Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 307

Francis Pryor’s The Fens is a charming and thoroughly enjoyable autobiographical landscape history of the Fens. This crossing of genre boundaries is accomplished using two parallel chronologies, wherein Pryor’s life is used to mirror events in the ever-changing Fens. The two narratives are used to communicate a personal-historical ambience of the Fens. Pryor’s various lives as an archaeologist, sheep farmer, and ‘churchaholic’ of the Fens singularly equip him for this approach.

The book can be split into two parts, the first deals with Pryor’s distinguished career as an archaeologist, and this is broadly used to reflect his portrait of the Fens before the Roman conquest. The book’s second ‘part’ moves from the post-Roman period to the present day, and this historical narrative is interwoven with the author’s meditations on his life in the Fens after leaving professional archaeology. This distinctive approach finds best expression in the chapters on the prehistoric Fenland. Pryor’s archaeological career lends these chapters a powerful depth of knowledge, this detail providing the best entry-point for Pryor’s autobiographical segues. The author seamlessly dips into his own experience preventing inbreeding in sheep as a sheep farmer when discussing the need for widely separated prehistoric agricultural communities to maintain contact. Pryor’s agricultural experience grounds his relationship with the Fens and supports the book’s overarching aim of dispelling the notion that the Fens were unproductive wastes, arguing instead that the Fens were prosperous landscapes throughout history.

The accounts of archaeological dig sites are set at a wonderful pace, and are the most engaging chapters of the book. This pacing is mainly a consequence of their immanent purpose: situating Pryor’s major digs in the context of his life, and the broader prehistory of the Fens. These earlier chapters also convey the sense of urgency in Fen archaeology in the 1970s and ’80s by teasing interesting sites which are then forced onto the backburner by outside factors. Chief among these are the urban expansion and demand for gravel in the period, which meant that many Fenland sites were in urgent need of excavation. Contextualizing Fenland archaeology in this period subtly builds suspense for the major discoveries of Pryor’s archaeological career, which he is careful not to spoil too soon. Revelations in the study of maps and aerial photographs are delivered with the same understated theatre, giving the impression of reading a dramatized methodology textbook. Cropmarks, it is revealed, emerge when agricultural crops over historic ditches and earthworks grow differently to their neighbours, revealing a shadow of a former landscape when viewed from above. The hot and dry summer of 1976 was a particularly good year for cropmarks, and the reader is slowly drawn into Pryor and his team’s anticipation of the aerial photographs of that season. These chapters are very successful in communicating the precise significance of archaeological finds, which means that they can be enjoyed as a basic and digestible introduction to archaeology. This is exemplified in Pryor’s recollection of the Cat’s Water excavation, where evidence of hearths in around half of 56 buildings is used to demonstrate that these were human dwellings. Phosphate analysis showing levels consistent with high concentrations of manure was then employed to show that the remaining buildings were used to house livestock. Moreover, some of the human dwellings were larger, a trend which increased over time, and this is used to infer increasing social stratification towards the end of the Iron Age.

The least convincing demonstrations of Pryor’s personalized approach to Fen history are those chapters on the Roman occupation. These lose the archaeological depth of earlier chapters, and the intimacy with the landscape which carries later passages here feels unfortunately synthetic. The book’s later chapters show a notable change of pace, trundling gently through interesting episodes in the histories of several fen towns, from the pre-Norman period through to the modern day. Pryor is not a historian of this period, and the acknowledged oversimplifications on enclosure and the spread of Enlightenment thought are at times distracting. These later chapters are far less unified in purpose than earlier ones, very broadly linked in demonstrating that the fenland towns had and retained a distinct identity over these thousand years. This is done through analysis of medieval church architecture, eighteenth-century intellectual societies, and the rise and fall of the rail network on the Fens. As Pryor’s life moves away from archaeology, these vignettes are more clearly motivated by his own experiences, and if the earlier chapters failed to capture the reader’s interest, these more introspective chapters will certainly struggle to do so. With that said, Pryor’s rich relationship with the Fens provides adequate cohesion for his various sallies into different historical periods and themes, and the amiable written style does not provoke the reader to ask too many questions. Pryor’s rural background may contribute to the gleeful and infectious irreverence which makes for very easy reading.

In a sense, this is two rather different books held together by Pryor’s fascinating life. The first part is a thrilling introduction to archaeology on the Fens, sustained with a clear purpose and genuine excitement for the source material. This is the strongest part of the book, and will be at least interesting to anyone invested in wetlands or archaeology. The second is a series of vignettes which are drawn together only by Pryor’s life and his palpable love for the Fens and those who live on them. This will be of more local interest, providing a single collection of Fen narratives for the interested non-historian. My copy in paperback is wonderfully produced, with large text on thick paper, and a beautiful, abstract representation of the Black Fens by Fred Ingrams fits the front cover.