REWT
Rivers of England and Wales, Temporally
The Humber
The region where the reconstruction is weakest after the Fens, and where the scoping exercise repeatedly found the network breaking. Humberhead went from 14% unreached to 21% and back to 3% in a single afternoon’s work.
Research leads, not verified citations. Nothing below has been checked against a copy. Dates given as decades are firmer than dates given as years.
The schemes, and when
| period | scheme | what it did to the network |
|---|---|---|
| 13th c. onwards | Commissions of Sewers; piecemeal embanking | maintenance of existing channels; little new cutting |
| 1626–c.1630 | Vermuyden’s drainage of Hatfield Chase for Charles I, financed by the Participants | the defining intervention: the Don’s southern arm to the Trent blocked, all water thrown north to the Aire |
| 1633 | The Dutch River, cut to the Ouse at Goole | a wholly new channel, made because the 1626 works flooded Fishlake and Sykehouse |
| 1635–1637 | Sir John Monson’s Ancholme Level; the New River Ancholme | |
| 1628–1650s | Isle of Axholme commoners’ resistance; works broken and repaired | channels cut, destroyed and recut — dates in this window are unstable by nature |
| 1764 | Holderness Drainage Act | the Hull valley |
| 1772 | Market Weighton Canal | drainage as much as navigation |
| 1798–c.1810 | Beverley and Barmston Drain | |
| c.1802 | Keyingham Level | Holderness |
| late 18th–19th c. | Warping — deliberate tidal silt deposition | warping drains, entirely artificial, and numerous |
| 1930 | Land Drainage Act | the modern Internal Drainage Boards |
The concentration is unmistakable: the network’s shape in this region is largely a product of 1626–1637, with a second wave of statutory drainage a century and a half later.
Contemporary and near-contemporary
- Dugdale, William, The History of Imbanking and Drayning of Divers Fenns and Marshes (1662) — the foundational contemporary account, covering Hatfield Chase and the Isle of Axholme as well as the Fens, and carrying maps. A second edition followed in 1772. The single most important item on the list.
- Abraham de la Pryme’s diary and his manuscript history of Hatfield (late 17th c.) — an observer living on the Level within living memory of the works.
- Court of Sewers records, and the Duchy of Lancaster records for Hatfield Chase at The National Archives. The Chase was Duchy land, which is why its administration is unusually well recorded.
- Hatfield Chase Corporation archives (the Participants’ successor body), with material at Doncaster Archives.
Modern scholarship and archaeological survey
- The Humber Wetlands Project (Hull / English Heritage, 1990s) — the Humber’s equivalent of the Fenland Survey, published as regional volumes covering the Humberhead Levels, Holderness, the Vale of York, and the Ancholme and Lower Trent valleys, and synthesised in Van de Noort, The Humber Wetlands: The Archaeology of a Dynamic Landscape (2004). For palaeochannels and pre-drainage hydrography this is the closest thing to a ready-made answer.
- Gaunt, G.D. — geological survey work on the Vale of York and Humberhead Levels, mapping buried and relict channels.
- Korthals-Altes, Sir Cornelius Vermuyden (1925) and Harris, Vermuyden and the Fens (1953) — biographies covering the engineering.
- Hunter, Joseph, South Yorkshire (1828–31) and Tomlinson, The Level of Hatfield Chace (1882) — antiquarian topographies with local detail and often with maps.
Cartographic and land-record
This is where the land-appropriation argument applies most directly, because the Humber schemes were contractual: the Participants took land in exchange for draining it, and that exchange had to be mapped.
- Participants’ allotment maps and the drainage awards for Hatfield Chase.
- Isle of Axholme enclosure awards (from the 1790s), which post-date the drainage but frequently depict older channels as boundaries.
- Warping drain records, 18th- and 19th-century — and a good negative index: a warping drain is certainly not medieval.
- County maps before the Ordnance Survey — Warburton (1720) and Jeffreys (1771–72) for Yorkshire — for the state of the network between Vermuyden and the OS.
- OS six-inch first series, which for this region may pre-date some of the nineteenth-century warping and later cuts.
Why this region repays the effort
Two reasons beyond its weakness in the current data. The interventions are densely dated and legally documented, so a course can often be pinned to a decade rather than a century. And the Don’s diversion is a case where the modern channel is not a modification of the medieval one but a replacement of it — the water was sent an entirely different way in 1626. No amount of patching the modern survey will recover that; only the documentary and cartographic record will.