'
Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland did, besides those firm
dykes and rich corn lands of the Porsand, which endure unto this day.
For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the old
wooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noble
pile of stone whose ruins are still standing, the French abbot of
Crowland sent French monks to open a school under the new French
donjon, in the little Roman town of Grante-brigge; whereby--so does
all earnest work, however mistaken, grow and spread in this world,
infinitely and for ever--St. Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage into
Crowland Island, became the spiritual father of the University of
Cambridge in the old world; and therefore of her noble daughter, the
University of Cambridge, in the new world which fen-men, sailing from
Boston deeps, colonized and Christianized, 800 years after St.
Guthlac's death.
The drainage of the fens struggled on for these same 800 years
slowly, and often disastrously. Great mistakes were made; as when a
certain bishop, some 700 years ago, bethought him to make a cut from
Littleport drain to Rebeck (or Priests'-houses), and found, to his
horror and that of the fen-men, that he had let down upon Lynn the
pent-up waters of the whole higher bogs; that rivers were running
backwards, brooks swelling to estuaries, and the whole north-eastern
fen ruinate, to be yet more ruinate by banks confusedly thrown up in
self-defence, till some order was restored in 1332, and the fens
prospered--such little of them as could be drained at all--for nigh
two hundred years.
Pages:
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140