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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. | ||||||||||||||
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| 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? |
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| "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. |
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| 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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