Hic jacet in fossa
Bedae Venerabilis ossa. {299}
Hermits dwelling in the wilderness, as far as I am
aware, were to be seen only in the northern and western
parts of the island, where not only did the forest
afford concealment, but the crags and caves shelter.
The southern and eastern English seldom possess the
vivid imagination of the Briton, the Northumbrian,
and the Scot; while the rich lowlands of central,
southern, and eastern England, well peopled and well
tilled, offered few spots lonely enough for the hermit’s
cell.
One district only was desolate enough to attract those
who wished to be free from the world,—namely,
the great fens north of Cambridge; and there, accordingly,
as early as the seventh century, hermits settled in
morasses now so utterly transformed that it is difficult
to restore in one’s imagination the original
scenery.
The fens in the seventh century were probably very
like the forests at the mouth of the Mississippi,
or the swampy shores of the Carolinas. Their
vast plain is now, in summer, one sea of golden corn;
in winter, a black dreary fallow, cut into squares
by stagnant dykes, and broken only by unsightly pumping
mills and doleful lines of poplar-trees. Of
old it was a labyrinth of black wandering streams;
broad lagoons; morasses submerged every spring-tide;
vast beds of reed and sedge and fern; vast copses
of willow, alder, and grey poplar, rooted in the floating
peat, which was swallowing up slowly, all-devouring,
yet all-preserving, the forests of fir and oak, ash
and poplar, hazel and yew, which had once grown on
that low, rank soil, sinking slowly (so geologists
assure us) beneath the sea from age to age.
Trees, torn down by flood and storm, floated and lodged
in rafts, damming the waters back upon the land.
Streams, bewildered in the flats, changed their channels,
mingling silt and sand with the peat moss. Nature,
left to herself, ran into wild riot and chaos more
and more, till the whole fen became one “Dismal
Swamp,” in which, at the time of the Norman Conquest,
the “Last of the English,” like Dred in
Mrs. Stowe’s tale, took refuge from their tyrants,
and lived, like him, a free and joyous life awhile.
For there are islands in the sea which have escaped
the destroying deluge of peat-moss,—outcrops
of firm and fertile land, which in the early Middle
Age were so many natural parks, covered with richest
grass and stateliest trees, swarming with deer and
roe, goat and boar, as the streams around swarmed
with otter and beaver, and with fowl of every feather,
and fish of every scale.
