In his 1627 Sylva Sylvarum, Sir Francis Bacon summarised several experiments on the properties of sound, concluding that ‘communication passeth far better throrow [sic] Water than Air’.[1] It is perhaps with this liquid clarity in mind that Hester Pulter (1605?-1678) created the boisterous bodies of water running through her royalist poetry. Her rivers and streams call to other nonhuman and human speakers, sounding sympathy for royalist defeats and the death of Charles I. Their cries also echo Pulter’s more personal concerns, while they gurgle with proleptic warnings of their own destruction.
These audible watery interjections are unsurprising. Pulter wrote her poetry at Broadfield, her Hertfordshire estate, situated on a patch of land woven into a watery latticework of rivers and streams.[2] In her autobiographical poem ‘The Invitation into the Countrey [sic] to my D.[ear].D.[Daughters]: M.[argaret] P.[Pulter] P.[Penelope] P.[Pulter] 1647, when his Sacred Maj[es] tie was at unhappy home’, the Thames appears first, mid ‘out Rore[s]’, making a swift retreat to the sea, grieving the absent king.[3] The speaker urges her daughters to follow the example of the Thames and ‘make hast[e] away’ from the ‘sad place’, London.[4]
It is to the equally sad, but far gentler ‘christal springs’ of Broadfield that the ‘lovely lasses’ are encouraged to return, where, in a chorus of riverine mourning, smaller waterways join the Thames and the maternal speaker in expressing their political woe:
Leas drooping Swans now sadly sing
And Bean comes weeping from her spring
Mimmer and Sturt in mourning weeds
Shewing theire hearts for griefe en’e bleeds
[…]
Vir lookes and sees this Shire looke Sad
Shee whirls about as Shee were mad
Round Verulam his ruin’d Stone
Shee runs and tells to Colne her mones
For since her saint his blood was shed
Shee never greived soe as shee said
[…]
Cleare Purvall too came bubling out
But long shee did not stand in doubt
Seeing our Halcion dayes were dun
She loathed (shee said) to see the Sun;[5]
Within a few short lines, Pulter name-checks seven local Hertfordshire rivers — the Lea, Beane, Mimram, Stort, Ver, Colne and Purwell — all of which share a special bond. They are chalk streams, ‘globally rare, a gentle unassuming but uniquely English gift to global ecology’.[6] England is host to 85 % of the world’s 200 rare chalk streams and Hertfordshire boasts ten percent of these.[7] Chalk streams are spring-fed, and those near Broadfield are filtered through the prehistoric chalk of the Chiltern Hills, converging in Hertfordshire en route to the Thames. Their beds, composed of calcareous porous chalk, keep the waters ‘crystal clear’.[8]
The virtues of chalk streams were extolled by Pliny the Elder (whose inspiration is clear throughout Pulter’s manuscript) and were subjects of royalist scientific writing in the seventeenth century.[9] While Pulter’s contemporaries considered their naturally-filtered, highly oxygenated water good to drink —with some streams even said to possess magical or holy qualities—the sounds of these special tributaries also differ from those of other rivers; their chalk-bed geomorphology brings a ‘highly localised’ response to their surrounding landscapes, resulting in a specific internal micro rhythm.[10]
Rob Goodman, who has recently recorded the sounds from within a chalk stream using a hydroscope, describes the sounds inside as ‘angular’, uncharacteristically ‘not at all sloshy’, but more like those of a ‘tight, dry space’.[11] Pulter’s lines speak to her understanding of the synaesthetic, paradoxical sounds of these waters: the Ver ‘whirls about as Shee were mad/ Round Verulam his ruin’d Stone’, while the Mimram and Strout, in their ‘mourning weeds/ ‘shew[ing] theire hearts for griefe en’e bleed[s]’.[12] These ambient multi-layered, multi-textured sounds— the moaning swirl of a splash against stone, the display of bleeding, beating hearts— recall early modern depictions of the womb as a glass flask, an alchemical matrix.[13] These, like the chalk streams themselves, are transparent, but their rigid containment is rendered precariously porous by their openings.
Underwater acoustics experts testing a ‘Sonic Womb’ found that, in utero, ‘amniotic fluid stimulates foetal hearing’.[14] Where the foetal skull, like the chalk bed, is calcareous, it serves ‘as a transducer’ allowing the foetus to filter noises from within and outside the womb.[15] The sound always at the top of others is, of course, ‘the maternal physiological internal sound from her heartbeat’.[16] Goodman’s chalk stream recordings picked up clear ‘mechanical beating sounds’, the undersong of a living river.[17] Pulter, in her weeping, bubbling rivers, invites us to imagine the steady beat of maternal stability in motion; her chalk streams, a collection of melancholy wombs, sing a clear undersong, calling her children back to her with the soundscapes and landscapes of home.[18]
Pulter could not have predicted the tragedy that would see her outlive all but two of her fifteen children, but she might have predicted, with some sad accuracy, the silencing of her calling streams. By the end of her poem, the healing capacities of Broadfield’s ‘inamel’d vales and cristal rills’ are fading in the face of the ongoing political instability.[19] In 2025, data from The Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs shows that all but two of Pulter’s talkative chalk streams are now described as bodies of water with ‘poor ecological status’, those most affected by human activity.[20] Wastewater run-off, overuse and climate change have significantly altered the health of their water, threatening to subdue forever their potent powers of speech.
Patricia Bond is a PhD candidate at The University of York, whose research is funded by the White Rose Council for the Arts and Humanities
Feature Image: Anon. Wooded Landscape with a Wildfowler by a Stream (1646), SK-A-4887, Rijkmuseum
Bibliography
Manuscripts
Leeds, University of Leeds Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 32
Primary Printed sources
Bacon, Francis, Sylva sylvarum; or, A natural history, in ten centuries (London: I. H. for William Lee, 1631)
Cavendish, Margaret, Observations on Experimental Philosophy (London: A. Maxwell, 1666)
Pliny The Elder, Natural History, Volume VIII: Books 28-32, trans. by A. C. Andrews, et. al. (Harvard University Press, 2014)
Rösslin, Eucharius, The byrth of mankynde, otherwyse named the womans booke…trans. by Thomas Raynalde and Richard Jonas (London: 1545)
Secondary Sources:
Bell, Charlie, ‘Hertfordshire’s Chalk Streams’ Hertfordshire Natural History Society, <https://www.hnhs.org/content/hertfordshires-chalk-streams> [accessed 25/07/2025]
Birkwood, Katie, ‘The birth of mankind’, Royal College of Physicians, <https://history.rcp.ac.uk/blog/birth-mankind> [accessed 04/07/2025]
Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, Water Quality Data Archive, <https://environment.data.gov.uk/water-quality/view/explore> [accessed 06/06/2025]
Goodman, Rob, ‘Sound Within Sound: Rob Goodman on Unfamiliar Sonic Landscape’, in Stapleford Granary exhibition guide Harry Cory Wright, 600 Pieces of Landscape: Chalk Stream, 3 July- 31 August, <https://www.staplefordgranary.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions-overview/harry-cory-wright-600-pieces-of-landscape-chalkstream>[accessed 30/08/2025]
Hagyard, Tim, Chalk Stream Reflections: Walking the Rivers of Hertfordshire (London: Mindful Steps Publishing, 2023)
Henriques, Julian, Eric Jauniaux, Aude Thibaut de Maisieres and Pierre Gélat, ‘Sound Before Birth: Foetal Hearing and The Auditory Environment of the Womb’ in Aural Diversity: A Clinical Perspective, ed. by John Levack and Andrew Hugill (Routledge, 2022), pp.27-41
Knight, Leah and Wendy Wall, gen. eds. The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, 2018, http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu
Perry, Tom, ‘Celebrating our Chalk Streams on World Rivers Day’, (2017), <https://environmentagency.blog.gov.uk/2017/09/22/celebrating-our-chalk-streams-on-world-rivers-day/> [accessed 25/05/2025]
Sear, D.A., M. Newson, J.C. Old and C. Hill, English Nature Research Reports, No 684, Appendix 5, Geomorphological appraisal of the River Nar Site of Special Scientific Interest, <https://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/file/77057>, [accessed 07/07/2025]
Whiteley, Rebecca, ‘Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe’, <https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/picturing-pregnancy-in-early-modern-europe/>; para. 13 of 15, [accessed 01/08/2025]
[1] Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum; or, A natural history, in ten centuries (London: I. H. for William Lee, 1631), p. 44.
[2] Pulter’s manuscript, MS Lt q 32, is held in the University of Leeds Library, Brotherton Collection.
[3] Pulter, ‘The Invitation into the Countrey [sic] to my D.[ear]. D. [Daughters]: M.[argaret] P. [Pulter] P. [Penelope] P. [Pulter] 1647, when his Sacred Maj[es] tie was at unhappy home’, l. 30, fol. 5r.
[4] Ibid., ll.1-2, fol. 4v.
[5] Pulter, ‘The Invitation into the Countrey…’, l.91, fol.5r; 1.71, fol.5v; ll. 93-112, fol.6r.
[6] Tim Hagyard, Chalk Stream Reflections: Walking the Rivers of Hertfordshire (London: Mindful Steps Publishing, 2023), p.6.
[7] Hagyard offers 300 as the number of chalk streams worldwide, while the UK government’s Environmental Agency claims that there are only 200 chalk streams worldwide. See Tom Perry’s blog ‘Celebrating our Chalk Streams on World Rivers Day, (2017), <https://environmentagency.blog.gov.uk/2017/09/22/celebrating-our-chalk-streams-on-world-rivers-day/> [accessed 25/05/2025] (para 2 of 16).
[8] Charlie Bell, ‘Hertfordshire’s Chalk Streams’ Hertfordshire Natural History Society, <https://www.hnhs.org/content/hertfordshires-chalk-streams> [accessed 25/07/2025], (para 15 of 31).
[9] Pliny offers a detailed discussion of the healing properties of various waters in Book XXXI of his Natural History arguing that chalk streams produce ‘water sweet and very light’ where the stone acts ‘as a strainer’ and ‘keeps back any dirt’, Pliny, Natural History, Volume VIII: Books 28-32, trans. by A. C. Andrews, et. al. (Harvard University Press, 2014), pp.377-462 (p.407). Among others, Pulter’s fellow royalist Margaret Cavendish acknowledged both petrifying waters and bathing in mineral waters in her Observations on Experimental Philosophy (London: A. Maxwell, 1666), p. 57.
[10] D.A. Sear, M. Newson, J.C. Old and C. Hill, English Nature Research Reports, No 684, Appendix 5, Geomorphological appraisal of the River Nar Site of Special Scientific Interest, <https://publications.naturalengland.org.uk/file/77057>, [accessed 07/07/2025], p 126.
[11]Rob Goodman, ‘Sound Within Sound: Rob Goodman on Unfamiliar Sonic Landscape’, in Stapleford Granary exhibition guide Harry Cory Wright, 600 Pieces of Landscape: Chalk Stream, 3 July- 31 August, <https://www.staplefordgranary.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions-overview/harry-cory-wright-600-pieces-of-landscape-chalkstream> [accessed 30/08/2025], unnumbered page 10.
[12] Pulter, ‘The Invitation into the Countrey…’, ll. 95-96, fol.6r.
[13] See Rebecca Whiteley, ‘Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe’, <https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/picturing-pregnancy-in-early-modern-europe/>; para. 13 of 15, [accessed 01/08/2025]; Images of birth figures in an alchemical flask appear in The birth of mankynde, otherwyse named the womans booke. This was first published as The rose garden for pregnant women and midwives by German physician Eucharius Rösslin in 1513, translated into English by Richard Jonas and updated by Thomas Raynalde and published in London in 1540, see Katie Birkwood, <https://history.rcp.ac.uk/blog/birth-mankind>.
[14] Julian Henriques, Eric Jauniaux, Aude Thibaut de Maisieres and Pierre Gélat, ‘Sound Before Birth: Foetal Hearing and The Auditory Environment of the Womb’ in Aural Diversity: A Clinical Perspective, ed. by John Levack and Andrew Hugill (Routledge, 2022), pp.27-41 (p.32).
[15] Ibid., p.33.
[16] Ibid., p.31.
[17] Rob Goodman, ‘Sound Within Sound’, unnumbered page 11.
[19] Pulter, ‘The Invitation into the Countrey…’, l.178, fol.7r.
[20] Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, Water Quality Data Archive, <https://environment.data.gov.uk/water-quality/view/explore> [accessed 09/08/2025].