But theirs was a land worth fighting for,--a good land and large: from
Humber mouth inland to the Trent and merry Sherwood, across to Chester and
the Dee, round by Leicester and the five burghs of the Danes; eastward
again to Huntingdon and Cambridge (then a poor village on the site of an
old Roman town); and then northward again into the wide fens, the land of
the Girvii and the Eormingas, "the children of the peat-bog," where the
great central plateau of England slides into the sea, to form, from the
rain and river washings of eight shires, lowlands of a fertility
inexhaustible, because ever-growing to this day.
They have a beauty of their own, these great fens, even now, when they are
diked and drained, tilled and fenced,--a beauty as of the sea, of
boundless expanse and freedom. Much more had they that beauty eight
hundred years ago, when they were still, for the most part, as God had
made them, or rather was making them even then. The low rolling uplands
were clothed in primeval forest: oak and ash, beech and elm, with here and
there, perhaps, a group of ancient pines, ragged and decayed, and fast
dying out in England even then; though lingering still in the forests of
the Scotch highlands.
Between the forests were open wolds, dotted with white sheep and golden
gorse; rolling plains of rich though ragged turf, whether cleared by the
hand of man or by the wild fires which often swept over the hills.
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