Coke, Popham, and Commissions of Sewers

Eric Ash's The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England (JHU Press, 2016) was recently reviewed by Bob Silvester in Environment and History (for an interview with the author see here). Famous common law judges play a big role in this story. The review reports that Ash:

Sir John Popham,
copy by George Perfect Harding, after unknown

succeeds admirably though is in fleshing out the procedures – there is a masterly commentary on the commissions of sewers – and events that have been dealt with only cursorily in the past. Lord Chief Justice Popham’s plans to dry out the Great Level, which resulted in little more than the construction of a large drain known as Popham’s Eau lying east of March in Cambridgeshire, seemed an obscure event when I worked in the Fens in the 1980s...; just what Popham sought to achieve and how it fitted into the overall sequence of drainage ventures is now much clearer through the careful analysis of archival material.

Regarding the author's statement that his "principal goal is to use the drainage projects to connect the broader political, economic, social and environmental developments of the era", Silvester writes that "there are times when fenland drainage appears to be subsumed within a broader discourse as simply an outstanding example of state-building in progress. It accounts for the lengthy digression on Lord Chief Justice Coke’s interference in fenland affairs around 1609".

For more on Commissions of Sewers and drainage law, see here.