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This chapter discusses the management of open bodies of water and wetlands on seasonally or permanently waterlogged soil. It concentrates on freshwater habitats, but briefly discusses management of brackish habitats, such as coastal grazing marshes, where they form a continuum with freshwater ones. Topics covered include principles of manipulating water levels, water quality, methods of improving the value of deep water bodies (>1 m) and large, shallow (less than about 1 m) for wildlife; temporary pools, permanent ponds and water-filled ditches, rivers, swamps and fens, bogs, wet scrub, wet woodland, wet grasslands.

This lecture presents the text of the speech about seventeenth-century draining of the fens and its impact on navigation delivered by the author at the 2008 British Academy Special Lecture. It traces the history of the body known as the Conservators of the River Cam as a navigation authority in 1702. The lecture discusses the papers published by the Cam Conservancy that portrayed the drainage works as having been seriously prejudicial to navigation.

Agricultural decision-making is, initially, most fruitfully explored in a local arena, and this chapter provides an introduction to the demesne farm of Wisbech Barton. The demesne was selected for the unusually high quality of its documentation: the series of accounts, two-thirds of which survive, extends from 1313 to 1429, and each contains an exceptionally high level of detail. Wisbech Barton lay on the estate of the bishop of Ely and was situated in the silt fens; consequently, much of the chapter surveys patterns of income and expenditure on the estate, and the economy of the medieval marshland. It then details the nature of the crops and livestock that were grown and raised on the farm, and trends in crop yields, fleece weights and lambing rates.

This chapter is an interpretive essay that seeks to explain how the urban social and bureaucratic elites’ Desagüe allowed them to colonize by subjecting water, land, and life forms in the region to their needs and definitions without literally occupying them. Conversely, agro-commercial landowners did colonize water, land, and people by occupying them. As a class, these landowners had nothing to do with the conscious design of the Desagüe, but profited from it nonetheless. Comparing this to the drainage of the English fenlands and French marais, the chapter proposes that all three were colonization projects, but their outcomes differed because of the class composition of their respective agents and the relative strength of their resisting peasantries. The chapter further argues that this difference generated varied results, leading some toward the simultaneous creation of nation and empire and others to struggle and fail toward those same goals.

This chapter examines how hydrological systems and hydromorphology affect the surface patterns of peatlands. It begins with an overview of different types of hydrological systems, namely: saline and brackish systems, limnogenous systems, soligenous systems, topogenous systems, and ombrogenous systems. It then considers hydromorphologic classifications, taking into account different scales of mapping such as microforms, microtopes, mesotopes, fens, macrotopes, and supertopes. It also looks at the mechanisms underlying the formation of peatland patterns, including permafrost patterns and landforms.