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