Abstract

Historians of the early Middle Ages have long harboured the suspicion that in a period when little effort was expended on maintaining roads, water transport offered a faster, more reliable perhaps even more commonly used means of moving around. However, equally little effort was expended on maintaining waterways, at least before the end of the tenth century, and the channels of rivers made have posed similar problems in moving around. We cannot really imagine that water transport was important as some have claimed when so little provision was made for it.