Guthlac's case) the delirious fancies of marsh fever made
fiends take hideous shapes before the inner eye, and act fantastic
horrors round the old fen-man's bed of sedge.
The Romans seem to have done something toward the draining and
embanking of this dismal swamp. To them is attributed the car-dyke,
or catch-water drain, which runs for many miles from Peterborough
northward into Lincolnshire, cutting off the land waters which flow
down from the wolds above. To them, too, is to be attributed the old
Roman bank, or 'vallum,' along the sea-face of the marshlands, marked
to this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. But the
English invaders were incapable of following out, even of preserving,
any public works. Each village was isolated by its own 'march' of
forest; each yeoman all but isolated by the 'eaves-drip,' or green
lane round his farm. Each 'cared for his own things, and none for
those of others;' and gradually, during the early Middle Age, the
fen--save those old Roman villages--returned to its primaeval jungle,
under the neglect of a race which caricatured local self-government
into public anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an alien enemy,
who might be lawfully slain, if he came through the forest without
calling aloud or blowing a horn.
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