Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England (review)

This collection of twelve essays focuses on the history of canals in early medieval England. Half of them expound on the technology of canal building and describe physical remains, and the other half are concerned with the general economic picture. It is a truly interdisciplinary project where historians and archaeologists, and even a geomorphologist, contribute material that is often but not necessarily mutually supporting. Most essays focus on a small region, but the thorough introduction by John Blair provides the links to enable readers to see the bigger picture and to understand how scholarship progressed in the field. Earlier research focusing on the central Middle Ages was concerned with improvements in roads, bridges, and haulage, while suggesting that investment was drawn away from the improvement of watercourses. Blair’s volume presents evidence that the period 950–1250 was actually a dynamic era in the history of English water transport.

These essays succeed very well in demonstrating how strong human agency could be both in the formation of waterways and in transcending natural hindrances between them. By 1000 the British commercial waterways landscape was dominated by the river Thames system together with one centered on the river Humber and the sea inlet The Wash to the northeast. The economic drive behind this was the orientation of eastern England to France on the one hand, and Scandinavia and the Low Countries on the other. Blair proposes a (graphic) model for the early medieval transport system, combining evidence from several essays, including place names implying river traffic, average boatloads recorded in accounts (mostly indicating downriver bulk trade such as grain or wool), distribution of pottery (often the return for the bulk trade), data on monetary circulation (excavated coins), (excavated) gutters for barges to circumvent fish weirs, and the size of (excavated) boats as related to the size of canals. To be sure, the basis of this system was the geographically determined pattern of river basins. Yet the need for the exchange of products contributed to investing in locks and sluices in order to make rivers more passable, and in constructing roads to connect river systems. In particular, a relatively rare commodity like salt would motivate people to build roads linking the water systems and thus create nodal points in the transport system, which over time might develop into commercial centers.

Drainage works provide other examples of how technology changed the landscape. The most common and simple form pertains to canals carrying off surplus water into the sea. The low wetlands at the mouths of river systems such as the Fenland and the Somerset Levels were already highly developed. More sophisticated and only discernable through intensive landscape studies are canals such as the “Rhee Wall” in Romney Marsh. This was a major artificial watercourse, constructed across an already reclaimed wetland, simply to divert water from the river Rother across the low-lying reclaimed marshes in order to flush out the estuary at New Romney, which like many sea inlets was continuously threatened by silting. No wonder the Rhee Wall was constructed and maintained by an interest group related to the harbor of New Romney. In the Fenland, similar canals served two functions, carrying off the water of upland areas and flushing shipping passages.

Because of its rich source material—both written and preserved in the landscape (sediments, former riverbeds and roads, vaulted flood-arches and sluices)—England provides a great case study. It may also provide models for the whole field, and thus this volume may be exemplary, for that reason but also because of the high level of scholarship. The large number of very good maps and graphs serves as a visual indication of the latter.