The dichotomy of the corrupt city versus the idyllic countryside remains a powerful literary metaphor. From Juvenal's satirical reflections on the corruption of Rome—“What can I do in Rome? I never learnt how / To lie”—to the natural sublime of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the unspoilt country versus the spoilt city is just one form of a dominant mythology that has long had a hold on the literary imagination. Analysing this rhetoric in his masterful The Country and the City, Raymond Williams is one of the most prominent critics to have challenged the ostensibly polarized vision of the urban and rural. His central thesis is that the country and city are not so much discrete locales, but rather are imbricated and interconnected. As Williams observed of England, the movement of agricultural produce into organized, central hubs served both rural and urban interests. This interaction or mutual interest of trade and exchange led to the augmentation of feudal marketplaces to towns and the rapid development of new industrial cities, particularly in northern England. The importance of access to waterways for merchants—seminal to the development of many ancient empires, including the Egyptian, Persian and Roman—also contributed to the growth of merchant settlements. In Western Europe around the ninth and tenth centuries, the Latin term portus, from which the word “port” derives, began to be used to describe the merchant town.