Life of Captain Matthew Flinders | Page 9

on a very large and important trade in Boston, and
representatives of houses from Ypres and Ostend acquired property in
the town.* (* Pishey Thompson Collections for a Topographical and
Historical Account of Boston and the Hundred of Skirbeck 1820 page
31.) In the middle of the sixteenth century, when Flanders was boiling
on the fire of the Reformation, Lincolnshire and Norfolk provided an
asylum for crowds of harassed refugees. In 1569 two persons were
deputed to ride from Boston to Norwich to ascertain what means that
city adopted to find employment for them; and in the same year Mr.
William Derby was directed to move Mr. Secretary Cecil, Queen
Elizabeth's great minister, to "know his pleasure whether certain
strangers may be allowed to dwell within the borough without damage
of the Queen's laws."* (*Boston Corporation manuscripts quoted in
Thompson, History and Antiquities of Boston 1856.)

During one of these peaceful and useful Flemish invasions the
ancestors of Matthew Flinders entered Lincolnshire. In the later years
of his life he devoted some attention to the history of his family, and
found record of a Flinders as early as the tenth century. He believed,
also, that his people had some connection with two men named
Flinders or Flanders, who fled from Holland during the religious
persecutions, and settled, in Queen Elizabeth's reign, in
Nottinghamshire as silk stocking weavers. It would be very interesting
if it were clear that there was a link between the family and the origins
of the great Nottingham hosiery trade. A Flinders may in that case have
woven silk stockings for the Royal termagant, and Lord Coke's pair,
which were darned so often that none of the original fabric remained,
may have come from their loom.
Matthew Flinders himself wrote the note: "Ruddington near
Nottingham (it is four miles south of the town) is the place whence the
Flinders came;" and he ascertained that an ancestor was Robert Flinders,
a Nottingham stocking-weaver.
A family tradition relates that the Lincolnshire Flinders were amongst
the people taken over to England by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch
engineer of celebrity in his day, who undertook in 1621 to drain
360,000 acres of fen in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. He
was financed by English and Dutch capitalists, and took his reward in
large grants of land which he made fit for habitation and cultivation.
Vermuyden and his Flemings were not allowed to accomplish their
work of reclamation without incurring the enmity of the natives. In a
petition to the King in 1637 he stated that he had spent 150,000 pounds,
but that 60,000 pounds of damage had been done "by reason of the
opposition of the commoners," who cut the banks of his channels in the
night and during floods. The peasantry, indeed, resisted the
improvements that have proved so beneficent to that part of England,
because the draining and cultivation of so many miles of swamp would
deprive them of fishing and fowling privileges enjoyed from time
immemorial. Hardly any reform or improvement can be effected
without some disruption of existing interests; and a people deeply sunk
in poverty and toil could hardly be expected to contemplate with

philosophical calm projects which, however advantageous to fortunate
individuals and to posterity, were calculated to diminish their own
means of living and their pleasant diversions. The dislike of the
"commoners" to the work of the "participants" led to frequent riots, and
many of Vermuyden's Flemings were maltreated. He endeavoured to
allay discontent by employing local labour at high wages; and was
courageous enough to pursue his task despite loss of money, wanton
destruction, and many other discouragements.* (* See Calendar of
State Papers, Domestic Series, for 1619, 1623, 1625, 1638, 1639 et seq;
and White's Lincolnshire page 542.) Ebullitions of discontent on the
part of fractious Fenlanders did not cease till the beginning of the
eighteenth century.
A very simple calculation shows that the great-grandfather of the first
Matthew Flinders would probably have been contemporary with Sir
Cornelius Vermuyden's reclamation works. He may have been one of
the "participants" who benefited from them. The fact is significant as
bearing upon this conjecture, that no person named Flinders made a
will in Lincolnshire before 1600.* (* See C.W. Foster, Calendar of
Lincoln Wills 1320 to 1600, 1902.)
It is, too, an interesting circumstance that there was a Flinders among
the early settlers in New England, Richard Flinders of Salem, born
1637.* (* Savage, Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New
England, Boston U.S.A. 1860.) He may have been of the same family
as the navigator, for the Lincolnshire element among the fathers of
New England was pronounced.
The name Flinders survived at Donington certainly for thirty years after
the death of the sailor who gave lustre to it; for in a directory published
in