The Parts of Holland form one of three ‘Parts’ of Lincolnshire, bordering the Parts of Lindsey to the north, the Wash to the east, the Parts of Kesteven to the west, and Cambridgeshire and Norfolk to the south. Holland itself is divided into three wapentakes, of which Elloe concerns
96 John Leland (ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith), The itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535– 1543 (5 vols, London: G. Bell and Sons, 1908–1910), v, p. 101.
97 Ibid., ii, p. 64.
98 For this usage see Statutes, iii, p. 906; Leland (ed. Toulmin Smith), Itineraries, iii, p. 101. 99 Hewlett and Birnie, ‘Holocene environmental change’, p. 50.
100Samuel Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire (London: Nonesuch, 2006 [1779]), p. 25. 101 A.J. Tawney and R.H. Tawney, ‘An Occupational Census of the Seventeenth Century’, The Economic History Review, 5, 1 ( 1934), pp. 25–64, p. 63.
31 the present study. Elloe, occupying south Holland, lies on the edge of the Wash. The south Holland Wash receives water from three major rivers, the Nene in the south and the Glen and Welland in the north. The region is characterised by significant amounts of land reclaimed from the sea after the later eleventh century. Most of the villages were settled on land reclaimed by 1086, yet they gradually incorporated large amounts of reclaimed marshland as land was inned from the Wash over the next five centuries (figure 0.3). The area is characterised by both fenland and marshland, both of which were en route to the Wash. This led to Defoe describing the whole Fen area as ‘the sink of no less than thirteen Counties’ and ‘often thus overflowed’.103 The Wash has a tidal range of 6.5m, the highest on the British
North Sea coast. Like southern Gloucestershire, South Holland was also subject to inundations by fresh and saltwater, the risks and benefits of each needing to be balanced effectively for land here to be used productively.
103 Daniel Defoe (ed. Henry Morley), Tour through the Eastern counties of England, 1722 (London: Cassell & Co., 1888), p. 161.
32
33 The study area is mostly fenland, divided between a large expanse of what geographer Michael Chisholm has characterised as silt fen, stretching from the Wash to beyond Spalding and Wisbech, where it meets a lesser area of peat fen. Beyond south Holland is the majority of the ‘Bedford Level’, the area of mainly peat fen, drained to varying degrees of success in
34 the seventeenth century by the Earl of Bedford, Cornelius Vermuyden and their successors.104
For some scholars, ‘silt fen’ is a misnomer, and the area of South Holland around the Wash should be called marshland, a distinction contemporaries would have recognised.105 These
‘marshes’ are still however characterised as ‘shifting, fragile, uncertain grounds’ that required careful management and adaptation.106 Whether technically marsh or silt fen, this region was
still subject to flood risk from the inland peat fens, water from which was held back by fen dykes, and the tidal processes of the Wash. When Leland travelled through the region in the 1530s he described travelling from Bourne in the Kesteven Uplands, to Boston, across ‘hy Holland’, ‘xx. miles al by low grounde and much marsch, and no woode in maner.’107 Fuller
described the area as ‘the reflection of the opposite Holland in the Netherlands with which it sympathized in the fruit fulness and low and wet situation Here the brackishness of the water and the grossness of the air is recompensed by the goodness of the earth abounding with dairies and pasture’.108
Economic activity focussed around three primary types: on the land most liable to flood by sea, river or fen, fishing, fowling, collecting rushes and reeds and making salt. In the areas inundated only seasonally, animals were grazed, turves cut and hay produced. In the driest, ‘upland’ and ‘island’ areas, arable farming could take place.109 In Holland, the silt land
hosted several salt pans, and Spalding was a significant fishing centre in the medieval period.110 This was a largely pastoral region in which diet and income were supplemented by
the products of the fen, and all available arable land was turned over to the production of grains and pulses, of which barley was the most important crop.111 Like much of fenland
Lincolnshire in the early modern period, the south Holland area was home to comparatively
104 Michael Chisholm, ‘Water management in the Fens before the introduction of pumps’, Landscape History, 33, 1 (2012), pp. 45–68, p. 47; H.C. Darby, The Draining of the Fens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), p. 71.
105 Anne Reeves and Tom Williamson, ‘Marshes’, in Joan Thirsk (ed.), The English Rural Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 150–166, p. 150.
106 Reeves and Williamson, ‘Marshes’, p. 153. 107 Leland (ed. Toulmin Smith), Itineraries, v, p. 33
108 Thomas Fuller (John Nichols and P. Austin Nuttall eds), The Worthies of England (3 vols, London: F.C. & J. Rivington, 1811), ii, p. 261.
109 H.C. Darby, The Medieval Fenland (Reprint, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1974 [1940]), p. 22 110 Darby, Medieval Fenland, p. 26, p. 38.
111 Joan Thirsk, Fenland Farming in the sixteenth century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1965), p. 37.
35 few significant gentry families, and Elloe contained no great family seats.112 Holland was
generally a relatively prosperous area, home to thirty-eight parishes which made up 6.3 per cent of the area of the county, yet routinely paid 21.4 per cent of assessments levied under Charles I and the Commonwealth.113 This wealth was not concentrated in the hands of one or
two leading families but was instead distributed amongst a ‘substantial group of middling-rich yeomen’ in a relatively even gradation, supported by an ‘indeterminate but seemingly large population of poor commoners.’114