1. Seventeenth-Century Draining of the Fens and English Literature

A prime example of agrarian modernization, the early modern fen drainage projects profoundly transformed the English landscape. Through these large-scale projects, driven by heavy capital investment and advanced technology, immense tracts of wetlands along the east coast of England were drained and enclosed in the seventeenth century and beyond. It was the most dramatic of the so-called “improvements” that characterized early modern English agriculture. Creating new fertile farmland, this massive land reclamation contributed to the much needed increase in grain production at a time of food scarcity, the combined effect of the early modern population boom and frequent crop failures during the so-called Little Ice Age. The fen drainage also contributed to the domestic cultivation of key industrial crops, such as rapeseeds, and was thus touted as a crucial achievement in nation-building.

At the same time, this massive transformation destroyed the fen landscape, habitat for rich and diverse flora and fauna, becoming “England’s greatest ecological disaster” in the words of Ian D. Rotherham’s title.¹⁸ It was also a death knell to the traditional pastoral economies of fenlanders who had been making their living “fishing and fowling,” an amphibious way of life intimately embedded in the seasonal rhythms of their watery world and grounded in the rich and diverse natural resources of the fen ecology. Contrary to the outsiders’ view that fenlanders were lazy beggars, the varied natural resources of the Fens enabled its residents “to live tolerably well compared with the peasantry of other agricultural regions.”¹⁹ Writing in 1150, Hugo Candidus, a monk, offered a view of the diverse resources and rich fecundity of fen life:

[The Fen] is very useful for men; for in it are found wood and twigs for fires, hay for the fodder of cattle, thatch for covering houses, and many other useful things. It is, moreover, productive of birds and fish. For there are various rivers, and very many waters and ponds abounding in fish. In all these things the district is most productive.²⁰

Fen dwellers made the most of these natural resources, thanks to their customary access to the commons and the fen, leading a more independent life, if rough and uncouth. Early modern land reclamation projects destroyed the rich fen ecology, along with the way of life embedded in it. In the words of Joan Thirsk, “The native peasantry had nothing to gain and much to lose by [the improvers’] designs, for in both forests and fens they were intended to turn pastoral economies into arable ones, and would inevitably have altered the structure of the local communities.”²¹ Fen residents were coerced into the project and were poorly compensated for the loss of their customary use rights of the commons. Dispossession of fen dwellers is part and parcel of the long-term transformation in relations of production, which was formally affirmed in the Parliament’s abolition of feudal tenures in 1646. Throughout the so-called enclosure, or the capitalist reorganization of the land, the rural poor’s use rights and customary access to the commons were not properly acknowledged. Christopher Hill has argued, “the agricultural revolution of the later seventeenth century was made at the expense of tenants,” whose customary rights were being eroded while the property rights of the landlords came to be legally protected.²² As the most dramatic of the seventeenth-century agrarian improvements, fen drainage embodies the key issues and fundamental disparities of capitalist modernization in the countryside.

Efforts to drain the Fens date back to Roman times and continued during the medieval period. But large-scale reclamation began in earnest in the early seventeenth century under the Stuart Kings, with the imported technology and workers from the continent. James I decided to undertake the fen drainage, expressing his intent not to abandon the Fens “to the will of the waters, not to let them lie waste and unprofitable,”²³ and his son Charles I continued the project on the death of his father, contracting for the project Cornelius Vermuyden, an engineer from the Low Countries. The first area to be drained was Hatfield Chase and the Isle of Axholme in South Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, followed by the Fens in South Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire around the Wash.

As the historian Eric H. Ash has carefully documented, the drainage projects sparked heated national conversation from early on.²⁴ While the crown and the landed elites were united in touting the benefits of transforming the seemingly useless marshlands into rich farmland, anti-drainers highlighted the Fens’ natural fecundity, which they argued was misunderstood by outsiders. To outsiders, the critics argued, the marshy landscape may look like a wasteland, a place of putrid corruption that needed reform, with its people prone to laziness and rudeness, but to locals, the fen ecology offers rich, diverse natural resources, enabling even poor cottagers to piece together a livelihood.

The fight against the drainage did not stop at petitioning, pamphleteering, and litigation against developers. Protests began soon after Vermuyden declared the completion of the Hatfield Chase and Axholme Isle project and continued in the 1630s. Fen men took advantage of the war to destroy drainage works throughout the 1640s, generally siding with Parliament. Indeed, Thomas Fairfax had some personal connection with the Hatfield Chase and Isle of Axholme region. His father, Sir Ferdinand Fairfax, was allegedly rescued by anti-undertakers from royalists in the Isle of Axholme during the first Civil War. When a leader of Axholme anti-undertakers was arrested in 1647, Fairfax helped to arrange his release.²⁵

As recent ecocritical studies have shown, the plight of the fen men and the environmental destruction of the Fens did not go unnoticed nor unlamented in early modern English literature. Ken Hiltner, Todd Borlik, and others have shown that early modern writers commented on and participated in the national debates over the Fen. Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass (1616), for example, questions the ethics of the drainage projects and their undertakers through a con artist named Merecraft, who pitches the project to a greedy Norfolk gentleman, promising to make him “Duke of the Drowned-lands.”²⁶ The fen drainage is more openly opposed in Michael Drayton’s chorographical epic, Poly-Olbion (1622). Countering the prejudice against the Fens and its residents, a personification of the Lincolnshire Fens triumphantly celebrates the region’s biodiversity and fertility, portraying fenmen employed “busily” in utilizing the rich natural resources unique to the Fens:

The toyling Fisher here is tewing of his Net:

The Fowler is imployd his lymed twigs to set.

One underneath his Horse, to get a shoot doth stalke;

Another over Dykes upon his Stilts doth walke:

There other with their Spades, the Peats are squaring out,

And others from their Carres, are busily about,

To draw out Sedge and Reed, for Thatch and Stover fit,

That whosoever would a Landskip rightly hit,

Beholding but my Fennes, shall with more shapes be stor’d,

Then Germany, or France, or Thuscan can afford.²⁷

It is true that this celebration is immediately sneered at by an outsider in the ensuing lines, dramatizing the ongoing national debates about the Fens and the diametrically opposed perception of the region and its residents. Yet such a rebuke does not erase the Fens’ celebration. After all, it is the Fen that has the honor to open the song of Lincolnshire and gets far more lines, about three times more, than those given to her detractor.

As many readers have noted, what is striking about Drayton’s epic is that not humans, but topological figures are the main characters and the speakers of the poem. “Humanity has been excluded from Poly-Olbion” as “topological characters themselves look at human beings and the world of men.”²⁸ And these non-human characters are “anthropomorphic without being anthropocentric.”²⁹ “The non-human environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that seems to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history.”³⁰ As Borlik has argued, Drayton’s poetic choice illustrates an emergent environmental ethos, namely, a recognition that “The human interest is not the only legitimate interest.”³¹ Drayton’s poetic innovation is an intentional response to accelerating environmental destruction espoused by the Baconian imperative to expand human domination of the natural world.

A similar environmental ethos infuses “The Powtes Complaint,” a contemporary protest song against the fen drainage. As in Drayton’s epic, the song is again written in the voice of non-human nature, in the form of fish called “Powtes.” Against undertakers who “mean all Fenns to drain and waters overmaster,” the fish/speaker calls “Brethren of the water” to “intreat our ancient water Nurses … send us good old Captain Floud to lead us out to Battel.”³² Fenmen’s dispossession is presented through the shared plight of fish on the verge of losing their habitat, leveraging the commonplace perception of fenmen’s affinity with fish:

Wherefore let us intreat our ancient water Nurses

To shew their power so great as t’help to drain their purses;

And send us good old Captain Floud to lead us out to Battel,

Then Two peny Jack with Skales on’s back will drive out all the Cattel.³³

One cannot help but wonder whether Marvell read this “Jacobean Environmental Protest Poem.”³⁴ As Borlik and Egan suggest, this protest song, written around 1619, appears to have had rather broad circulation. The poem was included in William Dugdale’s 1668 history of the fen drainage, and as many as four manuscripts survived, with many variants, another indicator of a wide readership. And it also looks like the song has connections with Cambridge University, Marvell’s alma mater. There is a high possibility that the song was written by someone from Wisbech and the surrounding Cambridgeshire, and the song was included in a literary miscellany, potentially compiled by a member of Cambridge University.³⁵ One wonders if this poem may have caught the attention of our poet, a native of the low-lying Humber estuary region, during his Cambridge days. If so, would he have recalled the poem when back in Yorkshire at the time of the heated conflict in nearby Fens?

Even if Marvell had missed this protest song, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) would still have offered our poet an imaginative model of ecocritical response to the fen controversy. In his ecocritical reading of The Tempest, through fruitful reconstructions and convergence of several cultural texts connected to the Fens, Borlik has convincingly argued that “the chimera known as Caliban is in part inspired by legends of Lincolnshire fen spirits, and that his plight comments on the displacement of local cottagers by land reclamation projects.”³⁶ As Borlik has observed, Shakespeare’s play more than once associates Caliban with the Fens. Act 2, Scene 2 begins with his curse that diseases associated with the Fens fall on Prospero:

Enter Caliban with a burden of wood

Caliban: All the infections that the sun sucks up

      From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him

      By inchmeal, a disease!

A noise of thunder heard. (2.2.1–3)³⁷

Caliban’s curse associates him with devils and goblins of the pagan folk tales passed down in the Fens, such as “Tiddy Mun.” At the same time, the tasks Caliban performs for Prospero, such as gathering wood and catching fish, associate him with fen men and fen economy. Other characters describe Caliban as fish (“a man or a fish? … A fish, he smells like a fish” [2.2.24–25]; “Legged like a man, and his fins like arms” [2.2.32–33]; “half a fish and half a monster” [3.2.27–28]), and he is also called a “tortoise” (1.2.316), suggesting his affinity with water and amphibious existence, as well as his physical deformity. If Caliban evokes fen men and the demons haunting the fen, and hence the spirit of the place, Prospero’s magic links him with the Baconian imperative to expand human control over the natural world. “Prospero’s power over the elements is precisely the power claimed by seventeenth-century projectors who sought to divert the winter floods from the fens.”³⁸

One may safely conjecture that a sensitive reader like Marvell, a native of East Yorkshire and its watery world of the coastal floodplains, would have grasped the layered cultural references of the play and the character Caliban, which converge on the fen landscape and fen dwellers. He would also have sensed one of the play’s key conflicts, namely, the urban magi-technocrat’s domination of the rural landscape and its underclass. “The colonial dynamic can also arise within a nation-state when the centre invades the periphery, or an urban elite seizes the communal wilds of the rural poor.”³⁹ When Marvell faced the fen men riots in 1651, one may suggest, he had multiple literary precedents to engage with, along with their proto-ecocritical models and insights.

2. Flood in the Meadow and Thomas Fairfax as an Improving Landlord

As the first phase of the Civil War wound down, the mid-seventeenth century saw a renewed push for agrarian capitalism. The Parliamentary government actively promoted the conversion of undeveloped land for productive use, under the influence of Samuel Hartlib, the proponent of all kinds of reform. Members of the Hartlib circle argued that “too much of England [is] being left as waste ground in Commons, Mores, Heaths, Fens, Marshes, and the like, which are all Waste Ground.” These places of waste are, they emphasized, “all capable of very great Improvement.”⁴⁰ In the ascending georgic culture, the Fens, along with forests and commons, came to be seen as “wastes,” as “land not yet under the plough, arable land-in-waiting,” as noted by Karen Edwards.⁴¹

This accelerated push for land reclamation by the Parliamentary government was met with frustration and anger by the fen men, who had generally sided with the Parliamentary cause: the Fens were major recruiting grounds for the Parliamentary forces in the Civil War. It is telling that Walter Blith (1605–1654), “one of the most important and influential writers on agricultural improvement during the seventeenth century,”⁴² made a dramatic shift in view from 1649 to 1652 regarding the draining of the Fens. Blith was a captain in the Parliamentarian army during the civil war, and served as a sequestrator of royalists’ estates and as a surveyor of confiscated Royal lands.⁴³ While Blith was ambivalent about the drainage project in The English Improver, or a New Survey of Husbandry (1649), in the significantly revised second edition, The English Improver Improved or the Survey of Husbandry Surveyed (1652), he became an ardent supporter of the fen drainage project. In the second edition, Blith listed fen drainage as the second of his six improvements, reflecting the changed consensus on draining of the Fens in Parliamentarian circles.

The frontispiece of Blith’s second edition vividly represents the reformist ideals of the late 1640s and early 1650s (See Figure 1). The illustration features the Royalist and the Parliamentarian soldiers putting aside their military weapons and replacing them with tools of agrarian improvement: now they work the land with a plough, dig new drains with a trenching spade, and use a survey tool for measuring the land, either in preparation for agrarian improvements or for enclosure. As Ash has observed, under the banner of “Vive La Re Publick,” the image urges that it is time to leave soldiering behind and to build the republic through innovative farming, capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1650s.⁴⁴ In the young republic, reformist energy is being redirected toward transforming all facets of society and culture, from agriculture to education, drawing on proposals from the members of the Hartlib Circle. I submit that such a Zeitgeist is echoed in the logic of apology in Marvell’s poem addressed to the retired Lord General of the Parliamentarian army. Fairfax is portrayed as having left soldiering and shifted his energy to improving the land, restoring it from the wastes of the Civil War. Though equipped with “Power which the ocean might command” (352), “he preferred to the Cinque Ports / These five imaginary forts” (349–50) of his garden, being closely involved in the restoration of his wasted estate into “Paradise’s only map” (768).

Figure 1

The frontispiece to Walter Blith, The English Improver Improved (London: Printed for John Wright, 1652). RB 600165. The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

One key marker of this poem’s presentation of Fairfax as an improving landlord is an innovative agrarian practice, duly noted in the meadow scene. As already discussed by many, in a clear departure from the generic precedents of the country house poem and their representation of the lord’s house and the great table in the hall as the center of the surrounding world, the physical center of Marvell’s country house poem is occupied by the poet’s observation of the agricultural practices in the Fairfax estate. In the center of this ninety-seven-stanza poem, from stanza 47 to 60, the poet strolls around the meadow, surveying the field and observing the agricultural work. He walks through the tall grass of the meadow, watching hay harvesting, cattle grazing the harvested field, and finally the flooding of the meadows:

Then, to conclude these pleasant acts,

Denton sets ope its cataracts;

And makes the meadow truly be

(What it but seemed before) a sea.

For, jealous of its Lord’s long stay,

It tries t’invite him thus away,

The river in itself is drowned.

And isles th’astonished cattle round. (465–72)

The accuracy of Marvell’s description of agricultural practices has been noted before by Hirst and Zwicker.⁴⁵ I believe, however, that a culminating event in Marvell’s description, the flood, has not received the kind of attention that it deserves. Certainly, there have been discussions about the symbolic meaning of this flood. James Turner has claimed, for example, that “Marvell makes the water represent the life he praises, a privileged and local innocence.”⁴⁶ And, without doubt, the biblical allusion to Noah’s flood is there, too. But there is no consensus yet on the literal cause of this flood. The lines make it clear that this is not a seasonal flood but a man-made flooding, as indicated in “Denton sets ope its cataracts.” Then what caused this anthropogenic flooding, and what does it tell us about this estate? Based on a 1716 map of the Denton estate, John Barnard has argued that “Marvell’s image involves a playful aggrandizement” of the periodic cleaning of the ‘Fish-Pond’ in the Denton estate.⁴⁷ It is hard to believe, however, that the opening of sluice gates to a mere fishpond would flood the whole meadow thirty miles down the river. I submit that the episode refers to floating/flooding, a cutting-edge agrarian technology in seventeenth-century England.⁴⁸ While Cristina Malcolmson, Anthony Low, and Ann E. Berthoff mentioned that the flood scene alludes to this advanced farming practice, they did not fully explain its significance, leading to the absence of such a view in Nigel Smith’s edition of Andrew Marvell’s poetry, the most recent scholarly edition.⁴⁹ I would like to foreground this view and argue that the artificial flood in the center of the poem is a key to its representation of Sir Thomas as an improving landlord.

Floating/flooding was an innovative agrarian practice in which meadows were flooded with water (hence, “water meadows”) to facilitate the early growth of hay and to fertilize the soil with alluvial enrichments.⁵⁰ In this practice, the meadows were covered with shallow water during the cold winter months for protection and early growth, according to Eric Kerridge, an agricultural historian. In addition, the meadows were often flooded again after the mowing in June and July for a second or third crop of hay, and dairy cattle were put in the meadows in high summer and early autumn to eat off the meadows. The hay crop from the floated meadow was “about four times as great as from an equal area of unfloated wet meadow.”⁵¹ The extremely tall grass of the meadow in Nun Appleton estate, deliberately highlighted in this poem, is another sign that this is a floated meadow: “And now to the abyss I pass / Of that unfathomable grass” (369–70, emphasis mine).

In England, Rowland Vaughan (1558–1627) was the first to write about water-meadows, calling the practice “drowning” and had long been given credit for the invention of the system, though recent scholarly consensus seems otherwise.⁵² Floating was the foremost of the key agricultural innovations recommended by the Parliament’s improvers centered around the Hartlib circle. Blith, both in The English Improver and in its second edition, The English Improver Improved, promoted floating as the first of the “six pieces of improvement of agriculture,” prominently listed on the frontispiece of the first edition. The practice necessitates preparatory leveling of the ground and the installation of elaborate water management systems such as “floating trench,” “draining trench,” and “sluices,” a large-scale investment only possible for large landowners. Seemingly mindful of such initial expenses, Blith emphasizes a high return for such capital investment when recommending this practice: “I … have cut twenty-four Load in a Meadow, where I cut but five or six the year before.”⁵³

This poem’s deliberate highlighting of advanced agricultural technology, floating, is symptomatic of its program to represent Sir Thomas as an improving landowner. In the following, I would like to examine some other elements of this poem that converge to narrate the imperative of improvement embodied in Fairfax: namely, Fairfax’s garden, his controlling presence in the meadow, with the poet as a surveyor, and his re-creation of the estate as paradise.

Thomas Fairfax seems to belong to the growing group of gentry landowners with a genuine interest in the management of their estates. His service as a young man in the Low Countries during the Thirty Years’ War may have exposed him to Flemish farming practices, the most advanced in Europe throughout the early modern period. These advanced practices were passed to England by immigrants from the region and by Englishmen who traveled there for trade or war.⁵⁴ Fairfax’s meticulous management of the Isle of Man, sequestrated to him, is well recorded.⁵⁵ At this stage of his life, following his retirement, the care of his estate and his familial matters seem to have been his primary concern, as Smith suggests:

Fairfax retired to his estates in Yorkshire and set about building the future of his family. There were repairs and restorations to perform after property damage during the Civil War (especially to the York houses). … Fairfax had risked his family properties in the Parliamentary cause. There was much construction to do; there was a daughter to educate and her marriage to settle.⁵⁶

In composing a poem about Nun Appleton, “a recently acquired property, and the projected home and dowry for his daughter Mary,”⁵⁷ Marvell is responding to such interests and the concerns of his patron. Fairfax rebuilt the house into a much larger one to enhance Mary’s dowry, and it is possible that “Fairfax was planning the new house at this time, or perhaps even beginning work on the renovation.”⁵⁸ Fairfax’s renewed interest in estate management serves as a key occasion of this poem in which Marvell celebrates and apologizes for his patron’s controversial decision to annul the entail and settle a substantial part of the family estate on his only daughter, Mary, and her future husband.⁵⁹ I propose that Marvell’s poem addresses his patron’s central preoccupation of this period and is written accordingly. Seen in this way, the seemingly disparate parts of this poem coalesce to form a rather coherent logic of encomium for the lord of this house as an improving and individualist landowner.

One such element and a prominent feature of this poem, differentiating it from its generic precedents, is its extensive coverage of the house’s garden. Just before the meadow scene, the poet spends eleven stanzas in the garden, representing Fairfax as a gardening enthusiast who brings his skills as a military leader to cultivate a highly disciplined garden. Fairfax’s interest in gardening suggests his familiarity with contemporary agrarian writings and their discussions of new agricultural technologies, because “[in] the seventeenth century the literature of horticultural improvement often merged into that of agricultural improvement. In the mind, as in practice, the boundaries between the kitchen garden, the orchard, and the fields beyond were difficult to maintain.”⁶⁰ Advanced horticultural techniques were very often applied to improve arable farming practices⁶¹ and vice versa.⁶²

Given that the garden of the manor was not featured in earlier examples of the country house poem, such as Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst,” one can make a case that the extensive coverage of the garden in Upon Appleton House is the poet’s strategic decision to illustrate his patron’s key preoccupations and to present him as an improving landlord, but without actually having to show him directly engaged in farming.⁶³ Even in georgic culture, according to Anthony Low, the poet needs to negotiate with “the fundamental contempt of labor” prevalent among the landed elite:

Labor is something valuable, something necessary, but on the whole it is better to gloss over it quickly and leave it to others. It is quite proper for a landowner to take an interest in the workings of his estate, and for a poet to celebrate and encourage that interest; but no one would expect the owner to put his own hand to the plow. As the old feudal relationship between master and workers gives way to the new system of land ownership and labor for hire, it even becomes legitimate to speak in poetry about the economic details of husbandry. Yet always there is a strong pull to make georgic easy, gentlemanly, more like pastoral.⁶⁴

I would suggest that Marvell is negotiating a way to address his patron’s agrarian interests by describing his highly managed garden and by describing the innovative agrarian practices of his estate, but without foregrounding the lord himself. Indeed, I would suggest that Fairfax seems present in the meadow scene, walking with the poet, though his presence is not explicitly mentioned, for the same reason. His presence is suggested by the pronoun “we,” which punctuates the lines in the meadow scene. We see one such example at the beginning of the meadow sequence:

And now to the abyss I pass

Of that unfathomable grass,

Where men like grasshoppers appear,

But grasshoppers are giants there:

They, in their squeaking laugh, contemn

Us as we walk more low than them:

And, from the precipices tall

Of the green spires, to us do call. (369–76, emphases mine)

In this first stanza of the meadow sequence, while at first glance, the speaker seemingly walks in the meadow alone (“to the abyss I pass”), the pronoun smoothly transitions to first-person plural pronouns a few lines down, suggesting the presence of a companion. First-person plural pronouns are again used in lines 378 and 435 in the meadow scene.⁶⁵ Who is with the poet in his perambulating survey of the estate? Can it be the addressee of this poem, Lord Fairfax? Though this subtle reference seems to have been unnoticed, the punctuating presences of the first-person plurals mark that Fairfax is indeed “a prime shaper of events” in the meadow sequence,⁶⁶ with a god-like control.⁶⁷ Like God, Fairfax can issue a flood, rejuvenating the meadow, and then take it away, in full control of the seemingly chaotic situations and the whole natural world.

This leads to my next point. In this poem, the poet is assuming the role of a land surveyor. Moving out of the house, the poet expresses his intention to “survey” (81) the estate, paying attention to its individual divisions and subdivisions. He chooses to ambulate around “fragrant garden, shady woods, / Deep meadows, and transparent floods” (79–80). According to Andrew McRae, in early modern England, land surveyors began to be seen as independent professionals who could bring legal and technological expertise to land measurement and estate planning.⁶⁸ As such, they were invaluable help for improving landlords in their efforts to use the land more intensively and efficiently. Such intensive management of the land, with the help of a hired professional surveyor, seems alluded to in the physical markers of Fairfax’s field. When harvested and cleaned of haystacks, the field is shown as a “naked equal flat”(449). For floating, the land needs to be meticulously surveyed and carefully prepared. It needs to be leveled to prevent differences in water depth. Blith advises, “Plot out thy Land, into such a Modell or Platforme as thou mayst be sure that … all thy Lands thou resolvest to float may be under the true Levell of thy Water.”⁶⁹

Surveyor is a fit companion for this improving landlord as he restores the estate from a waste into “Paradise’s only map” (768). As part of their service, the professional land surveyors produced a map of the estate, a tangible emblem of the owner’s absolute ownership of the land. As such, this estate, “Paradise’s only map,” can be given as an absolute property, freed of premodern constraints of entails, to the daughter of this improving and individualist landowner and her future husband, as justified and celebrated in this poem.⁷⁰

3. “Salmon-Fishers Moist” and the Resurgence of Nature

While Fairfax asserts his control over the natural world in the meadow, it is there that his logic of agrarian capitalism is countered by an alternative logic of the laboring population, as discussed by other readers,⁷¹ making the meadow a site of contestation:

For to this naked equal flat,

Which Levellers take pattern at,

The villagers in common chase

Their cattle, which it closer rase; (449–52)

Marvell’s reference to the Levellers in this scene introduces an alternative vision, a “levelled” society like Eden before the Fall, or like the harvested meadow created by the mowers’ military labor. The poet compares the mown field to the Levellers’ request for a more equitable society. It is likely that the reference is more about the proto-communist arguments of the Diggers, a group led by Gerrard Winstanley. Diggers called themselves “True Levellers” and Sir Thomas had personal interactions with them during the group’s experiment in St. George’s Hill in 1649–1650.⁷² Their vision challenged the capitalist improvement of land and its concomitant reorganization of traditional social relations.

I submit that these conflicting visions are framed by a view distinct not only from the capitalist logic of improvement but also from that of the True Levellers, though the dividing line is not always clear. The meadow/flooding scene, together with the poem’s final lines, obliquely alludes to the ongoing unrest that directly challenge the logic of agrarian improvement: fenmen riots in nearby Hatfield Chase. As mentioned, during the very summer of 1651 when Marvell was penning this poem, fenmen were staging violent attacks on the drainage works and on the new settlements of projectors’ tenants.⁷³

In his discussion of environmental protest literature of the Renaissance, Hiltner makes a distinction between early modern protesters who “were violently opposed to changes in land use” and the Diggers. According to Hiltner, in their approach to cultivating waste land, Winstanley’s group shared the logic of improvement with the agricultural reformers, pursuing the same goal of cultivating what they saw as waste land. Winstanley argued that “the main thing we aym at … is this, To lay hold upon, and as we stand in need, to Cut and Fell, and make the best advantage we can of the Woods and Trees, that grow upon the Commons, To be a stock for our selves and our poor Brethren …”⁷⁴ Winstanley viewed commons and forests as unproductive wastelands, aiming to turn them into productive land. While he aimed to utilize this newly gained productivity for the benefit of the landless “poor Brethren,” his view overlapped with the logic of improvement, namely, the need to intensify the control of the natural world for the benefit of humankind. In that regard, Winstanley’s stance was, though mostly aligned with, distinct from those of fenmen who were protesting against the impending destruction of the fen ecology, and against the replacement of pastoral economies with arable ones.

Then, how much of such distinction and insights informs Marvell’s poem? It is true that Marvell’s allusion to this ongoing unrest in the nearby fenland is very subtle and hard to pin down. I would suggest, however, that the harvested meadow, “a levelled space” (443), “Which Levellers take pattern at”(450), triggers an association with the ongoing fen riots, because of the word “Level.” The word refers to drained flat land, as in Hatfield Level. This double meaning of the word was noted by contemporaries, as this example demonstrates: “the undertakers were the true Levellers, for they invented the equivocal word Level.”⁷⁵ Such instances of layered references (“double meaning,” or what one may call double entendre) are seen in the flood scene, too. As discussed, the floating/flooding registers the advanced farming practice of Fairfax’s estate, symbolizing his assertion of control over his estate. But it also evokes a diametrically opposed kind of flooding, the kind that threatens the imperative of land improvement realized in fen drainage. The flood conjures up the image of a strike back by the forces refusing to be dominated. When protesting the drainage, fenmen attacks were often directed at dykes and sluice gates, inducing a flood:

In the neighborhood of Hatfield Chase, near the Isle of Axholme, everyday for seven weeks, gangs of commoners, armed with muskets, drew up the flood-gates so as to let in the flowing tide, and at every ebb shut the sluices, threatening that they “would stay till the whole level was well drowned, and the inhabitants forced to swim away like ducks.”⁷⁶

Flooding in the meadow scene, therefore, figures forth in two antipodal ways. It works as an example of capitalist control of nature, as I already discussed. But it also evokes the ecologically minded voices that protest the inequity involved and challenge such control over the natural world. Therefore, even though this anthropogenic flooding may be controlled by the landlord, it inevitably evokes the truly topsy-turvy situations ongoing in the nearby Fens, and other floods with a darker menace: the fen rioters’ attacks on sluice gates, which caused destructive flooding in the new settlements built in the drained land:

How boats can over bridges sail;

And fishes do the stables scale.

How salmons trespassing are found;

And pikes are taken in the pound. (477–80)

The lines associate “salmons” and “pikes” with “trespassing,” a verb that evokes the fen riots in which “fundamental struggles of the time over rights of land-use”⁷⁷ were unfolding. Commoners’ “trespassing,” or the act of challenging the notion of exclusive property rights, is transferred to the multiple species of fish, “eels,” “salmons,” and “pikes.” It is as if the fish’s call to action in “The Powtes Complaint” were actually being followed through in an act of ecological retribution, led by “good old Captain Floud.” This image of a world turned upside down in the flood scene is picked up again, more ominously, in “the salmon-fishers moist” of the concluding stanza:

But now the salmon-fishers moist

Their leathern boats begin to hoist;

And, like Antipodes in shoes,

Have shod their heads in their canoes.

How tortoise-like, but not so slow,

These rational amphibii go!

Let’s in; for the dark hemisphere

Does now like one of them appear. (769–76)

Fishermen’s carrying of boats on their heads is compared to “Antipodes in shoes,” and to Roman soldiers in “testudo formation.”⁷⁸ An image of a strange Other, it is both ominous and menacing. I suggest that “salmon-fishers moist ”(769), “rational amphibii” (774) coming out of the river, allude to fenmen who were characterized as living half on land and half in water by contemporaries. An outsider traveling through the Fens in Lincolnshire wrote in 1635, “I know not what to make of [fenmen], I think they be half fish, half flesh for they drink like fishes, & sleep like hogs.”⁷⁹ In his diary entry, Samuel Pepys records how he passed “along dikes, where sometimes we were ready to have our horses sink to the belly,” and “over most sad Fennes, all the way observing the sad life which the people of the place … do live, sometimes rowing from one spot to another, and then wadeing.”⁸⁰ These amphibious and “tortoise-like” fishers also evoke Caliban, along with all pagan ghosts, demons, goblins, and dark spirits of the fen wilderness, whose tales Marvell must have been familiar with. All these cultural references converging, this apocalyptic image conjures up the possibility of ecological retribution of apocalyptic proportions, as well as of “another revolution,” to draw upon Christopher Hill’s analysis of the English Revolution:

There were, we may oversimplify, two revolutions in mid-seventeenth-century England. The one which succeeded established the sacred rights of property (abolition of feudal tenures, no arbitrary taxation), gave political power to the propertied (sovereignty of Parliament and common law, abolition of prerogative courts), and removed all impediments to the triumph of the ideology of the men of property—the protestant ethic. There was, however, another revolution which never happened, though from time to time it threatened. This might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic.⁸¹

As in the scene of flooding, the moment of control over labor and the natural world slips into its opposite—a resurgence of forces that are not to be neatly controlled—evoking Caliban’s curse in The Tempest. Right after “(n)ature is wholly vitrified” by the heavenly tried “flames” of Mary Fairfax (687–688), making the estate “Paradise’s only map”(768), the watery bodies of Caliban-like “rational amphibii” and their menacing presence in the concluding stanza offer a stark contrast and question such imposition of rationality and anthropocentric dominion of the natural world, the reformist vision of the reclaimed Eden “after the demise of wetlands.”⁸²

4. Coda: The Angling Poet and the Space of Waste and Otium

Given Marvell’s position of dependency in the Fairfax household, it is hard to imagine that he would cast a skeptical eye on his patron in any direct fashion. In this poem, he assumes the role of the land surveyor, accompanying his patron in his georgic management of the estate, and structures it as a panegyric of the patron’s post-war efforts as an improving landowner and of his plan to convey the estate to his only child, Mary Fairfax. Marvell’s eulogy constructs a teleological narrative, a progressive story of this house from a Catholic nunnery to a Protestant household led by an improving landlord and caring father, projecting an auspicious dynastic future through Mary Fairfax.

At the same time, this progressive narrative is recurrently cast in doubt. In this poem, the poet associates himself with the space of “waste,” such as a forest, places to be “improved” upon in agrarian modernization. Retreating from the flood in the meadow, he seeks shelter in the forest, which is filled with all sorts of birds, plants, and insects, testifying to the teeming presence of rich non-human lives that brim over in the world of this poem. These non-human lives, the poem portrays, form a mutually compensatory utopian community in this space of waste (513–520). The poet’s sense of affinity with such space is captured by the strikingly sensual language deployed: “And ivy, with familiar trails, / Me licks, and clasps, and curls, and hales” (589–590).

The crowding of non-human lives occurs in another peripheral space of this estate, along the river, as the poet savors a fleeting moment of otium, a non-virtue in this Protestant household, as an angler:

Oh what a pleasure ’tis to hedge

My temples here with heavy sedge;

Abandoning my lazy side,

Stretched as a bank unto the tide;

Or to suspend my sliding foot

On th’osier’s underminèd root,

And in its branches tough to hang,

While at my lines the fishes twang! (641–648)

In this amphibious space along the river, the poet, immersed in the natural world, cuts a figure with features reminiscent of fen men. In this watery space, the poet engages in angling, a gentleman’s version of fishing, a defining activity of fenlanders, while enjoying his moment of otium, a gentlemanly form of laziness. His time in the landscape along the river is characterized by the adjectives “lazy” (643) and “idle” (650). In the pro-drainage rhetoric of early modern England, fenlanders were commonly accused of a lazy lifestyle, “given much to fishing and idleness.”⁸³ In his time of leisure, the poet is lounging on “sedge” and “osier,” plants closely associated with the crucial produce of the wetlands’ pastoral economy, as noted by many contemporaries. Refuting the pro-drainage rhetoric, for example, the anonymous author of The Anti-Projector argues that the Fen has a “great store of Osier, Reed, and Sedge, which are such necessaries as the Countries cannot want them for many uses, and sets many poor on work.”⁸⁴

The poet’s self-representation as an angler seems deliberate, given the social status of angling and debates surrounding the rights of fishing in the seventeenth century. Like rights of land use, rights of fishing were heavily contested at the time, with a “[surge] of litigation concerning riparian and other water rights” in the early seventeenth century.⁸⁵ This was part of “the fundamental debates of the age about the relation between English men and women and the land they inhabited,” according to Andrew McRae.⁸⁶ Using a rod and line instead of a net, angling is an ineffective and hence non-commercial way to catch fish. Access to the sport was “assumed to be heavily dependent upon the ownership of property” in early modern England. It was a “landed leisure” fit for a gentleman who owns land adjoining a river and his friends.⁸⁷ This makes it an ambivalent activity for our poet, a landless dependent of this household. The poet’s self-consciousness perhaps underlies his reaction to Mary’s arrival: “But now away my hooks, my quills, / And angles, idle utensils. / The young Maria walks tonight” (649–651).

While Marvell could not have read Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653) before writing this poem, Walton’s deliberate separation of the enjoyment of the land from the ownership of the land, against the ascending rhetoric of absolute property rights, is suggestive when reading the poet’s self-representation as an angler. In this moment, the tutor-angler is presented as the opposite of the social and cultural values embodied in the figure of Mary Fairfax, suggesting a sentiment similar to this one expressed by Venator in The Compleat Angler:

I say, as I thus sate joying in my own happy condition, and pitying this poor rich man, that owned this and many other pleasant Groves and Meadows about me, I did thankfully remember what my Saviour said, that the meek possess the Earth; or rather, they enjoy what the others possess and enjoy not.⁸⁸

One may suggest that the poet subtly engages with the nation’s “fundamental struggles … over rights of land-use,” and appears to find himself again leaning towards the view that sees the enjoyment and sustainable use of the natural world as open to all the subjects of the nation, not just to those who own the land and assert absolute domination over the natural world. The angler poet seems to inhabit a polar opposite of Mary Fairfax and her “hurrying and purposive reformation of nature and man,” to borrow Zwicker’s expression.⁸⁹ The poet is associated with the ethos expressed in The Compleat Angler, and its appreciation of “the slow, continuous wisdom of the natural world.”⁹⁰ While assuming the role of the poetic surveyor of this estate, a supporting partner of the improving landlord, his peripatetic loitering enables him to notice, appreciate, and enjoy all the teeming lives, especially in the liminal spaces of the forest and of the riverside. This poet’s associations with places of “waste,” this poem’s rich cataloguing of birds, fish, insects, and plants, and the poet’s self-representation as an angler, a charged figure, make it difficult to deem all of them a result of mere chance. Cumulatively, they forge what we may call an ecocritical frame that projects an alternate perspective on the imperative of agrarian improvement, even so indirectly and subtly.

Acknowledgements

It has taken a long time to write this article, which began in my doctoral dissertation project many years ago. Along the way, I have incurred significant intellectual debts. Among many, I would especially like to thank Professor Michael McKeon at Rutgers University. I would also like to thank Ryan Netzley, the editor of Marvell Studies, and the anonymous readers for their constructive critiques and helpful suggestions. Any remaining shortcomings are, of course, all mine.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.