The Great Inquest into the Soke of Bolingbroke

Following my post of 16th August describing my researches into the lives of my Askew ancestors on the edge of the East Fen in Lincolnshire, I had not intended to go back to the sixteenth century; I have only traced the family back to the eighteenth. However if there are earlier ancestors (and it is Rex Sly in his book “From Punt to Plough” who suggests that fen families tend to go back generations), then the fen laws contained in The Great Inquest into the Soke of Bolingbroke would have effected them directly. And they remained in force until the fens were enclosed, two hundred years later. There is little doubt that my ancestors would have lived and worked under these rules for generations.

The Askews lived in Toynton St Peter and Toynton All Saints, villages in the Soke of Bolingbroke which is an ancient administrative district covering the East and West Fens and the surrounding area, based in the village of Bolingbroke in South Lincolnshire. The boundary of the Soke is shown in R C Wheeler’s “Maps of the Witham Fens”. His Map No 8 (“A Description of Wildmore Fen, West Fen and East Fen etc” dated 1661 by an unnamed person) is a copy dated c1793. Wheeler says “The map appears to show the boundaries of the Soke of Horncastle, the Soke of Bolingbroke etc”.

In the more detailed Map No 12 (“A Map of The Levels in Lincolnshire commonly called Holland” by William Stukeley dated 1723), Wheeler says that the boundary may have been taken from Map No8. However for Map No 12, Herman Moll was the engraver and cosmographer (the science of mapmaking). As Herman Moll acknowledges, William Stukeley (an antiquarian) presented him with the design of the 1723 map. By this he obviously meant the internal Roman Road layout which had been part of the research by William Stukeley at the Society of Antiquaries. This information came from several documents of Roman origin.” (cartographyunchained.com).

The extract from this map below shows a dotted line which indicates the boundary of the Soke of Bolingbroke.

The Great Inquest set out to organise how the fen commoners used the common land of the fens to the advantage of all. It is described in W H Wheeler’s “A History of the Fens of South Lincolnshire” published in 1868. On Page 36 it reads:

“In the reign of Edward V1, a code of fen laws had been drawn up for the defining the rights and privileges of the commoners, and for the prevention of disputes and robbery (of livestock on the fen).

The code was drawn up by the Council of the Duchy of Lancaster at “The Great Inquest into The Soke of Bolingbroke”, held in 1548 and confirmed in Queen Elizabeth 1^st reign in 1573 and remained in force (for two hundred years) until the enclosure of the fens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries .The code consisted of seventy two articles, some of which are detailed as follows:

One of the first rules related to the brands or marks which each person who stocked the fens was required to place upon his cattle. Each parish had a separate mark (Toynton’s mark was a simple “X”) and no man was allowed to turn cattle out to common until they were marked with the town brand. No foreigner, or person not having common right, was allowed to put cattle on the fen, under a penalty of forty shillings, or gather any turbary( the legal right to cut peat or turf for fuel on common land) or fodder(coarse grass) in the East Fen without a licence. No fodder was to be mown in the East or West Fen beforeMidsummer-day.

There were penalties for all sorts of other offences: putting diseased cattle on the fen, disturbing cattle with dogs, leaving any dead animal, putting swine on the fen, taking or leaving dogs there after sunset. Rams were not allowed on the fen between St Luke’s Day (18^th October) and Lammas (a festival day in August). No reed thatch, reed star, or bolt (premature stalk of a flowering stem) was to be mown before two years growth, wythes (from the willow tree) were only to be cut between Michaelmas (29^th September) and May-day. No eggs were to be taken out of the fen except for ducks or geese. No person was allowed to use any sort of net or device to take or kill any fowl called moulted ducks, in any of the fens before Midsummer-day. (Ian D Rotherham in his book “The Lost Fens” says this is because this is the time the ducks moult their wing feathers and are flightless and vulnerable for several weeks).

A code of seventeen articles was also devised by the fisherman’s jury relating to fishing in the fens, mainly about the use and kind of nets. The principal fish were pike, eels, roach and perch.

Before being sent into the common fen, the livestock were collected at certain defined places and marked, and again, being taken out in autumn, they were brought to the same place to be claimed by their owners.

The fens remained in this condition until the middle of the eighteenth century when drainage schemes were introduced. Starting in 1762 with the Witham Drainage Act, it wasn’t until the Acts of 1801 and 1803 that drainage and enclosure of the more problematic waterlogged East Fen became properly addressed.