Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 292

At the present time, when ‘natural environments’ are being transformed by human action at a greater pace than ever before, policy makers and spatial planners are directing increasing attention to the conservation of selected sections of the natural world. The management challenges that confront them intensify year upon year, but relatively little thought has been given as to just how ‘natural’ our natural environment really is. This question is the starting point for the volume under review, which contains the proceedings of a two-day colloquium convened by historians at the Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis at the behest of the conseil-général of the Nord département. The meeting was held in September 2008 at the Liessies abbey conference centre near Avesnes. Rather than examining the breadth of the natural world, participants focused on the issue of water in the environment, and on the ways in which the morphology and location of watercourses changed through time. Their sources ranged from archival records to observation and sampling in the field, with methods of analysis spanning the patient exploration of historic maps, meticulous scrutiny of historic texts, and examination of soils and sediment cores. Disciplinary approaches included not only medieval history and historical geography but also environmental archaeology and physical geography. Thirteen chapters plus a couple of brief notes explore three themes: the changing location and use of watercourses; the relationship of the fluvial environment to human groups living nearby; and the ways that changes in watercourses are perceived and represented by local residents. Most of the discussion is directed to various parts of northern France, but stretches of central, southern and western France are not ignored. Most of the authors come from institutions in northern France but universities in other regions are also represented.

Five of the first six papers are emphatically northern in emphasis, with the changing relationship between land and water in the Canche valley being presented by three groups of authors who draw, in turn, on palaeoecological analysis (including carbon-14 dating), on the record of historical maps, and evidence from archaeological excavations of the Beutin shipwreck. A discussion of the changing course of the river Scarpe near Douai in early medieval times combines the use of documents with the analysis of soil profiles, whilst the paper on the changing course of the Rhône upstream of Lyons is derived in part from sediment analysis in the laboratory. The central section of the volume is more conventionally ‘historical’ in approach, with old maps and archival documents elucidating the changing configuration of the river Scheldt near Tournai, of the Meuse valley in Belgium, and of the Moselle at Metz in northern Lorraine. A remarkable photograph on p.150 showing the old bridge at Moulins-les-Metz, now high and dry in a meadow, reveals just how much the fluvial environment of the Moselle has changed over the past five centuries. Two further papers trace the ‘disappearance’ of watercourses beneath the spread of suburban Nice, and the use of wetlands near Laon as defensive features to be flooded in times of war and drained once peace had been restored. The two papers comprising the final section identify the distribution of watermills in part of western France and their role as heritage features in local tourism schemes, and the on-going ‘Confluence’ project to revitalize the southern tip of the peninsula between the Rhône and the Saône at Lyon. Two short notes on the changing morphology of the Scheldt and on the culverting of much of the Furan beneath Saint-Etienne conclude the collection of essays.

This special theme issue of the Revue du Nord certainly provides ample evidence that the ‘natural world’, as exemplified by watercourses, is far from stable across time and has been changed profoundly as a result of human perceptions and action. A brief conclusion to this effect is entitled ‘Des hydrosystèmes aux anthroposystèmes’. The volume is illustrated with a large number of maps, diagrams and photographs, some of which are in full colour. Each chapter is provided with an abstract in English as well as in French, and a detailed bibliography. Readers of this review will identify with the debate about the ‘naturalness’ of ‘nature’, and with the complementarity of literary, cartographic and scientific modes of investigation, even if watercourses – and especially those in urban settings – are rather removed from their usual fields of enquiry.