marked on the map of England as we have it now, by a line roughly joining Boston and King's Lynn, would on the earliest text of the palimpsest require an extended sea boundary on which Lincoln, and Stamford and Peterborough, and Huntingdon and Cambridge, and Brandon and Downham Market would become almost seaboard towns, and Ely an island fifteen miles or so off the coast at Cambridge. Such a conclusion, of course, would be somewhat of an exaggeration, for the wide waste of waters which thus formed an extension of the Wash southwards was not all or always sea water. So utterly transformed, however, has the whole Fen country become in modern times--the vast plain of the Bedford level contains some 2000 square miles of the richest corn-land in England--that it is very difficult to restore in the imagination the original scenery of the days before the drainage, when the rivers which take the rainfall of the central counties of England--the Nene, the Welland, the Witham, the Glen, and the Bedfordshire Ouse--spread out into one vast delta or wilderness of shallow waters. The poetic glamour of the land, now on the side of its fertility and strange beauty, now on the side of its monotony and weird loneliness, has always had a strange fascination for the chroniclers and writers of every age. In the first Book of the _Liber Eliensis_ (ii. 105), written by Thomas, a monk of Ely, in the twelfth century, there is a description of the fenlands, given by a soldier to William the Conqueror, which reads like the report of the land of plenty and promise brought by the spies to Joshua. In the _Historia Major_ of Matthew Paris, however, it is described as a place "neither accessible for man or beast, affording only deep mud, with sedge and reeds, and possest of birds, yea, much more by devils, as appeareth in the Life of S. Guthlac, who, finding it a place of horror and great solitude, began to inhabit there." At a later time Drayton in his _Polyolbion_ gives a picture of the Fenland life as one of manifold industry:-- "The toiling fisher here is towing of his net; The fowler is employed his limèd twigs to set; One underneath his horse to get a shoot doth stalk; Another over dykes upon his stilts doth walk; There other with their spades the peats are squaring out, And others from their cars are busily about To draw out sedge and reed to thatch and stover fit: That whosoever would a landskip rightly hit, Beholding but my Fens shall with more shapes be stored Than Germany or France or Thuscan can afford." This eulogy of the Fenland, however, Drayton is careful to put into the mouth of a Fenland nymph, who is not allowed to pass without criticism by her sister who rules the uplands:-- "O how I hate Thus of her foggy fens to hear rude Holland prate That with her fish and fowl here keepeth such a coil, As her unwholesome air, and more unwholesome soil, For these of which she boasts the more might suffered be."