ABSTRACT

So begins the ‘Song against [the] Corporation’, an anonymous, libellous ballad circulated in the Great Level of the Fens at the end of the seventeenth century whose target was the Corporation of the Great Level, also known as the Bedford

Level Corporation. is was the private company founded by the fourth and h Earls of Bedford and their fellow investors, who in 1630 famously – or infamously depending on the account – began a project to improve this large tract of peat wetland by drainage. ey undertook to do this in exchange for ownership of one-third of the drained fens, most of which had, until then, been used as common grazing lands. But equally as famously, their project was met with strident opposition from the inhabitants of the fenland, who denounced it as a scheme to deprive them of their commons and, as with similar drainage projects in the Lincolnshire Fens, a protracted series of riots erupted against the drainers and their enclosures which lasted through the 1630s, 1640s and 1650s.2