is what every reed man in this district can recite. Embankments slumped overnight. Marked channels vanished under weed and black water. Burial islands that had never shifted appeared to move. When men were eventually got through, it was done by the Brotherhood of the Lantern Grave and the warpriests of Saint Frideswide’s Reed Cross. They carried mire bells, saint ash, bound reed standards, and turned contested tracks into passable lines long enough for grain and wounded men to cross. The sessions hear all of this before they vote on any proposal to cut a no-cut ground.
The Eel, the Fowl, and the Peat
“Eel in the spring, fowl in the autumn, peat all the year and reed in the cold. Four trades, and a man who works all four is never idle and is never rich. My grandfather said the fen pays a living to anybody who will take it and pays a fortune to nobody at all, and I have not found him wrong.”
The wet country lives on four trades and they fit together across the year with a neatness that is the real reason the fen is prosperous. Eel are taken in the spring runs, in traps and long nets, and are the cash crop. Wildfowl are taken in the autumn on the meres, by decoy and by net, and are sent south. Peat is dug all year where the ground allows. Reed is cut in the cold, and is the poorest return of the four.
The eel trade is the one that reaches beyond the march. Mereton eel goes to Harrowgate salted and to the southern towns in barrels, the trade is old, and the fen defends its fisheries with the same ferocity it applies to the reed cuts. Three of the eleven holms live chiefly on eel and are the richest in the district. The traps are private property, are inherited, and are marked with the owner’s mark in a fashion that no fen man has ever needed explained.
Fowling is seasonal, communal, and the most pleasant work the fen has. The decoys are permanent structures, curved channels cut into the reed with netting over them, and there are nine of them on Lantern Mere. They are worked in October and November by parties from two or three holms together, and a good season at a decoy will keep a village in money through the winter. Each carries a small shrine at its head, kept by the holm that works it, and the fowlers leave the first bird of the season at it. The decoys are not worked after dark at any season, and the two that were abandoned within the record were abandoned after a death rather than after a poor year.
Peat is the steady trade and is what most of the fen actually does most of the time. It is cut, stacked, dried, and sold into Harrowgate, where it heats the town, the priory and the gaol. The cutting goes down in benches, exposes ground that has not seen air since before the Apocalypse, and is the reason bodies come out of the mosses at all. A peat gang that finds one stops work, sends to the parish, and does not resume that bench in that season. The priest comes out to the cutting, blesses the ground where the body lay, and goes back with it, and until he has come the gang will not put a spade in anywhere on that holm. No dykereeve has ever had to enforce this.
All four trades are worked in the open, away from the holm, in small parties and for long hours. The fen’s habits of caution are shaped by that. Nobody works alone. Nobody works after dark. Every party carries a lamp whether or not it expects to need one, and every party that goes out tells somebody on the holm where it is going, which is a courtesy in June and is not a courtesy in November.
To a visiting company, the four trades matter chiefly as cover and as employment. A party that wants to move through the wet country without being remarked upon will do better hired onto a peat gang than travelling as gentlemen. And a company that wants a guide onto difficult ground will find that the fowlers know the mere edges, the peat men know the mosses, and the eel men know the channels at night, which is knowledge nobody else in the march possesses.
The four trades also order status and sociability. A good eel trap is inherited property; a sound boat is both livelihood and proof that a household can maintain something expensive in a country that rots everything. Ownership of a dry store at a staithe matters nearly as much as acreage would elsewhere. Families that control neither trap nor boat work by shares, labour and marriage, and a clever marriage between holms can join a fishery, a ferry connection and a peat right without any deed being drawn. The reed sessions know these relationships because half their disputes begin where kinship and work overlap.
Fowling season is the fen’s nearest thing to a fair. Two or three holms work a decoy together, eat together while the nets are reset, exchange news, arrange winter labour and decide which young people have become old enough to be trusted in a boat without an uncle. Food is correspondingly communal and plain: eel fresh when there is too much to salt, fowl when the season is good, coarse bread, onions, peat-smoked meat, beer carried in small casks because glass travels badly. Winter visiting is by boat while the channels hold and by foot when the frost is honest. A person who cannot handle either is not despised, but is not thought ready to marry into a household whose work depends on both.
The Wet Country’s Refusal
“In four hundred years of my sessions book I cannot find one entry that says a causeway was let go, a cut abandoned by choice, or a staithe left dark for a season. I can find plenty of quarrelling. I cannot find any giving up. I do not think this district knows how.”
The wet country is the only district in the march that has not lost ground, and the fact deserves to be stated plainly because it is the exception on which everything else in these chapters depends. The upland has lost belts. The wood has lost its northern quarter. The fells carry lineages that were not there four centuries ago, and the wold keeps five barrows that no shepherd will graze and one that nobody will name. The fen holds eleven holms, the same eleven, with the same causeways between them and the same cuts around them.
The reason is not that the fen is safer. By every measure the march uses it is not: the ground kills more people annually than the upland, the carrs carry things the wold does not, and the bounty book runs continuously where the Harrowgate bounty goes unclaimed for years at a time. The wet country is more dangerous than the high country and has given up less of itself, which is the whole of the argument.
What the fen has that the upland lacks is a legible price. A causeway not repaired in October means a holm cut off in November, and every soul on it knows this in the year it happens. A cut not taken means a neighbour takes it and the ground goes with it. A staithe left dark is named at the sessions in front of eleven villages. Nothing in the wet country can be neglected quietly, and the thousand refusals of chapter twenty-two require quiet above everything.
The obligations also fall on people rather than on offices, which is the second difference and may be the larger. There is no fen equivalent of a quarantine officer renewing an order by clerical entry. The man who does not turn out for the causeway is known by name to everybody he will meet that year. The holm that lets a cut go answers for it in public to the neighbours who must then work it. Obligation in the wet country has a face attached at every point.
Whether this can survive is a live question and the Collegium’s proposal is the test of it. Releasing the northern cuts would be an act of ordinary humanity by every standard the realm applies, would relieve poor villages of unprofitable labour, and would be the first deliberate abandonment of ground in the wet country’s recorded history. The fen opposes it and cannot say why. The priory opposes it and will not say why in writing.
A company travelling in the wet country is therefore travelling in the one part of the march that still works, and should notice what that costs the people who live there. The fen is not braver than the upland, not richer than the wood, and not better governed than Harrowgate. It lights its staithes through the dark half of the year at its own charge, keeps a shrine at every decoy, watches its drowned a night before it will bury them, and cuts ten miles of reed in February for a price that does not pay. It has simply never been able to look away, and the ground it has not lost is what the looking bought.