Lincolnshire yellowbellies

There is some curiosity, even amusement, whenever we hear the phrase yellowbellies, especially from abroad, for it is regarded as one of those unexplainable English eccentricities. This may be so but despite its clumsy vulgarity, the description finds affectionate favour in this county where to be a yellowbelly is not only to be a person from Lincolnshire but also someone who finds this part of the country a most congenial place to live in and so they wear their badge with pride.

The origin of the term Lincolnshire yellowbelly is obscure but the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a native of the fens although by common usage, it has come to refer to a person who was born and bred in the county. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable supports the OED but embraces a larger area by defining it as a name given to people of the fenlands of the counties of Lincoln, Huntingdon, Cambridge, Suffolk and Norfolk but adds: "The Mexicans are also so called."

For those who are unfamiliar with these parts, it should be explained that the Great Level of the Fens, as it was once known, occupies an area of about 1,300 square miles of eastern England, extending from Cambridge in the south to Lincoln in the north and from the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk boundary in the east to within a few miles of Stamford in the west. Lincolnshire is a major part of this flat, though never featureless, landscape and those who lived here pursued a lifestyle that was probably not replicated anywhere else in the world and so it seems a natural progression that they would have attracted an unusual nickname such as this semantic oddity.

Those who lived in the fens in earlier times had close associations with fish and fowl and other creatures that inhabited these wet, low-lying and usually inhospitable areas that were little more than a quagmire in places and so were referred to derogatorily as having yellow bellies similar to the yellow belly of the frog or any of the fishes such as the pike or eel that have yellow under parts.

An earlier term, now defunct, is fen slodgers who are referred to by Lord Macaulay in his History of England (1848-1861) as half-amphibious beings who lived in the more isolated spots and got their living by fishing and fowling over several centuries. In A History of the Fens of South Lincolnshire, published in 1868 by William Henry Wheeler, the fen slodgers are described as men who lived in huts erected on the mounds scattered among the chain of lakes which were bordered by thick crops of reeds, their only way of access to one another, and of communication with nearby towns or villages, being by means of small boats or canoes which they paddled along with a pole and also used in their fishing and fowling expeditions.

They lived in miserable conditions although they enjoyed a sort of wild liberty amid the watery wastes which they were not disposed to give up and they violently opposed any attempt to alter the state of the fens, particularly large scale drainage projects, and frequently filled up the dykes which the labourers had dug and pulled down the banks in an attempt to prevent such schemes from going ahead with the result that workmen often had armed guards to protect them. But their numbers were too few and they were too widely scattered to make any combined effort at resistance. These would appear to be the original yellowbellies of the Lincolnshire fens. There are, however, many other definitions that have some claim to validity and here are a few:

• The uniforms of the old Lincolnshire Regiment were green with yellow facings. The fastenings of the uniform tunic, which were known as frogs, were also yellow.
• Opium extracted from poppy heads and taken to relieve malaria that was prevalent in the fens in earlier centuries turned the skin a shade of yellow.
• Sheep grazing in mustard fields were dusted by pollen from the blossom that turned their undersides yellow. Alternatively, the long under wool of sheep grazing in the Lincolnshire Wolds became discoloured by the yellow clay.
• Women traders on street markets in past times are reputed to have worn a leather apron with two pockets, one for copper and silver and one for gold. At the end of a good day they would say they had "a yellow belly" meaning they had taken a large number of gold sovereigns.
• The expression is based on the old belief that if a person born in Lincolnshire placed a shilling on their abdomen on retiring to bed and slept flat on their back all night, then the next morning the shilling would have turned into a gold sovereign.
• Lincolnshire folk were almost all land workers and as there was little farming equipment available in past times, most of the work was done by hand. Workers therefore spent most of their time stooping in the fields, planting or cutting corn, lifting root crops, picking stones etc, and on hot, sunny days, the men took off their shirts for comfort. Their backs therefore became tanned brown as they were always facing the ground while their chests and stomachs rarely saw the sun and remained their natural colour. Hence the tag "yellow belly".
• The stage coaches that operated in Lincolnshire in times past had yellow body work.
• The term originated from Elloe, the name of the rural deanery that serves the fen area of the Lincoln Diocese. This in turn took its name from the Saxon Wapentake which was referred to as Ye Elloe Bellie - Elloe meaning out of the morass while bel was the Celtic word for hole or hollow.

        Take your pick.

Return to The Fens

Go to:     Main Index     Villages Index