In the sixteenth century, a fan-shaped swathe of eastern England in the vicinity of the Wash estuary was chequered with low-lying wetlands known as fens. Inundated for much of the winter, the sparsely populated fen region encompassed almost 1,500 square miles and was one of the country's last remaining bastions of genuine wilderness. While Drayton acknowledges that outsiders sniffed at the fens as a putrid, disease-infested morass, he more emphatically praises them as a precious habitat for a teeming abundance of plants, fish, and fowl. His poetic catalogues could be compared to a recent biodiversity audit of the fens which inventoried over 13,000 species of flora and fauna, including a quarter of the rarest wildlife in Britain, of which 25 are found nowhere else on earth (Mossman et al). Drayton also glowingly depicts the bioregional economy of the fen-dwellers, who supported themselves by fishing, fowling, seasonal grazing, and harvesting sedge and peat. Appearing at a time when the fens had become the target of ecologically disastrous drainage schemes, the quarrel between Holland and Kesteven sounds almost like a parliamentary debate on the topic, in which the poet makes a tacit plea for conserving fens as part of England's environmental heritage.

Source: Poly-Olbion, 2.105–10.