In 1866, Charles Kingsley published Hereward the Wake: Last of the English, a quasi-historical novel based on the life of an eleventh-century Anglo-Danish outlaw and his last stand against William the Conqueror's Norman incursion into England. Described by Graham Swift as a ‘fenland fabulist’, Kingsley opens his text with a prelude dedicated to the novel's setting, the lowlands of East Anglia. Read as a defence of the Fens against the domination of highland spaces within romantic and historical literature, Kingsley's preface usefully represents the bifurcation of British rurality, a division based on gradient. But his championing of East Anglia is partial. While the nineteenth-century flatlands were drained, cultivated and effectively tamed by engineers and agriculturists – a process initiated formally in the seventeenth century – Kingsley's medieval fens are a morass of marshlands and Dark Age superstition.