Tim Soens

Floods and money: funding drainage and flood control in coastal Flanders from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries

From the High Middle Ages on, the coastal wetlands of the North Sea area have been intensively reclaimed and settled. In order to enable intensive agricultural production in these areas, a complex drainage and flood control system was gradually installed, one that demanded a permanent investment of huge amounts of capital and labour. As the maintenance of the water control system was vital for the coastal agro-system, the long-term evolution of investments is an important, yet rarely used, indicator of the economic, social and environmental fortunes of the coastlands. Based on new and very early serial data on water control funding in late medieval Flanders, this article argues that long-term fluctuations in the funding of drainage and flood control were first and foremost related to structural changes within the coastal economy, where an overall decline of investment levels ran parallel to the fourteenth-century crisis of the peasant smallholding economy in this region. Exogenous pressures on the other hand, such as storm surges, only provoked a short-term disruption of investments.

Assessing the Planimetric Accuracy of Historical Maps (Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries): New Methods and Potential for Coastal Landscape Reconstruction

Historical maps are vital tools for landscape reconstruction from the late medieval period onwards. However, the planimetric accuracy of local and regional maps before the nineteenth century is often considered problematic. This paper proposes a method for the evaluation of these maps, through integration in multiple computer programs such as ArcGIS, MapAnalyst and statistical software (SPSS). This method has been tested on a sample of historical maps depicting coastal landscape change in an area at the present-day Dutch-Belgian border (ranging from the local to the supra-regional level and from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries), and variations in planimetric accuracy over time have been interpreted. Results point to an exceptionally high accuracy of earlier medium- and large-scale maps – scale being the first determinant of planimetric accuracy – since no significant rise in accuracy over time was found. Notwithstanding this overall accuracy, many maps display pronounced local distortions. However, rather than disqualifying maps for landscape reconstruction, systematic analysis of these distortions can help to facilitate the interpretation of the historical maps and their use for landscape reconstruction. Finally, a method for integrating map accuracies in landscape reconstructions based on multiple maps is proposed and illustrated.

Flood security in the Medieval and Early Modern North Sea area : a question of entitlement?

Starting in the later Middle Ages, the coastal wetlands along the southern North Sea area were increasingly hit by a series of catastrophic storm surges. Deeply rooted in the collective memory of coastal society, these flood disasters are mostly discussed as products of meteorological disturbances, environmental vulnerability or technological failure. In this article, an alternative reading is proposed, drawing attention to massive distortions in the social allocation of flood protection in the later Middle Ages, which help to explain the increased frequency of storm disasters. Building on Amartya Sen’s original entitlement approach, it is argued that the right of coastal peasants to flood security often witnessed severe setbacks preceding many flood disasters, caused by adverse economic conditions, but also by an increasing violation of their entitlement to flood protection mainly by non-peasant groups, backed by an expanding state power.

Consuming maps and producing space : Explaining regional variations in the reception and agency of mapmaking in the Low Countries during the medieval and early modern periods

The acceptance of mapmaking in medieval and early modern Europe was neither a uniform nor a linear process. Comparing two neighbouring regions in the Low Countries, we explain the varying appetite for maps and mapmaking first by unravelling how people dealt with space before the introduction of modern mapmaking and, second, by identifying the actors that actively promoted its adoption. In regions where local elites had already been considering space as a commodity with a preference for clear-cut, geometric forms before the introduction of mapmaking, the latter was enthusiastically accepted and rapidly became instrumental in propagating this ‘modern’ concept of space. Other regions did not develop this appetite for mapmaking and continued to prefer different and more negotiable representations of space.