were to the mountaineer, the reed field and mere were to the Fenman - his home, the source of his subsistence, and his defence in seasons of oppression or misfortune." Hither, then, as to a final stronghold, resorted the last Saxon defiers of the Norman invaders. "This land," as Dugdale noted, "environed with fens and reed plecks was impassable; so that they feared not the invasion of an enemy, and in consequence of the strength of this place, by reason of the said water encompassing it, divers of the principal nobility of the English nation had recourse unto it as their greatest refuge against the strength and power of the Norman Conqueror."

In the annals of patrotism there are no more stirring pages than those which tell how Hereward, the last of the English, resisted the power of William the Conqueror in the Fens of Lincolnshire. For seven long years, as Kingsley tells, he and his stout-hearted followers held their own against the Norman invader, and fought till there were none left to fight. "Their bones lay white on every island in the Fens; their corpses rotted on the gallows beneath every Norman keep; their few survivors crawled into monasteries, with eyes picked out, or hands

and feet cut off; or took to the wild woods as strong outlaws. . . . But they never really bent their necks to the Norman yoke."

Romans and Normans, then, had good cause to hold the Fens in abhorrence. But that the evil repute of those far-off times should persist in these changed and peaceful years is inexcusable. All those qualities which made the Fens an ideal refuge for the oppressed have disappeared. Long centuries ago they were dyked and drained, tilled and fenced, until now they have "a beauty as of the sea, of boundless expanse and freedom. For always, from the foot of the wolds," continues Kingsley, "the green flat stretched away, illimitable, to an horizon where, from the roundness of the earth, the distant trees and islands were hulled down

like ships at sea. The firm horse-fen lay, bright green, along the foot of the wold; beyond it, the browner peat, or deep fen; and among it dark velvet alder beds, long lines of reed-rond, emersed in spring and golden under the autumn sun; shining river-reaches; broad meres dotted with a million fowl, while the cattle waded along their edges after the rich sedge-grass, or wallowed in the mire through the hot summer day. Here and there, too, upon

Here

the far horizon, rose a tall line of ashen trees, marking some island of firm rich soil. and there, too, as at Ramsey and Crowland, the huge ashes had disappeared before the axes of the monks, and a minster tower rose over the fen, amid orchards, gardens, cornfields, pastures, with here and there a tree left standing for shade, - Painted with flowers in the spring,' with pleasant shores embosomed in still lakes,' as the monk-chronicler of Ramsey has it, those islands seemed to such as the monk terrestrial paradises. Overhead the arch of heaven spread more ample than elsewhere, as over the open sea; and what vastness gave, and still gives, such effects of cloudland, of sunrise and sunset, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles."

Strangely enough, it was not left to Kingsley to discover the beauty of the Fens. Despite the popular impression that this district is "a а dull and dreary land," it would be possible to compile an anthology in its praise. For example, so long ago as the twelfth century Henry of Huntington wrote: "This fenny country is very pleasant and agreeable to the eye, watered by many rivers which run through it, and adorned with many roads and islands." Earlier still