should go when it had done its work, and that the civilization of the
fen should be taken up and carried out by men like the good knight,
Richard of Rulos, who, two generations after the Conquest, marrying
Hereward's granddaughter, and becoming Lord of Deeping (the deep
meadow), thought that he could do the same work from the hall of
Bourne as the monks did from their cloisters; got permission from the
Crowland monks, for twenty marks of silver, to drain as much as he
could of the common marshes; and then shut out the Welland by strong
dykes, built cottages, marked out gardens, and tilled fields, till
'out of slough and bogs accursed, he made a garden of pleasure.'

Yet one lasting work those monks of Crowland did, besides those firm
dykes and rich corn lands of the Porsand, which endure unto this day.
For within two generations of the Norman conquest, while the old
wooden abbey, destroyed by fire, was being replaced by that noble
pile of stone whose ruins are still standing, the French abbot of
Crowland sent French monks to open a school under the new French
donjon, in the little Roman town of Grante-brigge; whereby--so does
all earnest work, however mistaken, grow and spread in this world,
infinitely and for ever--St. Guthlac, by his canoe-voyage into
Crowland Island, became the spiritual father of the University of
Cambridge in the old world; and therefore of her noble daughter, the
University of Cambridge, in the new world which fen-men, sailing from
Boston deeps, colonized and Christianized, 800 years after St.
Guthlac's death.

The drainage of the fens struggled on for these same 800 years
slowly, and often disastrously. Great mistakes were made; as when a
certain bishop, some 700 years ago, bethought him to make a cut from
Littleport drain to Rebeck (or Priests'-houses), and found, to his