Cornelius Vermuyden
Sir Cornelius Vermuydenwas a Dutch engineer who introduced Dutch land reclamation methods to England.
Vermuyden was commissioned by the Crown to drain Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire.
In the 1650s, he directed major projects to drain The Fens of East Anglia, introducing the innovation of constructing washes, to allow periodic flooding of the area by excess waters.
By the period of 1621 to 1623, Vermuyden was working in England, where his first projects were on the River Thames, repairing a sea wall at Dagenham and working to reclaim Canvey Island, Essex. The latter project was financed by Joas Croppenburg, a Dutch haberdasher to whom Vermuyden was related by marriage.
This, or perhaps work at Windsor, brought him to the notice of Charles I, who commissioned him in 1626 to drain Hatfield Chase in the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire. The King was Lord of the four principal manors there: Hatfield, Epworth, Crowle and Misterton, as well as 13 of the adjacent manors, and he wanted to expand the cultivable area. Vermuyden was to receive one third of the drained land, most of which had previously been commons, as recompense for his investment. To finance the drainage project, he sold shares in this land to other investors, including some fellow Dutchmen. Some French and Walloon Protestant refugees also settled in the area as landowners or tenants. The King intended to enclose one third of the common fen in his right of "improvement" as the Lord of the Manor, leaving one-third for those local residents who had common rights of pasturage in the fens.
The local people were upset by the project, particularly those of the Manor of Epworth, whose lord had already enclosed part of the commons in the 14th century. He had later signed a legal document giving up all subsequent rights of enclosure within the manor. As with other fen drainage schemes at the time, the locals did not oppose drainage per se, but were outraged about the large enclosures of their common pasture and turbary fens. This threatened their commons rights and livelihoods, as they depended on the fens for pasturage and for peat for burning as fuel. From 1627, the richer members of the community challenged the project in court by lawsuits, even as large groups of commoners (not necessarily poor people, but including some substantial farmers) rioted against the works and the enclosures. Because the legal position of the commoners of Epworth was unique, the legal debate over the drainage and enclosures lasted into the eighteenth century.
Vermuyden was knighted in 1629 for his work, and became a British citizen in 1633.
In 1631 he built the Horseshoe Sluice on the tidal river at Wisbech, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire at a cost of £8,000, by a "little Army of Artificers Venting, contriving and acting outlandish devises"
The work on Hatfield Chase was only partially successful: the straightening of the river Don and outlet into the Aire caused flooding in Fishlake, Sykehouse and Snaith. As a result of a lawsuit in 1633, Vermuyden dug the Dutch River, which provided a direct route from the Don to the River Ouse at Goole. It required him to deplete most of the land that he had acquired in the Chase. The same year he bought 4,000 acres (1,619 ha) of land in Sedgemoor on the Somerset Levels and Malvern Chase in Worcestershire; he also entered into a partnership in the lead mines in Wirksworth, which he drained by means of a sough.
