Historical Introduction

Summary

THORNEY ABBEY: SITE AND SITUATION

The site of the former abbey, now the village of Thorney, is today part of Greater Peterborough (grid reference TF 2823 0420), in the Fens. The Fenland, now rich farmland, was, in the medieval period, a huge area of marsh and inland water, with small discrete areas of higher ground, covering in all some 1300 square miles (see maps). It stretched north to south from Lincoln to Cambridge, approximately seventyfive miles, and from east to west, at its widest from Brandon to Peterborough, about thirty-six miles. The fen was of two types: in the north around the Wash was the silt fen and to the south the peat fen. A map of late-eleventh-century settlement in the area based on the Domesday Survey shows a considerable density on the uplands around the fen edge, but few in the Fenland itself. What settlement there was in the Fenland was concentrated in the north, on the silt fen around the Wash. The few settlements found in the south of the region were, like Thorney, situated on upstanding gravel islands, as the peat offered ‘no stable foundations on which to build’. Darby has calculated, on the basis of the Domesday data, that the population in the late eleventh century in the upland areas beyond the fen edge was generally between five and fifteen persons per square mile, rising in places to over fifteen persons, whilst in much of the silt fen on the north it was between one and five persons per square mile, falling over most of the southern peat fen, the area in which Thorney was situated, to under one person per square mile.

This Fenland landscape was graphically described in the early eighth century by Felix, biographer of St Guthlac, who was a hermit at Crowland near to Thorney:

There is in the Midland district of Britain a most dismal fen of immense size, which begins at the banks of the River Granta not far from … Cambridge (Gronte) and stretches from the south as far north as the sea. It is a long tract, now consisting of marshes, now of bogs, sometimes of black waters overhung by fog, sometimes studded with wooded islands and traversed by the windings of tortuous streams.