He read plays, attended the village fairs, shot plovers in the fenland, and enjoyed a dance with his sisters.
It is now established that he was a tenant of Peterborough Abbey, from which he held lands at Witham-on-the-Hill and Barholme with Stow in the south-western corner of Lincolnshire, and of Crowland Abbey at Rippingale in the neighbouring fenland.
This alteration of coast-line appears at Loosduinen, where the moor or fenland formerly developed behind the dunes now crops out on the shore amid the sand, being pressed to the compactness of lignite by the weight of the sand drifted over it.
This is closely followed on the south-east by the Chalk country, occupying the whole of the rest of England except where the Tertiary Basins of London and Hampshire cover it, where the depression of the Fenland carries it out of sight, and where the lower rocks of the Weald break through it.
The continuity of the belts of Chalk and of the Middle and Upper Oolites in the Eastern Plain is broken by the shallow depression of the Wash and the Fenland.