Scottish and Dutch Prisoners of War in the English Fen Drainage Project, 1651–53

During the English Revolution, the successive governments found themselves responsible for tens of thousands of prisoners captured in battle. The Crown and later the Republican and then Protectorate governments sent many of these prisoners into plantation servitude in the West Indies. Others remained in jails. This paper focuses on a third group who were put to work on English soil: Scottish soldiers captured in the Battle of Worcester, and Dutch sailors taken in the naval battles of the First Anglo-Dutch War. Their numbers threatened to overwhelm available English prisons. In part to prevent mass deaths from exposure and disease, the Council of State negotiated with the Society of Adventurers for fen drainage, who undertook to employ several thousand of these men in eastern England. The prisoners did not look upon their new job as a mercy. They resisted and escaped constantly. As a result, the company and Council corresponded about the practical limits of violent discipline, the law of war, and whether forced labor was worth all the trouble. The company board, prisoners, fenland observers, and the Council of State all had different ideas about the legitimate treatment of prisoners of war and the degree of violence that could be used to get them to work while in captivity. Company records optimistically describe the conscripts as “willing” or “volunteers,” but Council documents show less squeamishness. This exceptional episode reveals how authorities and participants thought about and carried out labor conscription, not in its commonly recognized location on the peripheries of the early English empire, but rather in the center of British and European conflict zones.