Introduction

This chapter looks at how contemporary documents reveal how administrative arrangements valued water and how watercourses were often followed by boundaries. These documents, too, often offer the earliest written evidence for the names by which rivers and lesser watercourses were known in this period and offer material not readily available elsewhere. Some settlements taking their names from rivers might first appear in Domesday Book, which, although it was compiled soon after the Norman Conquest, nevertheless presents a picture of late Anglo-Saxon England. From these early sources, important information can be gleaned about ways that the waters all around them touched the daily life of people in this period in myriad ways.

Rights to rivers and other watercourses in documentary sources

Rights to water frequently find mention in pre-Conquest charter grants or leases, usually as the appurtenances of estates in the Latin preamble. Sometimes they are expressed as rights in aquarum cursibus ‘running waters’ or diriuatisque aquarum cursibus/dirivatisque cursibus aquarum/ aquis, aquarumque decursibus, variants of ‘running streams of water’, or merely as in aquae ‘in waters’, in flumine, rivulis or aquarum riuulis ‘in rivers’ or ‘in the water of rivers’. Kentish charters, especially, may note rights in other waters and wetlands: fontanis, paludibus, fluminibus ‘(in) springs, marshes and rivers’: marshes and rivers were places for the capture of fish and fowl.