During one of these peaceful and useful Flemish invasions
the ancestors of Matthew Flinders entered Lincolnshire.
In the later years of his life he devoted some attention
to the history of his family, and found record of
a Flinders as early as the tenth century. He believed,
also, that his people had some connection with two
men named Flinders or Flanders, who fled from Holland
during the religious persecutions, and settled, in
Queen Elizabeth’s reign, in Nottinghamshire as
silk stocking weavers. It would be very interesting
if it were clear that there was a link between the
family and the origins of the great Nottingham hosiery
trade. A Flinders may in that case have woven
silk stockings for the Royal termagant, and Lord Coke’s
pair, which were darned so often that none of the
original fabric remained, may have come from their
loom.
Matthew Flinders himself wrote the note: “Ruddington
near Nottingham (it is four miles south of the town)
is the place whence the Flinders came;” and
he ascertained that an ancestor was Robert Flinders,
a Nottingham stocking-weaver.
A family tradition relates that the Lincolnshire Flinders
were amongst the people taken over to England by Sir
Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch engineer of celebrity
in his day, who undertook in 1621 to drain 360,000
acres of fen in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire.
He was financed by English and Dutch capitalists,
and took his reward in large grants of land which
he made fit for habitation and cultivation. Vermuyden
and his Flemings were not allowed to accomplish their
work of reclamation without incurring the enmity of
the natives. In a petition to the King in 1637
he stated that he had spent 150,000 pounds, but that
60,000 pounds of damage had been done “by reason
of the opposition of the commoners,” who cut
the banks of his channels in the night and during
floods. The peasantry, indeed, resisted the improvements
that have proved so beneficent to that part of England,
because the draining and cultivation of so many miles
of swamp would deprive them of fishing and fowling
privileges enjoyed from time immemorial. Hardly
any reform or improvement can be effected without
some disruption of existing interests; and a people
deeply sunk in poverty and toil could hardly be expected
to contemplate with philosophical calm projects which,
however advantageous to fortunate individuals and
to posterity, were calculated to diminish their own
means of living and their pleasant diversions.
The dislike of the “commoners” to the
work of the “participants” led to frequent
riots, and many of Vermuyden’s Flemings were
maltreated. He endeavoured to allay discontent
by employing local labour at high wages; and was courageous
enough to pursue his task despite loss of money, wanton
destruction, and many other discouragements.* (* See
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, for 1619,
1623, 1625, 1638, 1639 et seq; and White’s Lincolnshire
page 542.) Ebullitions of discontent on the part of
fractious Fenlanders did not cease till the beginning
of the eighteenth century.
