Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), p. 182

The 18 papers collected here were presented at the third conference examining the historical evolution of the coastal lands of regions bordering the North Sea. Each of these conferences has redefined our understanding of the changes which have taken place in the continental coast of the North Sea and has sought to integrate insights from geomorphology on the one hand, and history and archaeology on the other. The reality is that there are considerable problems in combining the two approaches, and this volume is divided into separate sections for those papers that deal with the ‘natural context’ and those that address the ‘social organization’. The first generally looks at change on a grand scale of thousands of years, while many of the papers dealing with the history consider the later middle ages alone. The tension between natural and anthropogenic factors runs throughout the volume. The historical papers in particular are deeply ambivalent about the cause of changes and whether the ‘aggressive’ reclamation of wetlands precipitated the subsequent crises.

The term ‘aggressive’, employed in a number of papers by the Continental contributors, implies a certain type of relationship between human intervention and the environment. It seems to be used here to mean reclamation activities which created unstable environmental conditions. Stability in a dynamic coastal environment is, however, a relative concept. The conditions in these regions were unpredictable and the pursuit of long-term stability was generally illusory. Increasing storminess from the later thirteenth century and strong winds at any period, which could reactivate coastal dune systems, were important factors in changing the environment. But equally as important was the decline in land values in the fifteenth century, which reduced investment in drainage and maintenance of the flood defences. It remains difficult even with the benefit of hindsight to understand the contribution of the various factors. The introduction of rabbits into the coastal dunes of the south-west Netherlands is identified in one chapter as an important part of a stable eco-system lasting until the eighteenth century, but in the nearby Scheldt estuary rabbits are said to have been the cause of the destruction of the coastal dune barrier. Equally, coastal flooding could be regarded as a disaster, or the means by which fertile alluvium was deposited, raising land levels and providing opportunities for new, profitable reclamation.

The particular value for English-speaking readers is that this book brings together an enormous volume of scholarship, particularly from continental Europe. Much of that work is otherwise available only in Dutch or Flemish, and the individual papers here provide a guide to the current state of knowledge on the coastal environment of the North Sea coast. These are set alongside a small number of papers from Britain and, rather oddly, a study of water management in the Po valley in Italy. What emerges more strongly than anything else is that most of the papers are local case studies. No grand synthesis emerges and even common factors are difficult to identify. As a result the concluding chapter by Eric Thoen lays stress upon regional ‘social-agro systems’ as the critical factor in the history of these coastal lands. Diversity rather than uniformity along the coast seems to the main conclusion to draw from this volume.