y and Charteris cannot be traced beyond the gulf of the Danish
invasion, but they are members of the group or ring of houses which
clustered round the edge of the dry land and sent out its industry
towards the Wash, making new land; for this ring sent out feelers
eastward, draining the land and recovering it every way, founding cells,
establishing villages. Holbeach, Spalding, Freiston, Holland, and I know
not how much more was their land.

When the monasteries were destroyed their lordship fell into the hands
of that high class--now old, then new--the Cromwells and Russells and
the rest, upon whom has since depended the greatness of the country. The
intensive spirit proper to a teeming but humble population was
forgotten. The extensive economics of the great owners, their love of
distances and of isolation took the place of the old agriculture. Within
a generation the whole land was drowned.

The isolated villages forgot the general civilisation of England; they
came to depend for their living upon the wildfowl of the marshes; here
and there was a little summer pasturing, more rarely a little ploughing
of the rare patches of dry land; but the whole place soon ran wild, and
there Englishmen soon grew to cause an endless trouble to the new
landlords. These, all the while on from the death of Henry to that of
Elizabeth, pursued their vigilance and their accumulations. Their power
rose above the marshes like a slow sun and dried them up at last.

In every inch of England you can find the history of England. You find
it very typically here. The growth of that leisured class which we still
enjoy--the class that in the seventeenth century destroyed the central
government of the Crown, penetrated and refreshed the universities,
acquired for its use and reformed the endowed primary education of the
English, and began a thorough occupation of our public land--the growth
of that leisured class is nowhere more clearly to be seen than in the
history of the Fens, since the Fens had their faith removed from them.

Here is the story of one such family, a family without whose privileges
and public services it would be difficult to conceive modern England.
Their wealth is rooted in the Fens; the growth of that wealth is
parallel to the growth of every fortune by which we are governed.

When the monasteries were despoiled and their farms thrown open to a
gamble, when the water ran in again, the countryside and all its
generations of