In the seventeenth century the rivers flowing into the Wash formed an extensive system of inland navigation which stretched from Lincoln in the north to Bedford, Cambridge and Bury St. Edmunds in the south. The nucleus of that system was the Great Ouse. That “ goodly fair river “ had been navigable during the middle ages, but when it was surveyed by Sir Clement Edmondes in 1618 it was found to be “ generally foul and overgrown with weeds “ and “ stopped with weirs” between Huntingdon and Ely. Though Edmondes was primarily concerned with the river as a channel for fen drainage, his report shows that the question of navigation was considered important. That question was exercising men’s minds in many parts of the country, for the early seventeenth century saw a determined effort to improve the navigation of several English rivers. Such improvements involved both technical and legal difficulties. Technically there was the problem of making and maintaining a passage for boats despite shallows and fords, mills and weirs. Legally there was the fact that non-tidal rivers belonged to the owners of the adjacent lands. Thus almost any river improvement involved some interference with rights of property and some machinery for assessing compensation for damage to such lands. It involved, therefore, some grant of authority which would permit the undertakers of river improvements to carry out their work without obstruction, subject to the payment of compensation for any damage which that work caused. Such grants of authority usually took the form either of letters patent or of acts of parliament. The former were the chief instruments under which undertakers of river improvements received the necessary powers for their work in the first half of the seventeenth century. Thus it was under the authority of letters Ouse between St. Ives and Great Barford were carried out.

In these improvements the main part was played, before the Civil War, by Arnold Spencer of Cople. The Spencer family held Rowlands manor in Cople from before 1531 until the early eighteenth century. Arnold Spencer seems to have been a country gentleman alive to the developments of river navigation in his day, and anxious to promote these in his own county.