The Sea is History: Estate Management, Land Use, and Risk Calculation on the Late Medieval and Early Modern English Coastline, c.1350-1600

Abstract

This thesis explores how individuals and institutions managed the risks of inhabiting marginal coastal landscapes in Little Ice Age Britain between c. 1350 and 1600. Three houses of English Augustinian canons with coastally located estates are investigated, including Bilsington (Kent), Hastings (East Sussex) and Burscough (Lancashire). The activities of their immediate post-dissolution successors are also examined.

These case studies demonstrate that pre-modern environmental interactions were not merely one-directional as is often assumed, but rather environmental change was both an exogenous and endogenous driver of change. Institutions manipulated and even invented flooding and storm surge risks to redirect local economies and fulfil long-term strategies.

These findings have implications for the ways we understand decision-making and risk calculation by both late medieval and early modern individuals and institutions; how we reliably reconstruct past weather events; and how historians approach the late medieval/early modern divide.