Since Mesolithic times man had made his
home, seasonally or permanently, by
lakes which, besides fresh water, provided fish and waterfowl for food and reeds
for thatching. Permanent villages of huts built on piles driven into the shallows were
established, and their remains have been found by the edges of lakes or former
lakes in northern Italy, southern Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. But the
quaking ground of marshes and bogs must always have been feared and avoided.
The eeriness of such an environment can still be felt: the croaking of frogs and the
calls of unidentifiable creatures, drifting patches of mist, and especially at night the
elusive and mysterious lights of will o' the wisp (now generally attributed to the rise
and combustion of marsh gas from the decomposition of organic matter) and the
phosphorescent glow of certain fungi. Hence, and not surprisingly, the long-standing
belief in ghosts, lost spirits, 'burning souls' and other preternatural beings haunting
the dreaded ground and giving rise to many legends.
In A.D. 98 the historian Tacitus made
a study of the various European races living
beyond the frontiers of the Roman Empire. To this work, De origine, situ, moribus
ac populis Germanorum, better known as De Germania, we turn as our earliest
source for the history of northern and eastern Europe. Its information, however, is
not always reliable. Tacitus, for whom the Empire from Augustus to Domitian
represented all that is most degraded and degrading in human life, sketched a
picture intended to provide his contemporaries less with a faithful image of
Germania and its people than with a pattern of moral virtue and simplicity. In the
eyes of Tacitus the ancient Germans were free, healthy and straightforward men
living close to nature, the embodiment of virtues whose absence he regretted in his
fellow-countrymen.
De Germania is nevertheless of first importance
for the study of the protohistory of
Europe; it contains much information about the way of life and beliefs of people of
Celtic Iron Age culture, upon which few details are to be found elsewhere. Tacitus is
the first historian to have described the part played by marshes in the religion and
the jurisprudence of Germania.
According to Tacitus, every year the tribes
living in what are now Denmark and
north Germany made sacrifices of servants or slaves to Nerthus, goddess of spring
and fertility; after cleaning the statue and chariot of the divinity the fettered victims
were plunged into the waters of a marsh or lake. In other contexts Germanic law laid
down two kinds of capital punishment: hanging for traitors and deserters, and
drowning for those guilty of cowardice, rape or unnatural practices. Corpses found
lately in bogs of northern and central Europe seem to confirm these particulars.
It is likely that similar discoveries
have been made for centuries by those working
the peat bogs. Not knowing the period at which death had occurred they would
notify the priest or pastor, who would give Christian burial to the bodies. In 1835
human remains exhumed from the peat caught the attention of the prehistorians for
the first time; it was realized that these remains had been preserved because the
presence of tannic acid and exclusion of oxygen had prevented putrefaction.
Up to the present about one hundred and
fifty corpses have been taken from the
peat bogs of what was once Germania and from areas formerly populated by Celts
and Baits. These anonymous victims had all met a violent end; most are naked,
shackled and wearing a sort of garotte round the neck; sometimes the throat has
been cut or the skull broken with some blunt weapon. A girl of about fourteen found
in a bog in Schleswig-Holstein was wearing a bandage over her eyes and the left
side of the head had been shaven; not far off lay a man, strangled with a twig of
hazel. The most complete body was that of a man found in 1950 in the Tollund peat
bog in Denmark; a leather noose was round his neck and he wore a leather cap
and belt. His head has been carefully preserved, and examination of the body
revealed the last meal of this Iron Age man to have been entirely vegetarian.
Specialists have long puzzled over these
primitive killings, but no satisfactory
explanation has yet been provided. Probably they are, as Tacitus reports, of
executed criminals or victims sacrificed to the goddess Nerthus. Among other
female bodies is that of a clothed woman fixed to the bottom with stakes; she was
taken from a bog in Jutland.
It may readily be imagined that these
places of execution filled later generations
with terror, and it was only a few centuries ago that man began, very timidly at first,
to turn marshes and bogs to account, to drain and clear and plant them. Such
cultivation brought the settlers no more than momentary rewards. In various times
and countries marshes have had a dubious reputation; vagabonds, delinquents,
prisoners and others whom authority wished to segregate were sent there to hard
labour.
In 1765 an edict of Frederick the Great
declared the marshes of East Frisia a
Prussian possession. Special commissioners installed there in the following
decades twenty thousand paupers and 'social misfits'. These raw colonists were
supposed to burn the vegetation, dig the ground and plant cereals. The experiment
ended in fiasco. We know today that such a result was inevitable and that the
practice of clearing land by burning brings with it the destruction of the soil. The
wretched colonists entrusted with the clearance of the East Frisian marshes were
forced, in order to survive, to become brigands and beggars. Only at the beginning
of the nineteenth century was an end put to this disastrous situation.
At all periods sphagnum moss has been
dried and used as fuel in areas devoid of
timber, but it was not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that a small
country, poor in wood but rich in bog, marsh and lake, revealed to the world a large-
scale technique of peat-cutting and its possible results. The Netherlands, formed
very largely of river deltas, has much low-lying land and from remote times the
coastal areas have been constantly threatened by the sea. From the twelfth to the
fifteenth century the Dutch lost in this way one fifth of their territory. At all times the
Dutch have been forced to struggle obstinately in order to conquer and then to hold
their fields. Thus they achieved a rare mastery of agriculture, horticulture and the
regeneration of waterlogged ground. They defended themselves by building dikes
and embankments and by digging canals to facilitate the outflow of salt or brackish
water, so injurious to cultivation. The water was raised by pumps worked by hand
and then, from the seventeenth century, by the windmills whose outlines have
become a part of the landscape. The Dutch took advantage also of their
'amphibian' situation, and became a nation of fishermen, sailors and traders. And
as the resources of their country were limited, despite such efforts, they sought in
the East and West Indies the riches which Holland could not provide.
But those measures did not suffice to
replace the agricultural land lost to the sea,
and so the peasants looked toward the moors. They cut the turf and sold it to the
townsfolk for fuel, thereby increasing the danger; for the trenches and pits filled and
created new stretches of standing water which could not drain away.
In the north-east they grappled with the
problem differently. The floods of 1287 had
claimed 50,000 victims in the area between the mouth of the Ems and the Zuider
Zee; those of 1421 twice as many. So two centuries before Dutch overseas trade
and colonization reached their zenith the people of Groningen 'occupied' their
neighbouring wastelands. They excavated canals allowing ships access to the peat
bogs, and as they had no desire to create new lakes and ponds but wanted, on the
contrary, agricultural land, they linked together the extraction of the peat, land
drainage and the growing of crops. First they made an intricate canal system, after
which they could take up the peat without causing the trenches to fill with water.
Then, when the layer of peat had been removed, the ground was divided among the
settlers—with the obligation to develop it. The rules were strict: nothing might be
burned, and it was compulsory to till and manure the soil, to keep the canals and
runnels clean, and to plant hedges and trees as wind-breaks. The general adoption
of such methods gradually changed the face of Holland.
The example of Groningen was copied by
other districts with peat bogs to exploit.
Villages grew up in the newly fertile areas. Sale of the turf provided the settlers with
the capital needed for increasing the network of canals; ships plied upon the
watercourses, fetching manures and taking away the dried peat and the produce of
the harvests. The success stimulated similar undertakings in other districts.
The achievements of Dutch engineers in
reclaiming their inundated coastal areas
need no emphasis. But it is easy to forget that many of the prosperous, clean,
attractive Dutch towns and villages, the green pasture lands with their cattle, the
fields of tulips, the bright parks, have been largely won back from the former
marshes. Rehabilitation of the waterlogged soil made the fortune and the cultural
notions of this little country which has fought so valiantly and successfully against the
encroachment of river and sea.
