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Does  this  make  sense?    Well no,   with great respect to all concerned, it doesn't. Either  the broads were first dug out as complete basins and flooded subsequently, or  they  were  dug  out  as  separate smaller pits which flooded one by one as they were  completed.   To  try  to have it both ways is self-contradictory, and therefore non-sense.    If  there were any flooded areas in the basins before the 14th century, then the original account of how the broads were created  collapses like a house of cards, including all the parts which modern authorities have retained.
Hickling Broad extended to 400 acres. How many baling devices would have been needed to keep it all dry?
What has gone wrong?
Either  there  is  something  wildly  wrong  with  Martin  George's  thinking  about separate,  fairly small pits,  or the broads  didn't start to flood in the 14th century. The separate, fairly small pits make pretty good sense to me.  I am probably guilty of  appalling heresy  in saying so,   but  it  looks  very  much as if Joyce Lambert's colleagues  got a lot more of it  wrong  than just the level of the sea   -   something which Martin George  and everybody else who seems to agree with him have failed to spot.

There  is a lot of general evidence that conditions in Northern Europe, in England, and  in  Norfolk  got  wetter  around  the  start of the 14th century, but what is the particular  evidence  that  in east Norfolk and in north-east Suffolk this resulted in formerly dry peat pits becoming flooded?
"The flooding of the turf pits must have produced a major change in the landscape of Broadland, even if it were not an economic disaster. Yet all this  activity  and change have gone unrecorded in published writings on the history of the area and forgotten by local history and folklore."
C.T.Smith with Lambert
et al., 1960.
There isn't any evidence.

Say that again
Apart  from  one  reference  to  "10 men digging at Witemore"  in 1240  (probably Alderfen  or  Burntfen Broad),   the  earliest  surviving  records  which provide any clues  to  the methods being employed, or to conditions in the turbaries, date from the early 14th century.  The earliest surviving  clear reference to water in a peat pit (now part of Ormesby Broad)  occurs in a record dated 1311,  when bulk  peat was being  'ferried',  rather than turves being dug.   The earliest possible  reference to a broad  as  such  ('Broddinge') comes  from  South  Walsham in 1315. Before  then  there  is silence on the subject  of water   -   but  before  then there are virtually no relevant  records.    Those  that  have  survived  simply  show  the  existence  and  approximate  location of turbaries in the 12th and 13th centuries,   plus a few sales statistics.   There is nothing to say whether the basins were all dry or whether they  contained  flooded  areas.   So  there  is  no  evidence  that  they first became flooded in the 14th century.

If  mean  water  levels rose, the result could just as well have been a corresponding rise in the level of water in derelict, fairly small pits which were
already flooded  - an  unremarkable  change, and thus one quite likely to have gone unrecorded.
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