# - Engineering--the Draining of the Fens.

i) papers concerning engineering issues and the management of the project, including a hand-drawn map of the Fens showing the path of the Old Bedford River, an autograph letter signed by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden on the laying of the banks of the new river (1 page, folio, 5 August 1641), notes by Sir Miles Sandys on the Bedford River scheme, notes on negative side-effects of the project including a paper laying out concerns that it may become impossible to navigate to Cambridge, two autograph letters by Simon Hill to Sir Miles Sandys reporting on his ongoing construction work, presumably on 'Hill's cut' near Peterborough (1633) together with notes detailing the reasons for Hill's discharge due to the inadequacy of his work, a description of a sluice with plan, a letter by William Dodson outlining his objections to the current proposal for continued drainage (3 pages, folio) together with a map by Dodson of the Fenland waterways explaining his criticisms, and "A Perticuler of Every Adventurer in the Twentie Lotts and theire Severall preperties where they lye" (35 pages, folio, [1630s])



ii) Financial accounts, including summary accounts of the finance supplied by the Earl of Bedford and other investors in the Bedford River Project, and the expenditure on the project, mostly in summary but with some detailed expenses, signed multiple times by the expenditor Richard Owen (23 pages, folio, 1632-36); six sets of detailed disbursements on the Bedford River project, showing expenditure on digging dikes, goods and iron, wages, etc. (May to August 1633);  total costs of "the greate Sluice that is now laide downe uppon the outfall of Bedford river" (1634), and relating to drainage work at Ely; receipts, bills, and related accounts for wages, timbers, etc.



iii) Papers relating to the Commission of the Sewers, including a petition signed by Oliver Cromwell and other Commissioners, to the Privy Council, asking permission to attend a session of the Commission at Wisbech ([1630s]) and many other petitions to the Commission (for or against various drainage schemes, opposing the appointment of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, criticising the division of acreage of reclaimed land) including several original petitions signed by local residents and also drafts and copies of petitions, together with signatories, summaries of objections and responses, as well as minutes of meetings of the commission, statutes and orders, lists of commissioners, and a series of verdicts of county sewer commissions for Huntingdonshire, Suffolk, Cambridge and the Isle of Ely with jurors' signatures, also some papers relating to Parliament including petitions by the Adventurers relating to proposed Acts, 1618 to 1630s



iv) Later papers, including "The Report of the Committee to whom the Proposals tendred by the Earle of Bedford to the Corporacion on the 5^{th of February 1663 for the mainteyning Preserving & better dreyning of the great Levell of the Fenns was comitted" (11 pages, folio) and other papers relating to the establishment of the Bedford Level Corporation, legal papers (1650s), papers relating to various estates in the late 17th and early 18th century, most notably the Cambridgeshire estates of Sir Thomas Chicheley, summary valuations of estates, and several documents relating to land purchases by Edward Russell, Earl of Orford (later 17th century)}



v) Various printed documents, pamphlets and broadsides relating to the Great Level and Fenland drainage projects, seventeenth century



This cache of papers sheds considerable light on one of the great engineering projects of 17th-century England, its practicalities, financing, and social impact.

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The first decades of the seventeenth century saw a number of proposals for the agricultural development of the Great Level, the largest fenland region in Eastern England. Fen drainage tended to be highly controversial, pitting large landowners and investors who saw the potential of the fertile soil, against locals who made their living from the marshy fens. The projects of the 1630s which are documented in the current archive were initiated by the 1630 "Lynn Law", contracted between the Commission of the Sewers and the Earl of Bedford, a major landowner around King's Lynn in the heart of the Cambridgeshire fens. In return for financing a highly ambitious drainage system under the directorship of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, the Earl and his thirteen co-adventurers were to be assigned 95,000 acres of the reclaimed land. This was principally achieved by digging a new twenty-one mile channel for the Great Ouse between Earith and Salters Lode: the Bedford River (now known as the Old Bedford River because of a second project later in the century).

The "Lynn Law" project was completed by 1636, but continued resistance in the Fens, expressed through petitions to the Commission and the Privy Council, led to the collapse of the investment scheme in 1638. Reclamation work continued through the 1640s and 50s on a smaller scale. A new company was also established, the Bedford Level Corporation, and its constitution was settled in 1663.