Treatment for Fenland Ague

A tiny post for today courtesy of Fenland Notes and Queries. For local historians the journal, dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a wealth of seemingly random historical facts clipped together in what was a regular and frequent journal. Thankfully a large number are available online, or you can find them in the occasional local library. My favourite place to read them is Senate House Library, but for now the scanned versions online will suit me well.

Today I came across the most fenland of anecdotes: a cure for fen ague. It was a troublesome illness that wasn't well understood, but we now know it as malaria. The boggy waters were perfect homes for mosquitos that spread the debilitating disease through the fenland communities. Naturally, there were some odd cures and this one involved spiders!

For reasons never explained some people, particularly in the northern fen areas, believed that spiders could cure the fever associated with fen ague. Some ate them; some placed spider webs on their foreheads. If you decided to eat one it was your choice as to whether you ate it live, rolled it in flour, covered it in butter, or popped it in a sandwich. It was also your choice as to whether you pulled all of its legs off, or left them dangling. In some areas they carried spiders around with them as a sort of talisman too. One thing that we can all agree on is that opium would have been a much more effective treatment for a fever than a spider, but there is something wonderfully gothic about lying in your sick bed under a dewed cobweb.

Research and Resources

Fenland Notes and Queries: https://archive.org/details/fenlandnotesque01sweegoog/mode/2up?view=theater

Cliffe's History: https://www.cliffehistory.co.uk/the-ague-or-english-malaria.html

Images from Pixabay by Traphitho and fietzfotos

The Deeping Fen Waterspout

In my last blog I briefly mentioned the great bog that was Deeping Fen, so it felt important to explain a little more about it and highlight an unusual event.

Deeping Fen was, as Stukeley had observed, largely a bog and at times a lake. Even in more recent times, the central part of the area was commonly referred to as a lake and was mostly unusable land.

The Deeping fen area stretches from the rivers Glen to the north and Welland to the south, an area of vast flatness with no observable feature that was not manmade. Several towns and villages exist on the periphery of the fen with strong Anglo-Saxon roots, and Roman Car Dyke flirts with the western edge of the fen. There are also some excellent archaeological features from prehistory, so the land was never ‘just a swamp’.

Drainage began centuries ago, and the enormous hand-cut drains still dominate the landscape today. They remain vital in protecting the low-lying land from summer deluges and winter’s constant rains. Almost as vital as the deeply dug river channels of the Welland and Glen whose wide and enormously high banks have happily contained a vast quantity of water without incident for many years. However, in took centuries to drain the fen until it was suitably habitable.

It was thanks to this frequent dampness that Deeping Fen was the site of an unusual weather feature in 1752. The journal Fenland Notes and Queries carried an account from Reverend Benjamin Ray, the Perpetual Curate of Cowbit and Surfleet, who had seen a waterspout over Deeping Fen. Rev. Ray is described in Literary Anecdotes related to the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society as being ‘A most ingenious and worthy man, possessed of good learning, but ignorant of the world; indolent and thoughtless, and very often absent.’ Hardly a glowing report and perhaps not the most reliable reporter of a rare meteorological sighting. The report was as follows:

May 5^th 1752, a phenomenon appeared about 7 in the evening, in Deeping-Fen, which, from its effects, seemed to be a water-spout, broken from the clouds. A watery substance, as it seemed, was seen moving on the earth and water, in Deeping-Fen. It passed along with such violence and rapidity, that it carried every thing before it: such as grass, straw, and stubble; and in going over the country bank, it raised the dust to a great height; and when it arrived in the wash, in the midst of the water, and just over against where Mr R. lived, it stood still for some minutes. This watery substance spouted out water from its own surface to a considerable height, and with a terrible noise.

The waterspout continued to Cowbit and then headed towards Weston Hills and Moulton Chapel, destroying a field of turnips, and damaging two gates on its progress. Others were also seen on the same day, but none of them would have benefitted from the specific landscape credentials of Deeping Fen.

The journal Fenland Notes and Queries can be viewed online, as can Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. Follow the links below.

https://archive.org/details/fenlandnotesque01sweegoog/page/n272/mode/2up

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Literary_Anecdotes_Of_The_Eighteenth_Cen/-UxjAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

Image of a sheep on the high bank of the River Welland by the author