Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Modern East Anglia as a dialect area
- 2 Old East Anglian: a problem in Old English dialectology
- 3 East Anglian places-names: sources of lost dialect
- 4 Language in contact: Old East Saxon and East Anglian
- 5 Socielects in fourteenth-century London
- 6 Some morphological feautures of the Norfolk guild certificates of 1388/9: an excersise in variation
- 7 Eloboratio in practice: the use of English in mediaval East Anglian medicine
- 8 Third-person singular zero: African-American English, East Anglian dialects and Spanish persecution in the Low Countries
- 9 Chapters in the social history of East Anglian English: the case of the third-person singular
- 10 The modern reflexes of some Middle English vowel contrast in Norfolk and Norwich
- 11 Welcome to East Anglia!: two major dialect ‘boundaries’ in the Fens
- 12 Syntactic change in north-west Norfolk
- Index Of Names
11 - Welcome to East Anglia!: two major dialect ‘boundaries’ in the Fens
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Modern East Anglia as a dialect area
- 2 Old East Anglian: a problem in Old English dialectology
- 3 East Anglian places-names: sources of lost dialect
- 4 Language in contact: Old East Saxon and East Anglian
- 5 Socielects in fourteenth-century London
- 6 Some morphological feautures of the Norfolk guild certificates of 1388/9: an excersise in variation
- 7 Eloboratio in practice: the use of English in mediaval East Anglian medicine
- 8 Third-person singular zero: African-American English, East Anglian dialects and Spanish persecution in the Low Countries
- 9 Chapters in the social history of East Anglian English: the case of the third-person singular
- 10 The modern reflexes of some Middle English vowel contrast in Norfolk and Norwich
- 11 Welcome to East Anglia!: two major dialect ‘boundaries’ in the Fens
- 12 Syntactic change in north-west Norfolk
- Index Of Names
Summary
On the first of November in the year of our Lord 1613 late in the night, the sea broke in, through the violence of a north east winde, meeting with a spring tide, and overflowed all marshland, with this town of Wisbeche, both in the northside and the south, and almost the whole hundred round about (Dugdale 1662: 276)
The Fens: where north meets south
Fens (Figure 1) are a low-lying area of eastern England situated about seventy-five miles directly north of London, and fifty miles west of Norwich. Compared with the rest of southern England it is a rather sparsely settled region, many parts of which have a population density less than a fifth of that of England as a whole. They separate the counties of East Anglia, Norfolk and Suffolk, from the Midlands and the North – Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire. The area has a rather unique geomorphological and demographic history. Figure 2 shows the Fenland in the early seventeenth century. The northern coastline lay up to twelve miles further south than at present. Most of the Fenland population at that time lived on a few islands of higher ground and in small communities on this northern coastline. The southern two-thirds of the Fenland consisted of undrained marshland which was subject to tidal flooding in summer, more continuous flooding in winter and was hence too unstable in most places for permanent settlement. Darby, for example, notes that ‘even those portions that escaped winter flooding were subject to an annual heaving motion, the mud absorbing water and swelling’ (1931: 18). The overall livelihood of many small Fenland communities was directly related to the success of efforts to hold the water back. Even the northern coastline settlements, the most stable and relatively heavily populated, witnessed major flooding in 1439, 1550, 1570, 1607 and 1613 (Darby 1974).
Up until the seventeenth century, the Fens were seen as a miserable place, where its inhabitants eeked out a meagre living in the most difficult of circumstances.
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- East Anglian English , pp. 217 - 242Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2001