drear winter nights the whistle of the wind and the wild cries of the
water-fowl were translated into the howls of witches and demons; and
(as in St. Guthlac's case) the delirious fancies of marsh fever made
fiends take hideous shapes before the inner eye, and act fantastic
horrors round the old fen-man's bed of sedge.

The Romans seem to have done something toward the draining and
embanking of this dismal swamp. To them is attributed the car-dyke,
or catch-water drain, which runs for many miles from Peterborough
northward into Lincolnshire, cutting off the land waters which flow
down from the wolds above. To them, too, is to be attributed the old
Roman bank, or 'vallum,' along the sea-face of the marshlands, marked
to this day by the names of Walsoken, Walton, and Walpoole. But the
English invaders were incapable of following out, even of preserving,
any public works. Each village was isolated by its own 'march' of
forest; each yeoman all but isolated by the 'eaves-drip,' or green
lane round his farm. Each 'cared for his own things, and none for
those of others;' and gradually, during the early Middle Age, the
fen--save those old Roman villages--returned to its primaeval jungle,
under the neglect of a race which caricatured local self-government
into public anarchy, and looked on every stranger as an alien enemy,
who might be lawfully slain, if he came through the forest without
calling aloud or blowing a horn. Till late years, the English
feeling against the stranger lasted harsh and strong. The farmer,
strong in his laws of settlement, tried at once to pass him into the
next parish. The labourer, not being versed in law, hove half a
brick at him, or hooted him through the town. It was in the fens,
perhaps, that the necessity of combined effort for fighting the brute
powers of nature first awakened public spirit, and associate labour,
and the sense of a common interest between men of different countries