Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

[Susano]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

The first thing the PCs see when they enter Slatmarsh is a stray dog running past carrying a human hand in its mouth.

[Old Man]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

What movie was that? Wild at heart?

[Susano]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

What movie was that? Wild at heart?

 

Yojimbo

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

A pond below the heaped causeway, brilliant red with cranberries floating in the bone-chilling water. And in the middle, a body floating, dead eyes staring upwards....

[Susano]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Some bodies up on the weird wheel-like objects on long poles you see in certain paintings from the later middle ages.

[IndianaJoe3]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Some bodies up on the weird wheel-like objects on long poles you see in certain paintings from the later middle ages.

 

That would be a Catherine Wheel.

[The Weapon]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Actually' date=' I think 20 miles is a day's travel. Provided you have the terrain. In a swamp? Who knows.[/quote']

 

Roman legions marched 25 miles a day carrying armor, weapons and standard kit and built and knocked down a fort into the bargain. Now admittedly that's with good roads and fit young(ish) adult males. If Saltmarsh is anywhere near a big town it has a road through the swamp. It's not a good road, in fact maybe it's just dirt piled up and compacted a bit so you're not walking on something soggy. Still if you could march 4 miles/hour (standard british march rate) on good roads then you could get at least 3 on this which means in 10-11 hours including lunch you could be in the city.

[Susano]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Roman legions marched 25 miles a day carrying armor' date=' weapons and standard kit and built and knocked down a fort into the bargain. Now admittedly that's with good roads and fit young(ish) adult males. If Saltmarsh is anywhere near a big town it has a road through the swamp. It's not a good road, in fact maybe it's just dirt piled up and compacted a bit so you're not walking on something soggy. Still if you could march 4 miles/hour (standard british march rate) on good roads then you could get at least 3 on this which means in 10-11 hours including lunch you could be in the city.[/quote']

 

I think there's a huge difference between Roman legionnaires and what one can expect from the general population. Also, I'm pretty sure Saltmash isn't in the swamp, just near it, and there's no road through the swamp. And I'm also pretty sure that in period, it was far easier to go around than through a swamp, forest, or any thing similar.

[Markdoc]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Roman legions marched 25 miles a day carrying armor' date=' weapons and standard kit and built and knocked down a fort into the bargain. Now admittedly that's with good roads and fit young(ish) adult males. If Saltmarsh is anywhere near a big town it has a road through the swamp. It's not a good road, in fact maybe it's just dirt piled up and compacted a bit so you're not walking on something soggy. Still if you could march 4 miles/hour (standard british march rate) on good roads then you could get at least 3 on this which means in 10-11 hours including lunch you could be in the city.[/quote']

 

Actually, according to Vegetius, the standard march was a bit under 18 miles, over a period of 7-8 of our hours. That was, as noted, fit young men, who spent most of their training learning endurance running. At that rate, a fit strong man, carrying a decent load could make it from Saltmarsh to Seaton in a day - someone in lightly less sprightly condition, could do it one long day. People's speed degrades over time - just because a legionary could do 18 miles in 7 hours, doesn't mean they could just as easily do 24 in 10 - in fact, most of them probably could not. And that's not with campaign kit, but, with only their weapons and armour. Here's the comment from his section on monthly training "The foot were obliged to march completely armed the distance of ten miles from the camp and return, in the most exact order and with the military step which they changed and quickened on some part of the march. ". Incidentally, the Roman foot = 0.9708 English foot and the Roman mile = 1,000 paces of five feet each. So, the Roman mile was roughly, 9/10's of an English mile. The bit about "changed and quickened" refers to the roman practice on forced march or alternating the quick march with the ordinary march. That's a pace which isn't even possible for many people and corresponds to about 2.5 MPH.

 

Things haven't changed much: According to modern US Army doctrine, the average rate of march for trained infantry under favorable weather conditions is 2-1/2 MPH over roads and 1.5 MPH cross country. A normal foot march covers 20 miles per day (That's from U.S. Dept of Army. Staff Officers' Field Manual: Organization, Technical, and Logistical Data, Part I. FM 101-10, Oct 1961.pp. 123-124. FM.) During the napoleonic era, French infantry (considered the fastest in Europe at the time) under Napoleon marched at the ordinary rate of 3 mph, for 10-12 miles per day, with quick march doubling that distance - at the cost of attrition as soldiers who could not keep up started dropping out. They moved faster, but for short periods of time. As far as the British army goes, far from 4 miles per hour, the standard British army marching speed is regular infantry, 120 paces per minute, the Light Infantry or Rifle pace, 140 per minute, double time is 180 paces to the minute: corresponding to between 2 1/2 and 3 1/2 miles per hour, with the regulation 10 minute pause per hour - not that different from the Romans, actually. The idea that infantry can march at 4 MPH is a mistake taken from training: for example, to join the Royal Commandoes, the last - and hardest - of the tests is the dreaded "30 miler", where would-be recruits have to cover 30 miles with full kit in 8 hours - a speed somewhat less than 4 miles per hour. Admittedly, that's not on a good road - or indeed a road at all! US Delta Forces have an even longer test (40 miles) but for that 20 hours is allowed, showing how speed falls off as distance increases. Neither of those are marches: they are endurance tests, designed to weed out all but the very toughest. For regular light infantry, the EIB standard is 12 miles in 3-hours. That's wearing fatigues, boots, helmet, rifle, LBE and a light rucksack - but no ammunition is carried. And again, that's a qualification test, not a regular march. Keeping that up for 11 hours though .... not going to happen.

 

Given all that, Saltmarsh to Seaton in a long day isn't an unreasonable pace, but it would be a grind: not something you'd do casually.

 

cheers, Mark

[Susano]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

I also recall reading that riding a horse doesn't get you there any faster. Horses need rest, food, and water, and so you'll cover about 20 miles a day on horseback - it's just you'll be able to carry more and will probably be lest tired.

[azato]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

I imagine that most of the travel between towns is via horse/donkey/mule and cart. Active soldiers are given the right to a free ride on an cart not fully burdened. Paying hitchhikers may be a common thing as going back to the the home city with an "empty" cart would mean the loss of economic opportunity.

 

As far as distances traveled in a day...I think a lot comes down to

the existence of a road

the condition of a road

the phsical shape a person is in (if walking)

how used they are to traveling

the pace

 

 

We walked an 11 mile trail in the Smokies. It killed my butt for days and I was shot afterward. But if i were to walk that way frequently it would not be that bad.

No road

Bad conditions of the "road"

Reasonable shape

Not used to conditions

unencumbered.

Good cool weather.

[assault]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

The obvious question is: what other communities are there between Seaton and Saltmarsh?

 

My guess would be that both towns are market towns, and each serve as magnets for the communities between them. Trade between the two would be less important than trade with the smaller communities around them.

 

I'm not familiar with the map: is it possible to travel between the two towns by water? If so, that would be the quickest and easiest way - in the absence of monsters!

 

FWIW, where I am in Australia, there is a nice little string of towns located a day's travel by bullock cart apart from each other along the main road inland from Brisbane. Even the relatively large city where I live (Toowoomba), was originally a watering hole at the top of a mountain range (escarpment).

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Another approach is to look to actual geography. Pulling out my road atlas of Great Britain (it was cheap, and who doesn't need more atlasses?) I've found a short stretch of coastal road through the Fens, a well known real world marshland. The A149 between King's Lynn and Hunstanton, a distance of --eyeballing it here-- 20 miles. It's not quite the Fens Causeway, the great Roman road built across the Fens to link East Anglia to (the larger traditional region of which Norfolk is a part), but it is close. Imagine a causeway, 60 feet wide and paved with gravel raised well above a land of marshes and mud flats.

King's Lynn is a relatively new town, created in the early stages of the Medieval drainage of the Fens at the point where some major canals emptied into the River Ouse at its outlet into the Wash, creating Norfolk's main port during Medieval times. The Ouse scours a path through a "bleak landscape of salt marshes, mud flats and braided rivers" to reach more navigable waters.

The A149 is not a coastal road. There is no coast, only a gradual transition from dry land to open sea. Here's a resource for historical Norfolk maps from the 1800s showing, none too clearly, the small town of Ingoldsthorpe along the A149 on the way to Hunstanton. Ingoldsthorpe probably means a village built on an artificial mound "thorpe," and named for the heroic Ingold. Notice the nucleated layout of not only the villages and estates, but even the woodlots in the area around Ingoldsthorpe. Even in 1856 this was a closely managed landscape, with drainage ditches and canals, and windmills for even more intensive draining. When Ingold first set out to build, those blank squares would have been, at best, wet pasture. Even today some of this landscape is left undrained and "wild." At Heacham, a little town hemmed in by the sea and a river, the road reaches an area of rocky uplift. Heacham lost 9 people in the great North Sea Flood of 1953 when the sea broke through the coastal defences, but immediately to its east begins a region that counts, at least locally, as hilly. No doubt that, in order to confuse silly foreigners, it is referred to as a "Down."

The presence of this upland probably explains why these towns and this road are so well-built. There is rock available for construction. The more heroic Fen Causeway leads from one "island" in the Fens to the next. Some of these look very small indeed, probably thorpes in origin. They aren't more than 5 miles apart, and I would suggest that there would be thorpes, perhaps no more than a rude mansion, a few houses and some kind of shrine, every 5 miles on the road from Seaton to Saltmarsh.

[azato]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Thanks all of you for posting to this point...the convention has thrown me off schedule and I will respond in a couple days....Great Stuff Guys!!!!

[Markdoc]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

I also recall reading that riding a horse doesn't get you there any faster. Horses need rest' date=' food, and water, and so you'll cover about 20 miles a day on horseback - it's just you'll be able to carry more and will probably be lest tired.[/quote']

 

Over short periods, horses do get you there faster (for the British army, the march rate for horses was 6 1/2 MPH as opposed to 3 1/2 for the fastest light infantry). It's just that to maintain that rate horses need lots of food. Plus you still need food for the riders. Essentially for any trip of more than a few days, every army is tied to the speed of its supply train, which in pre-industrial times generally means 12-18 miles a day.

 

cheers, M ark

[Markdoc]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

We walked an 11 mile trail in the Smokies. It killed my butt for days and I was shot afterward.

 

Try doing it in unpadded sandals with 4x the load ... That's what a legionnaire would sometimes have to do. There's a reason they spent ten times as much time on endurance training than tactics and weapons training added together.

 

cheers, Mark

[Susano]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Over short periods, horses do get you there faster (for the British army, the march rate for horses was 6 1/2 MPH as opposed to 3 1/2 for the fastest light infantry). It's just that to maintain that rate horses need lots of food. Plus you still need food for the riders. Essentially for any trip of more than a few days, every army is tied to the speed of its supply train, which in pre-industrial times generally means 12-18 miles a day.

 

cheers, M ark

 

There used to be a Poul Anderson short story collection titled simply Fantasy. In it was "On Thud And Blunder" which was all about this sort of thing. A great resource.

[Captain Obvious]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

http://www.sfwa.org/2005/01/on-thud-and-blunder/

 

Fantasy is still well worth picking up, even though this essay is readily available. Lots of good stories in there.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Here's a great pair of maps centred on the town of Huntingdon near Cambridge and the Neolithic site of Flag Fens (ugly website warning) that really captures the difference between the ancient undrained landscape of the Fens and the modern, drained landscape. And here's another interesting site just down the A145, Seahenge.

[Markdoc]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

The Fens are an interesting area - my wife's family is from Lincolnshire, on the coast and we've done a fair amount of traveling there. One of the striking things about the Fens in history is that although (to modern eyes) they are not very big, to the medieval eye, they were vast wasteland in which all kinds of things could hide - and which did in their time, serve as refuges to bandits and defeated people of various stripes. The difficulty of traveling through the fens (even though they were never as empty as popular myth made them) is attested to by the fact that pre-17th century, most people and most roads took the far longer route around them, rather than the direct route.

 

cheers, Mark

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

I still vividly remember reading, at what may or may not have been the climactic moment of Scott's Hereward the Wake (I was 9, and not quite the literary critic I am now), the hero's stunning revelation. His army could show up at (some town in East Anglia) and then at York without being detected because the Forest of [something or other near York] was the same as the forest of the Fens!*

It's like a secret passage that runs through a hundred miles of open country.

 

 

*It was, in fact, so hard to get by land from London to York in the old days that the standard itinerary was by river (the Trent or the Ouse?), not because river travel was faster, but because the rivers were actually passable.

[Markdoc]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

I still vividly remember reading' date=' at what may or may not have been the climactic moment of Scott's [i']Hereward the Wake [/i](I was 9, and not quite the literary critic I am now), the hero's stunning revelation. His army could show up at (some town in East Anglia) and then at York without being detected because the Forest of [something or other near York] was the same as the forest of the Fens!*

It's like a secret passage that runs through a hundred miles of open country.

 

 

*It was, in fact, so hard to get by land from London to York in the old days that the standard itinerary was by river (the Trent or the Ouse?), not because river travel was faster, but because the rivers were actually passable.

 

Not really: we know that the old roman road from York to London (Ermine Street) was in continuous use up to ... well, today really: the A15 follows mostly the same route. The name comes from the saxon "Earninga Straete" so it was certainly still in use in the 11th century, trade privileges are confirmed in documents by the 12th century and it was an important pilgrimage route as attested to by the 12-14th century pilgrims' lodgings all along the route (some of which are still there!) However, it doesn't go very close to the fens, passing through Lincoln. That may be because the country closer to the fens used to be heavily wooded, or because of impassibility (the medieval road made a diversion south of Lincoln, to avoid areas with the worst flooding in winter/spring). We know from acts of parliament in the 1500's that funds were being levied for the upkeep of the road and in the 1600's it became England's first turnpike. It was considered the busiest and most important road in England. It's always had travelers' inns too. The George at Stamford on the London York road only dates from the 1500's, but it was built on the site of a much older traveler's inn.

 

There is no "river route" from York to London (though people would certainly have used one if there was) - all of the rivers run west to east, draining into the North Sea. You could have gone to Nottingham, then northeast on the Trent, then into the estuary of the Humber, then up the Ouse to York - but then you would have had to tranship a couple of times (boats that could travel in the estuary, which was considered very dangerous for shipping, were too large for the Ouse or Trent) and also walked/ridden over half of the distance, anyway. Certainly almost all trade to or from York that came in by sea was transshipped at either Shelby or Hull for precisely this reason. The town council of York left us plenty of lawsuits regarding rights of passage and maintenance of bridges, roads and waterway, and levied tolls on both, indicating that the road was an important factor up until the decline of York at the end of the medieval period. You might have had difficulty getting a boat for such a trip, too: I'm not sure how much trade there was on the Trent (there must have been some, but it hasn't left the trove of records that travel on the Ouse or Ermine street has). Nottingham was a middle-sized town of no great import through the medieval period (the population in 1650 was about 3500, as opposed to about 3000 in 1400). Its rise to prominence starts after York's decline and is due to some of the same factors. If you wanted to travel by boat, your best bet would have been the coastal route - which could be faster, was arguably more comfortable, but also very unpredictable: onshore winds could strand you for days or even weeks.

 

The old-fashioned idea that overland travel was difficult and that people rarely travelled in medieval England, doesn't match up with the archeological and documentary evidence showing lively travel and trade up and down the major roads.

 

cheers, Mark

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Just to be clear here, the point of Hereward's revelation in Scott's novel is that the route his army uses does not cross open, Norman-controlled country, because the two forests are contiguous, and no-one knows that except for some heroic Anglo-Saxon freedom fighters. It's a route for a guerilla army, not the high road.

As for the river route, I'm going on Rollason, D. W. (David W.) Northumbria 500-1100 : creation and destruction of a kingdom (2003) . I was quoting from memory on the mistaken assumption that I'd managed to return the book to the library, but the online catalogue says differently, and under a pile of papers and books, I find...

Okay, York is a major nexus of Roman roads. Two routes cross the (modest) upland spine of Britain from the Midlands (former Mercia), with another chokepoint at Manchester. Manchester having no direct old Roman connection south except through Derby, this route "points" at Gwynedd rather than London.

Derby, in the southern Midlands is on the road from London and near Nottingham, the traditional head of navigation of the Trent, a unique north-flowing English river that falls into the estuary of the Humber. From Derby the Roman road goes north to York. The problem is that near Hatfield Chase, it gets pinched between the estuarine swamps of the Humber and the water parting, and makes four major river crossings in twenty miles.

The other road from London (Ermine Street, I think) runs through Lincolnshire directly from London to Lincoln Huntingdon. North of Lincoln, it splits. One trunk heads west an hits the same "pinch" as the Derby road, which it joins, again near Hatfield Chase after crossing three rivers in 30 miles before it hits the Derby road with two crossings to go to York.

Finally, there is a direct route north from Lincoln to York --clear going except that it crosses the estuarine Humber!

 

The takeway here is the perfect compromise. Both Markdoc and I are right -depending on the season. There's no way that any of these roads would be passable in a wet season. The wetlands of the Ouse (and here's the relevance to Azato's question) would be a vast, impassible muck, and the only overland route leads to Wales. By the same token, the Trent would be swollen, an easy, albeit perhaps too-easy descent, and the Ouse comparatively deep, with a tidal lift to carry you up to (near) York.

Now, the same wet would go to green pastures, and in dry seasons, all of these roads would be needed, and choked with drove herds of cattle and sheep for slaughter, horses for sale, and waggon trains loaded with cheese, woad, linen and wool.

 

I emphasise the wet season impassibility because --I think-- understanding how the Ouse boundary worked may get us to understanding of how the story of the "Anglo-Saxons" was first constructed and we got a mythopoeic story of England being founded by north German invaders, as opposed to it emerging from sub-Roman institutions in which Germanic languages were the default lingua franca along the east coast, and Celtic in the west.

 

It looks like the lower Ouse is still notoriously prone to flooding. Per Wikipedia:

The Ouse valley is a wide, flat plain; heavy rainfall in the river's catchment area can bring severe flooding to nearby settlements. In recent years both York and Selby, and villages in between, have been very badly hit. The river has two weirs with locks, at Linton-on-Ouse and Naburn, so that boats of 45.7 m length and 4.6 m beam can reach York. The Ouse is tidal up to Naburn Locks.

[Markdoc]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Heh. I've rambled across this country, so I know well what the Ouse and Trent are like. The lower reaches of both are considered "challenging" and are not recommended for inexperienced boatmen. Not because they are rapid, particularly, but because both have severe tidal bores and empty out in wide shallow rivermouths with shifting mudbanks. In theory (and rarely, in practice) you can also walk across the Humber estuary. However that's dangerous - though shallow, the tides race at high speed into the estuary and the banks are always shifting. But it was only last century the Humber got a bridge. Prior to that, Ermine street terminated in Barton upon Humber, where travellers took a ferry across to Kingston upon Hull. The ferry has been in operation for centuries - it was mentioned in the Domesday book and again Edward II's charter (still preserved) from 1351. It's rather hard to explain why a ferry important enough for a royal charter existed if travellers came principally by boat ... and also why it should be located on the road instead of the river mouth, many miles away ... where there is no town.

 

The road (Ermine street) was certainly used in wet weather as well as fine - in fact it has two alternate routes near the Humber: a dry weather one (direct to Barton, across to Hull by Ferry and then up across the hills to York) and the alternate one I noted above that swings more inland. This route remained passable even in wet weather - it's known as the Roman Ridge or Roman Rigg, because it runs along high ridgetops, well above any flooding. You can still walk parts of it today - near Selby it runs along a high limestone scarp giving you great views out over the river valleys and providing firm dry footing even in wet weather. It was along this road that Harold bought his army at great speed to defeat Hardraada - and indeed, in autumn, traditionally a rainy period. Harold was in a hurry - but he didn't go by boat. It was also along Ermine street - at the crossing of the Welland near the natural ford at Stamford - that Harold's and Hardraada's armies clashed. Hardraada's force had also been using the road, in preference to their ships (not surprising - dragging a ship upcurrent, up a narrow winding river is a lot of work). The Ouse itself is also pretty shallow - one of the reason we know so much about early trade on the Ouse is because of medieval lawsuits over blockages: peasants setting wicker fish traps across the river, blocking passage of even light boats was recurring problem. It is fast in a few of the parts above Selby (that's as far as the river was considered navigable by larger boats: Selby served York as a secondary port though the primary port was Kingston upon Hull, which had a direct road connection), but generally it's more placid - and in many places you can wade across without even getting your shorts wet. The locks of course are a post 16th century addition to solve this problem. However, when it comes to road transport, the Ouse is a bit of a red herring. Ermine street runs direct to York from Kingston upon Hull, rising swiftly up out of the estuary valley and climbing towards the Wolds. It doesn't follow the river valley at all - probably precisely because of the concern about flooding.

 

So, while I suspect strongly that people did use the rivers for transport, there's no question that the main artery for travel between London and York was Ermine street. We have much historical documentation of travel along it - compared with almost none for the Trent and a fair amount on the Ouse which nonetheless seems to be almost entirely about transport of goods from Selby and Hull. This also explains the pattern of settlement. If you look at England's east coast north of the Wash, one of the striking things is that towns did not spring up in numbers along the river valleys, but instead are primarily strung out along the lines of the old roads. That's quite different from (say) Holland or Northern Germany, or even south-east England where the pattern of settlement is much more clustered along the river bottoms.

 

We are (as usual ) getting a little off-topic here, but it does mean that Saltmarsh can sit on a good road without seeming anachronistic. As a possibly relevant side note, excavations in Ermine street in Lincolnshire have revealed that the medieval road was more sophisticated than we might think. Although the excavated section runs across grey clay pans (very prone to flooding), the road had two ditches dug under the road, at its edge which were filled with gravel and then the whole lot edged with clay (giving a raised berm) and the gap between the berms filled in with sand. That gave a slightly raised sandy surface that would dry quickly and not form ridges and humps, and which would not collect water (it drained out rapidly into the gravel sumps and then onto the surrounding surface, which was lower than the road). Building and maintaining such a road is pretty labor intensive - you need to dig through heavy clay and haul sand in, but it gives you a good surface, suitable for wheeled traffic in both wet and dry weather.

 

As far as Walter Scott and Hereward's secret woodland passage, I would - to be polite - be sceptical. For a start Scott was more into "feeling" than historical accuracy and for a second as far as we know, Hereward never went to York (the De Gestis Herwardi, the near-contemporary record of his life and deeds, makes no such claim, though it discusses his other - possibly fictional - travels in detail. I suspect if he had taken an army north, people might have noticed) and for a third, between Ely and York you have to cross no less than 4 major roads, the high (and long treeless) chalk downs of the wold and the area between Boston and Peterborough, which was already densely settled by late saxon times (and prosperously farmed) as attested to by numerous 8th and 11th century finds - including plenty of imported continental ware.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Re: Populating and fleshing out Saltmarsh

 

Oh - a second thought - if you're interested, "Middle Anglo-saxon Lincolnshire" covers this area (and this question) in some detail. The author discusses the sites where large founds have been made and writes "A glance at figure 6 allows some common characteristics of these ' productive ' sites to be recognized. First, and perhaps most notable, is their inland location, situated along the most important routes and lines of communication, such as the Rivers Humber , Trent and Witham, and prehistoric and Roman routes, especially Barton Street , High Street and the route along the Lincoln Cliff" . Later she writes "In general, the large amount of coinage recovered, only second to those of the great Middle Saxon emporia or wies, strongly suggests the active involvement of these 'productive' sites in some form of commerce. This also seems to be underlined by the strong element of foreign coin from these sites" In the figures, it is clear that most of the productive sites are actually on roads, as are the largest, although they most closely clustered where the roads and rivers converge - North of Flixbourough, for example where the Lincoln Cliff route, and the Trent come together. Flixborough isn't on a river, but it's only about an hour's walk from the Trent and two-three hours walk from the Humber - it's probably where shipped goods were assembled for the trip down the road to Lincoln, or where goods moving north were transhipped for passage up the Trent (thus avoiding the treacherous lower reaches of the river) or sent on to the Humber ferry at Winteringham by road. Torksey, on the other hand - a site as large as Flixborough - isn't anywhere near a river. But it does sit on a major north-south road where it crosses the old Foss Dyke. It probably served as a border town, monitoring traffic up and down the road and levying tolls on good passing through to Lincoln.

 

The archaeology makes it clear that it wasn't either/or roads or water but both. The north-south route tracks most closely with the road. The east-west routes, by way of contrast track most closely with the rivers.

 

Also (facepalm) I should have thought of this book before with regard to the original poster's question because it lists the products of the villages at the edge of the fenlands "Apart from animal stock, the natural resources of the fenland also included wildfowl, thatch, oysters and mussels from the sea, as well as fish, and it may have been these, or similar goods, that would have been exchanged for the querns or other products arriving with the Ipswich ware." She also discusses the fact that many of the old village sites have no manufactured goods but lots and lots of animal bones - suggesting that cattle were driven into the fens to feed in summer and then killed and the meat and hides preserved (probably with salt) for hauling out as winter approached. That certainly sounds like Saltmarsh: those animal products could be traded to the city for all the stuff like leatherware, fancy work and glassware. It also means the swamp probably has little villages dotted about its edges where the fishermen and thatchers live, and the herders come to spend their summers.

 

cheers, Mark