Talk: Imperial Mud – The Fight for the Fens

For our February talk we are remaining online which means we are able to welcome Tasmanian resident James Boyce to Mill Road History Society. James is the author of Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens (2020) amongst many other award-winning historical books and in this talk he will tell us about the history of the Fens and how it related to Cambridge and Cambridgeshire.

The synopsis for his book is as follows:

Between the English Civil Wars and the mid-Victorian period, the proud indigenous population of the Fens of eastern England fought to preserve their homeland against an expanding empire. After centuries of resistance, their culture and community were destroyed, along with their wetland home – England’s last lowland wilderness. But this was no simple triumph of technology over nature – it was the consequence of a newly centralised and militarised state, which enriched the few while impoverishing the many.

In this colourful and evocative history, James Boyce brings to life not only colonial masters such as Oliver Cromwell and the Dukes of Bedford but also the defiant ‘Fennish’ themselves and their dangerous and often bloody resistance to the enclosing landowners. We learn of the eels so plentiful they became a kind of medieval currency; the games of ‘Fen football’ that were often a cover for sabotage of the drainage works; and the destruction of a bountiful ecosystem that had sustained the Fennish for thousands of years and which meant that they did not have to submit in order to survive.

This event will take place on Zoom. The Zoom link will be sent to our mailing list a few days before, and again on the afternoon of the talk for new subscribers. If you haven’t joined the mailing list or didn’t receive the link then please email us through the Contact form.