The George Askew Story - Five Generations of Agricultural Labourers Part 2

I posted Part 1 on 26th December last year when I ended by saying I wanted to look at farming in that area around where the family lived in Lincolnshire. Little did I know then where this study would take me. From my first internet searches for the East Fen I found a wealth of information including many books on the subject, some I have copied from the web and some I have bought.

What I now realise is that although we know that George's father James was, according to the 1851 Census, an agricultural labourer, this is not necessarily the case for the previous three generations: John Ayscough (1781 - 1846), John Ascough (1758 - 1844) and Thomas Ascough (1735 - ?). It is possible they combined working for the local landowners in the enclosed fields at the end of the Wolds above the East Fen with being fen commoners. Certainly before 1800, the villages on the margins of the fen had common rights on the wholly unenclosed East Fen, West Fen and Wildmore Fen.

The proximity of Toynton St Peter and Toynton All Saints (wrongly marked on the above map as Upper and Lower Toynton) to East Fen is particularly interesting. The map above (by Wenceslaus Hollar and dated 1661) is included in Dugdale's "The History of Drayning and Imbanking of Divers Fens and Marshes"of 1662 showing "The Deeps" of the East Fen. These permanent large ponds are shown on all the maps of the time. My latest prize possession is "Maps of the Witham Fens", a huge volume where R.C. Wheeler has searched for every old map he could find of this part of Lincolnshire. Even the (undated) enclosure map of the East Fen (probably around 1801) still has most of the Deeps unenclosed but now possibly cut off from the surrounding villages.

The Deeps were important to the commoners in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the extraction of peat and then for fishing and fowling. So my research now extends to these more ancient times but particularly how the lives of the common people changed from a hard but fruitful rural existence on the margins of the fen to where their loss of independence through no longer having access to enclosed the fen meant they were now dependent on the new landowners. As I.D. Rotherham puts it in his book "The Lost Fens"  this was "England's Greatest Ecological Disaster". But for the inhabitants it meant so much more.