Bedford Level, an extensive tract of flat land in the east of England, embracing nearly all the marshy district called the Fens. It extends inland around the Wash into the six counties of Northampton, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Lincoln, Norfolk, and Suffolk, and has an area of about 750,000 acres. Its inland boundary forms a horseshoe of high lands, and reaches the towns or villages of Brandon, Milton (near Cambridge), Earith, Peterborough, and Bolingbroke. It is divided into three parts—the north level, between the rivers Welland and Nene; the middle, between the Nene and the Old Bedford River; and the south, extending to Stoke, Feltwell, and Mildenhall. It is intersected by many artificial channels, as well as by the lower parts of the rivers Nene, Cam, Ouse (Great and Little), Welland, Glen, Lark, and Stoke. It receives the waters of the whole or parts of nine counties. This district seems to have been a great forest at the time of the Romans, who cut the forest down, formed great embankments to exclude the tide, and rendered the tract for a time a fertile inhabited region. In the 13th century, violent incursions of the sea stopped the outflow of the rivers, and it became a morass. The practicability of draining this extensive region seems to have been thought of as early as 1436, and many partial attempts were made after this. The first effectual effort was in 1634, when Francis, Earl of Bedford, after whom the district was thenceforth called, obtained, along with thirteen others, a grant of 95,000 acres of the reclaimed land on condition of draining the level. The work was partially accomplished in three years, at a cost of £100,000; but was pronounced inadequate by government. Charles I. tried to get the work, with a greatly increased premium, into his own hands; but the civil war stopped further progress. In 1649 parliament confirmed William, Earl of Bedford, in the rights granted to his father; and after a fresh outlay of £300,000, the contract was fulfilled. In 1688 a corporation was formed for the management of the level. The middle level has always been the most difficult to manage; and the work on it, with one drain 11 miles long, was only completed in 1852 at a cost of £400,000. The St Germain's sluice, at the confluence of that drain with the Ouse, was considered perfectly secure. But in May 1862 it gave way under the pressure of a strong tide, and the western bank of the middle-level drain burst, speedily flooding about 6000 acres of fertile land. This led to the construction of a permanent cofferdam of pile-work to shut off the tidal waters; and for the drainage of the middle level, Slater's-Lode sluice was taken advantage of; siphon pipes being laid over the cofferdam, the flood-waters let off by them and by drains, the siphons acting as permanent sluice.
See Heathcote's Reminiscences of Fen and Mere (1876); the Duke of Bedford's Great Agricultural Estate (1897).