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The canals of Roman Britain are best known in the east, which until then, was very aqueous.Car Dyke: “an 85 miles (137 km)-long ditch which runs along the western edge of the Fens in eastern England. It is generally accepted as being of Roman age and, for many centuries, to have been taken as marking the western edge of the Fens.” Upcast banks set well apart, as in this well-preserved section near Branston Booths, Lincolnshire, suggest a canal intended for navigation[6]The Car Dyke - Past work, Current State and Future PossibilitiesThis work presents the results of a survey of the present knowledge of the The Car Dyke, one of Britain's longest but little known linear monuments. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that detailed study of the Car Dyke was undertaken, however the full results of The Car Dyke Research Group were never published. One of the key elements of the work was the collating of visual surveys. This has been updated with visual studies in 1996 and 2000.Foss Dyke: “connects the River Trent at Torksey to Lincoln, the county town of Lincolnshire, and may be the oldest canal in England that is still in use.”The Foss Dyke was long thought to have been constructed by the Romans around 120.[6] Pointers include an inscribed statuette of the god Mars found in it at Torksey, which is now in the British Museum, but there is a lack of consensus among authors writing on the subject.Bourne–Morton Canal: “an archaeological feature to the north east of Bourne in Lincolnshire, England.[1] In old maps and documents it is known as the Old Ea. It was a 6.5 km artificial waterway linking the dry ground at Bourne to the ancient edge of the sea near Pinchbeck, or perhaps to a navigable estuary in the area. There is now no visible trace”Excavation at Cross Drove in the 1990s suggests it was around 2.6 m deep at high tide, 6 m wide at the base and 10 to 12 m wide at the surface[2]MONUMENT NO. 1388890: “Excavation following an earlier assessment revealed a farmstead of 1st-3rd century date as well as the possible Roman waterway, the Bourne-Morton canal. The excavations of the Romano-British settlement and field system revealed part of a ditched enclosure attached to an extended boundary ditch. In one of a number of intercutting ditches and gullies a skeleton with a copper-alloy bracelet was excavated beneath large dumps of pottery, iron smithing-slag and some coal.”ROMAN DITCHED ENCLOSURE 43 to 410ROMAN FARMSTEAD 43 to 410ROMAN INHUMATION 43 to 410ROMAN METAL WORKING SITE 43 to 410Roman Routeways across the Fens: Excavations at Morton, Tilney St Lawrence, Nordelph and Downham West (East Anglian Archaeology Occasional Paper): Amazon.co.uk: Heather Wallis: 9780905594354: BooksThis volume presents the results of four excavations, three in Norfolk (Tilney St Lawrence, Nordelph and Downham West) and one in Lincolnshire (Morton), of Romano-British routeways constructed some time before the 3rd century AD. Data from the sites, which comprise canals, roads and especially the Fen Causeway crossing the southern Fenlands, are discussed in turn and the final chapter draws some more general conclusion as to their function, chronological sequence and their roe in the development of the area in Roman times.Others:River Ouse–River Nene Drainage [White 1984, pp. 227–229, table 6]River Nene–River Witham

Three reasons.First, who would do it? The number of literate people in mediaeval Europe was a very small percentage of the population. Most of them had much more important things to do, like copying psalms and illuminating Bibles, rather than wasting their time counting peasants. Royal government was tiny by modern standards; quite literally the king's household which travelled around the country with him, and perhaps a handful of locally-based officials (counts, sheriffs) to act as royal representatives in the regions. You could order the local nobility or clergy to send in a report, but they probably wouldn't know either, and would have no incentive to provide an accurate figure.Second was the cost. Given the first point, there was only a small pool of people who would be able to administer a census. You certainly couldn't send out written forms in the modern manner, since nobody would be able to fill them in. (Also, there was no postal service.) That meant royal officials travelling to every town, village, hamlet and out-of-the-way farmstead in the country, and physically counting the number of people. That would take months. They'd need food, travel expenses, probably an armed escort. Who would pay for all that?Third, what would be the point? Mediaeval governments didn't provide services to people at a local level, so would have no need to know the size of the population. They didn't collect individual taxes, so didn't need a list of taxpayers. (Such monetary taxes as there were tended to be fees, tolls or excise duties, which were easy to collect.) There were no elections, so no need for an electoral register. There was no organised universal military service, so no need to know the size of the country's manpower reserves.The feudal system meant that society was organised as a pyramid. The king would know exactly how many tenants-in-chief he had, and what obligations each one had under his feudal contract. That was really all he needed to know. If the Earl of Hallamshire traditionally owed 120 knights' service, then as long as he showed up at the royal muster at the head of 120 knights, or paid the king enough money to hire 120 mercenary knights, then it wasn't really the king's concern how he administered his own fief or how many peasants lived there.Finally, it should be noted that any move to take a census would likely be met with resistance at all levels of society. The nobles would resent royal interference with their prerogatives. They would worry that the king would increase their feudal obligations if he discovered that their lands were richer or more heavily-populated than he'd realised. The peasants and townsfolk would have a much more direct concern; why would the king's men be coming around counting them all, if not to impose a new tax on them, or some other such burden? They would have a very good reason to try to distort the count as much as possible: under-report the size of the population, conceal family members, go into hiding in the woods when the census-men came around, or in extreme cases murder them and hide the bodies.It should be remembered that the Domesday Book was seen by people at the time as something quite exceptional, awe-inspiring and terrible. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes it as 'shameful', a sign of William the Conqueror's tyranny. It was certainly proof that 11th century England was one of the most centralised countries in Europe at the time, and its new Norman overlords were ruthless and efficient.William also had a motive which didn't apply to most mediaeval kings; as a foreign conqueror, he didn't have a clear idea of the resources of his new kingdom, its size and wealth, and the obligations of each of his subjects (remembering that the Norman nobles were themselves newly-established in a conquered land). Conducting a thorough survey would give him and them the level of knowledge that native-born rulers would have absorbed growing up from the people around them.

This is a more complicated question than it might initially seem.The title of Mayor of New York City was first established in 1665, when the British acquired the colony from the Dutch and gave it its current name, and the first to hold that title was Thomas Willet, a British merchant who is not well-remembered by New Yorkers today. Indeed, if you asked the average New Yorker on the street, I would wager that you wouldn’t get more than one out of fifty who could tell you the man’s name.Even as a relatively knowledgable scholar of New York City’s history, I am afraid that I can’t say much about Willet’s policies. I know that he had been a trader in the Plymouth Colony and that he was one of the Englishmen who oversaw the peaceful transition of New (or technically Nieuw) Amsterdam from Dutch to English control in 1664. His title as Mayor was presumably due to his aid in England’s acquisition of the colony from the Dutch. Aside from that, I don’t know much about him at all.If you were to actually conduct the aforementioned survey and ask a random selection of New Yorkers who our city’s first mayor had been, I feel relatively sure that I can guess what the most common answer would be. He was never a mayor at all, he presided over the city before it was called New York, and he was the seventh person to hold his title, but if you are looking for the “Founding Father” of New York City as opposed to just the first person to hold the title of mayor after the city became New York, he’s as good an answer as you could hope for.Peter StuyvesantLike I said, Peter Stuyvesant wasn’t mayor, the city he oversaw wasn’t called New York, and he wasn’t the first. So he is emphatically not the technically correct answer to this question.At the same time, though, if you are looking for a Founder who first molded the City we have today and who is still held in prestige by posterity, Stuyvesant is your guy.When Peter Stuyvesant became Director (roughly equivalent to Governor) of New Netherlands (Nieuw Nederland) in 1647, New Amsterdam was not what you would call a city, even then. It occupied only a few blocks at the very bottom tip of Manhattan, a few ramshackle huts and farmsteads.Stuyvesant realized the potential represented by New Amsterdam’s location. Sitting on one of the world’s largest natural harbors, with the brackish and fjord-like Hudson River estuary allowing even large ships to sail remarkably close to shore, perfectly situated to connect the farmland of what is now Upstate New York with the greater web of shipping routes, Stuyvesant began to plan for urban growth.It was Stuyvesant who commissioned the wall that ran where Wall Street now stands. He oversaw the digging of the canal that would eventually become Broad Street and Broadway. It was his hand that guided the chisel which would carve much of what would become New York. He was also the one who divided Nieuw Nederland into two colonies, today called New York and New Jersey, and set the state boundary between the two which still stands. As such, recognition of Stuyvesant isn’t confined to New York’s state borders, as evidenced by a statue in his likeness which stands in Jersey City’s Bergen Square.Today, Stuyvesant’s name is found all over New York City. From the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, to the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, to Stuyvesant Town on the Lower East Side, every New Yorker knows his name. Even the name of his farm, called the “Bouwerij” lives on today as the Bowery.He wasn’t our first mayor, but like I said, if you asked the average New Yorker to name the first mayor of the city, I would bet that the most common answer you’d get would be Stuyvesant.But the actual answer is Thomas Willet, who isn’t as fun to write about.