linking rivers to important production centres. The eleventh and twelfth centuries seem to have been the high point for this dynamic approach to water-transport: after 1200, the improvement of roads and
bridges increasingly diverted resources away from the canals, many of which stagnated with the reassertion of natural drainage patterns. The new perspective presented in this study has an important bearing on the economy, landscape, settlement patterns and inter-regional contacts of medieval England. Essays from economic historians, geographers, geomorphologists, archaeologists, and place-name scholars unearth this neglected but important aspect of medieval engineering and
economic growth.
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